A federal grand jury has indicted John Bolton, the former US national security adviser in Donald Trump’s first term, on charges of mishandling and transmitting classified information.
The indictment, filed in Maryland, appears to have had sign-off from career prosecutors in the US attorney’s office there despite initial reluctance to bring a case before the end of the year.
The 18-count indictment against Mr Bolton involves eight counts of unlawfully transmitting national defence information and 10 counts of retaining classified information under the Espionage Act, according to the 26-page indictment.
The charges nonetheless come at a fraught moment for the justice department, which has been rocked by extraordinary pressure from Mr Trump to expand a vendetta campaign to pursue criminal cases against his political enemies.
RM Block
In recent weeks, Lindsey Halligan, Mr Trump’s handpicked US attorney in Virginia, obtained indictments against James Comey, the former FBI director, and the New York state attorney general Letitia James, over the objections of career prosecutors.
Mr Bolton has been a thorn in Trump’s side for years since he departed the president’s first administration, criticising him on cable news and assailing him for his own mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club.
Part of the criminal investigation into Mr Bolton has focused on what resembled diary entries and private notes he made for himself on an AOL email account – and whether they contained classified information, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bolton’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, has said the former national security adviser did nothing inappropriate with classified records and that documents with classified markings retrieved from his phone by the FBI were decades old.
Mr Bolton, a long-time federal government official with a top-secret clearance who was UN ambassador before serving as Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, is widely known as a diligent note-taker.
After he left the administration in Mr Trump’s first term, Mr Bolton continued to work in Washington and the investigation has examined whether his assistants had access to those notes, the people said.
Bolton’s AOL email account was also hacked by a foreign adversary, according to a redacted US intelligence assessment that was included in the search warrant affidavit from the search of Mr Bolton’s house.
The potential for disclosures of classified information are relevant in Espionage Act cases, because the justice department looks at so-called “aggregating factors” when deciding whether to mount such a prosecution.
Broadly, the department pursues cases that have a combination of four factors: wilful mishandling of classified information, vast quantities of classified information to support an inference of misconduct, disloyalty to the US and obstruction. – Guardian
