Before you add John Bolton’s indictment to the growing pile of specious prosecutions of Donald Trump’s enemies, stop and read the Justice Department’s allegations that the former national security adviser systematically shared classified information with people who weren’t authorized to read it, all in the service of writing a tell-all book. The 18-count criminal indictment, filed yesterday, was compiled by experienced prosecutors, not political lackeys. It is detailed and precise, and relies on Bolton’s own words to implicate him.
You should question whether these charges would be brought if Trump weren’t president. Officials in Joe Biden’s administration passed on the chance to do so. And Bolton has plenty of basis to argue that he is being singled out because he is one of Trump’s most voluble and persistent critics. (He pleaded not guilty in court this morning.) But political animus doesn’t make the government’s charges baseless. This indictment does not belong in the same category as the ones against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Those cases are so weak that a U.S. attorney resigned rather than present them to a grand jury, and career prosecutors told his replacement that the government would probably lose at trial.
People I spoke with who are knowledgeable about the Bolton case—including what he allegedly did while serving in the White House in Trump’s first term, and internal deliberations over whether to charge him with mishandling classified information—say that indicting the former adviser was not an easy call. But the case, several said, is “righteous.” Reading the charges, I’m inclined to agree that if its facts are accurate, the government has a strong argument. I’ve covered a lot of cases of mishandling classified information and documents. Some people who have faced charges like those Bolton does now are in prison.
This indictment tells a story about a seasoned diplomat and well-known conservative firebrand who, to the surprise of many at the time, went to work for one of the most unconventional presidents in recent memory. He intended to document the experience. The day before Bolton became national security adviser, prosecutors allege, a person identified as Individual 1 set up a group chat that would be used, as Bolton put it in a text, “For Diary in the future!!!” Bolton’s excessive use of exclamation points aside, this is not in and of itself a crime. But prosecutors allege that this group chat became a primary vehicle for Bolton to share more than 1,000 pages of material that they say contained classified information with two people the indictment calls Individual 1 and Individual 2, described as relatives. News reports have identified them, respectively, as Bolton’s wife and daughter. Both appear to have been working with Bolton to compile his notes and observations.
Prosecutors focus on several instances of Bolton sending multipage documents that contemporaneously described his work at the highest levels of official power. In his 17 months as national security adviser, Bolton played a central role in major foreign-policy issues, global crises, and deliberations among Trump’s national-security team. The demands of the job sometimes overwhelmed his note-taking. “Too much going on!!!” Bolton allegedly texted his family members around July 15, 2018, explaining why he hadn’t made that day’s diary entries.
And what was going on at the time? On July 16, the day after Bolton’s text, Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. In a press conference that now lives in infamy, Trump said that he took Putin’s word that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election, siding with a dictator against the U.S. intelligence community. A week later, according to the indictment, Bolton texted, “More stuff coming!!!” He then shared a 24-page document describing what he learned on the job, and a few hours later, he texted, “None of which we talk about!!!”
“Shhhhh,” Individual 1 replied. Individual 2 then observed, “The only interesting thing is what [senior U.S. government official] might have said from [foreign-language] interpreter, which you didn’t tell us.”
“More to come with cloak and dagger…or something,” Individual 1 wrote. “So he says…”
The government redactions in those key texts leave the reader hanging: Is the unnamed senior official Trump? Is the language Russian? The indictment doesn’t say, nor does it mention the Helsinki summit, where Trump and Putin had a private meeting and the U.S. president allegedly seized the notes from an interpreter. Trump denies this.
During that same week, Bolton had a front-row seat as Trump was publicly feuding with the government of Iran and implicitly threatening military action. The president was also in the midst of a trade dispute with European nations over steel and aluminum imports. The previous month, Trump had held his strange summit in Singapore with North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, and now was waiting to see if relations with the hermit kingdom might thaw. (They didn’t.)
Over the course of the next year, Bolton sent hundreds of pages of documents to his family members containing classified information, prosecutors allege. Lest there be any ambiguity about his motives, prosecutors say that five days after he left his White House position in September 2019, Bolton texted his family that he was transitioning from diary writing to “bookwriting” and that he was talking with a publisher. Simon & Schuster ultimately published Bolton’s White House memoir, The Room Where It Happened, in 2020.
Now, it’s important to note some events that the indictment does not fully explore. Before publication, Bolton submitted his manuscript to the government for a review, which was meant to identify any information that was classified or too sensitive to publish. These reviews are common practice, and they are not intended to dampen or silence the author’s political opinions or criticism of the president. After a lengthy back-and-forth with career experts, Bolton made changes to the text. The edited manuscript was effectively suitable for publication, according to a detailed statement in September 2020 from the official who led the review.
But then the Trump White House ordered a second review by a political appointee, who concluded that the manuscript was full of classified information. This was a highly unusual move that Bolton contends was meant to stop his book from being published. That official, Michael Ellis, is now deputy director of the CIA. The spy agency provided the information that was the basis for a warrant to search Bolton’s home in Maryland in August, The New York Times reported.
This backstory will surely be part of Bolton’s defense that he is being unfairly, even unconstitutionally, singled out because he criticized Trump. Bolton went ahead and published his book, and prosecutors do note in their indictment that “none of the classified national defense information” mentioned in the criminal charges was contained in the memoir. The government would likely point to this fact at trial to argue that Bolton knew, or was later persuaded, that this information was classified when he shared it with his family members. The fact that they talked about the information in hushed tones (“Shhhhh.” “None of which we talk about.”) might be used by prosecutors to argue for Bolton’s consciousness of guilt.
It’s also worth emphasizing that, by Bolton’s own account in the book, he didn’t think he was obliged to submit the manuscript for a standard prepublication review. This is a controversial position for any former government official who had access to classified information, and it’s a legally risky one. But Bolton “reluctantly agreed” to the review, he wrote, “so this book could be published.”
The government later sued Bolton over the book’s publication, and the parties reached a settlement in June 2021, when Joe Biden was in office. As a condition, Bolton agreed to turn over any classified information in his possession, the indictment states.
This is where the indictment makes things look really bad for Bolton. Less than a month after the settlement, Bolton notified the FBI that he believed one of his personal email accounts had been hacked by the government of Iran. Bolton had also used this account to send diary documents to his family members, prosecutors allege. A few weeks later, in late July, a representative for Bolton forwarded the FBI an email that appears to be a blackmail threat from whomever had gained access to his account: “I do not think you would be interested in the FBI being aware of the leaked content of John’s email… This could be the biggest scandal since Hillary’s emails were leaked, but this time on the GOP side! Contact me before it’s too late…”
Bolton’s representative told the FBI that the former White House adviser was going to delete the contents of the hacked account. The anonymous writer warned Bolton that they would “disseminate the expurgated sections of your book,” which suggests that the hacker had obtained the classified material that Bolton was told, during the prepublication review, he should take out.
At no point, prosecutors allege, did Bolton tell the FBI that he had used the hacked email account to send the diary documents to his family members, or that hackers now apparently had the information.
So, by the government’s account, Bolton transmitted classified information to people who weren’t authorized to receive it, and then at least some of the information fell into the hands of a foreign adversary. As spillages of classified information go, this one was potentially disastrous. If the diary entries are as expansive and detailed as prosecutors suggest, then the Iranians now had an unedited first-person account of the inner workings of the Trump administration.
Here we need to return to the Biden administration, and what officials had to take into account when they were deciding whether to bring charges. They knew that Iran had hacked Bolton’s account, and not just because Bolton told them. The intelligence community knew through its own sources, and officials were reluctant to divulge that information as part of a criminal proceeding, according to people I spoke with who are familiar with the situation.
This is not surprising. Intelligence agencies are often more concerned about guarding their sources and methods of information-gathering than they are about helping the Justice Department bring charges. And the case against Bolton was already complicated. Maybe he had shared classified information. But he was the national security adviser at the time. Senior government officials routinely keep notes for their memoirs. How many of them may have technically violated the law but were never indicted? Yes, Bolton was sharing information on an unsecure system. But, ultimately, when confronted with the government’s concerns in the prepublication review, Bolton acceded to requests to delete material that experts thought was too sensitive to print. Justice Department officials weren’t sure that they could persuade a jury to unanimously find that Bolton was guilty.
That was a judgment call. Prosecutors today are making a different one. But undoubtedly, they are doing so under political pressure from the president. I am told that career prosecutors working on this case complained that the administration was rushing to file charges, eager to check off another name on Trump’s enemies list. Such haste could undermine the integrity of the case. Investigators needed time to confirm that the information at issue was actually classified when Bolton handled it. They also needed to understand whether it has since been declassified. This is standard-issue procedure in a classified-documents case. And considering that they thought this one has merit, prosecutors were justifiably angry at their political bosses for trying to rush them to bring a case before they were prepared.
Bolton is portraying the prosecution as nothing but political retribution. He wants to align himself with Comey, James, and others in Trump’s sights, including Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, and John Brennan, the former director of the CIA.
Bolton said in a statement Thursday that Trump had tried to block the publication of his book, and that his former boss’s vendetta “became one of his rallying cries in his re-election campaign. Now, I have become the latest target in weaponizing the Justice Department to charge those he deems to be his enemies with charges that were declined before or distort the facts.”
Should he face trial, Bolton will have every opportunity to prove those claims to a jury. But he faces a much steeper climb than Trump’s other foes.
