Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton has been charged over his handling of classified information, making him the latest critic of the President to be indicted.
A federal grand jury in Maryland issued the indictment after hearing evidence presented by the Justice Department, setting the scene for another politically fraught court battle involving one of Donald Trump’s enemies.
Trump was in the Oval Office announcing new reforms to make IVF more affordable when news of the indictment broke.
“I didn’t know that, you’re telling me for the first time,” he said when asked for his thoughts. “
“But I think he’s a bad guy... Too bad. That’s the way it goes, right?”
The move comes after FBI agents swooped on Bolton’s Maryland home in August, in a stunning pre-dawn raid flagged with a cryptic tweet by bureau director Kash Patel.
“No one is above the law,” the MAGA loyalist wrote as his agents descended.
Bolton was charged with 18 criminal counts on Thursday, including eight counts of transmitting national defense information and 10 counts of retaining national defense information.
“From on or about April 9, 2018, through at least on or about August 22, 2025, Bolton abused his position as National Security Advisor by sharing more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities as the National Security Advisor-including information relating to the national defense which was classified up to the TOP SECRET/SCI level-with two unauthorized individuals,” the 26 page indictment says.
Those two individuals were Bolton’s wife and daughter, and the information included details about a foreign adversary’s attack plans, intelligence sources and methods, and covert action by the U.S government.
The investigation also looked at notes he was making to himself in an AOL email account—similar to diary entries—which were also shared.
Later, a cyber actor believed to be associated with Iran hacked into his personal email account and gained unauthorized access to the classified.
The move makes Bolton the third high-profile Trump enemy to be indicted in less than a month, although legal experts suggest his case could be more serious than others.
Last week, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully sued Trump for civil fraud, was charged by a Trump-appointed attorney over claims she secured a favorable mortgage for a property in Virginia by falsely claiming it was a second residence.
Earlier, former FBI director James Comey, who Trump blames for the investigation he faced over Russian interference, was also charged for lying to Congress over testimony he gave years ago.
All three have denied wrongdoing.
Bolton worked as Trump’s National Security Adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, but the pair clashed over how to handle major policy challenges, including Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan.
Tensions escalated after Bolton was ousted from the White House in 2019 and later published a tell-all book, The Room Where It Happened, about his time as Trump’s national security adviser.
Trump had tried to quash the book at the time, claiming that Bolton had breached a non-disclosure agreement signed as a condition of his employment.
In a Fox News interview in 2020, he also said Bolton “took classified information, and he published it during a presidency,” adding that: “I believe that he’s a criminal, and I believe, frankly, he should go to jail for that.”
Department lawyers argued it contained classified national security information, covering areas such as U.S. intelligence sources and methods, foreign policy deliberations and conversations with foreign leaders.
However, a federal judge allowed the book to be published and the investigation was ultimately dropped after the Biden administration came to office in 2021.
Bolton’s charges come a day after Trump held a press conference with Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, in which Trump made it clear he wanted the pair to keep going after his enemies.
The president also cited a list of people he wanted to target, including Democrat Senator Adam Schiff (who helped lead the first impeachment against Trump); former government attorney Andrew Weissman (who was the lead counsel for the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election) and former deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco (who oversaw Trump’s alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election, his handling of classified documents, and the January 6th attack on the Capitol.)
“I hope they’re looking at political crime, because there’s never been so much political crime against a political opponent as to what I had to go through,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday.
Shortly after, Patel did an interview with conservative network Real America’s Voice, signaling that Trump’s retribution campaign was only just getting started, and that “many” indictments against the president’s political enemies would come by the end of the year.
“We are looking at so many different leads by those who were in positions of power, and we’re not going to stop until every single one of those is fully exposed,” he said.
“These indictments that you’ve seen and the ones that you’re going to see coming up in the near future are just the beginning… Look at the work the men and women of the FBI have done so far in these seven, eight months - and just imagine what we’re going to do come the year end.”
