{"id":29883,"date":"2025-10-17T05:05:37","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T09:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=29883"},"modified":"2025-10-17T05:05:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T09:05:37","slug":"former-trump-adviser-john-bolton-criminally-indicted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2025\/10\/17\/former-trump-adviser-john-bolton-criminally-indicted\/","title":{"rendered":"Former Trump adviser John Bolton criminally indicted"},"content":{"rendered":"
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John Bolton, who served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser before becoming a vocal critic of the president, has been criminally indicted on federal charges.<\/b><\/p>\n

The Department of Justice presented a case to a grand jury in Maryland on Thursday, and they agreed there was enough evidence to indict Bolton, who issued a statement maintaining his innocence.<\/p>\n

It comes after FBI agents searched Bolton’s home and office in August as part of an investigation into the handling of classified information.<\/p>\n

The indictment makes Bolton, 76, the third of the US president’s political opponents to face charges in recent weeks. He could face decades in prison.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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According to a 26-page indictment filed at a court in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Thursday, Bolton is charged with eight counts of transmission of national defence information (NDI) and 10 counts of unlawful retention of NDI.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors accuse him of illegally transmitting top secret information about US national defence using his personal email and other messaging apps.<\/p>\n

“These documents revealed intelligence about future attacks, foreign adversaries, and foreign-policy relations,” the court papers state.<\/p>\n

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If found guilty, Bolton could face up to 10 years in prison for each charge. He is expected to surrender to authorities on Friday.<\/p>\n

“No one is above the law,” US Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement announcing the charges.<\/p>\n

Bolton said in a statement that he looked forward to defending his “lawful conduct” in court as he accused Trump of seeking “retribution against me”.<\/p>\n

“Now, I have become the latest target in weaponizing the Justice Department to charge those he [Trump] deems to be his enemies with charges that were declined before or distort the facts,” Bolton said.<\/p>\n

Bolton’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said the charges stemmed from diary entries kept by his client over his 45-year career in public service.<\/p>\n

“Like many public officials throughout history, Amb Bolton kept diaries \u2013 that is not a crime,” said Mr Lowell.<\/p>\n

He described the records as “unclassified, shared only with his immediate family, and known to the FBI as far back as 2021”.<\/p>\n

According to CNN, Bolton is alleged to have shared the information with his wife and daughter.<\/p>\n

The unauthorised information includes “diary-like entries from Bolton’s time as the National Security Advisor” and were allegedly “printed and stored” at Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Maryland.<\/p>\n

Bolton was\u00a0fired from Trump’s first administration<\/a>\u00a0in 2019. His 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, recounted his time working under Trump and portrayed him as a president who was ill-informed about geopolitics.<\/p>\n

The White House filed a lawsuit to block the book from being published, arguing it contained classified information and had not been properly vetted. A\u00a0judge denied the request<\/a>\u00a0and the book was released days later.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The US Department of Justice then opened an investigation into whether Bolton had mishandled classified information by disclosing certain information in the book.<\/p>\n

Asked about the indictment on Thursday at the White House, Trump said he did not know about it, but added that Bolton was “a bad guy”.<\/p>\n

Bolton, who served as George W Bush’s UN ambassador, was among former officials critical of Trump who had their Secret Service protection stripped in January.<\/p>\n

He is the third Trump critic to be criminally charged since September.<\/p>\n

New York City Attorney General Letitia James was\u00a0indicted on bank fraud charges<\/a>\u00a0in October.<\/p>\n

Former FBI director James Comey was charged in late September with lying to Congress.<\/p>\n

The cases were filed after Trump urged the US attorney general to prosecute his political opponents.<\/p>\n

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote on social media.<\/p>\n

Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Bolton, who served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser before becoming a vocal critic of the president, has been criminally indicted on federal charges. The Department of Justice presented a case to a grand […]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29884,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[10106,285,1172,11683,5504,3122,11684,11685,4974,6468],"class_list":{"0":"post-29883","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-usa","9":"tag-classified-information","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-fbi","12":"tag-greenbelt","13":"tag-john-bolton","14":"tag-maryland","15":"tag-transmission-of-national-defence-information","16":"tag-unlawful-retention-of-national-defence-information","17":"tag-us-department-of-justice","18":"tag-us-politics","19":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29883"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29885,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29883\/revisions\/29885"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}