Former National Security Adviser John Bolton is expected to plead guilty to illegally retaining sensitive national security documents and pay a fine of more than $2 million.
Bolton intends to plead guilty to a single count of illegal retention of national defense information. The charge carries a possible sentence of up to five years in prison, though the plea does not guarantee jail time. A conviction on the count carries a sentencing range of zero to 60 months.
A plea hearing is scheduled for June 26, according to the court docket.
The agreement comes months after Bolton, who served as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser for roughly a year during Trump’s first term before becoming a vocal critic, was charged in Maryland. Prosecutors accused him of keeping diary-like entries from his time in the White House at his home in a Maryland suburb.
Bolton was originally indicted in October on 18 felony counts, including eight counts of transmitting national defense information and 10 counts of unlawful retention. He pleaded not guilty to all of them at the time. Prosecutors alleged he shared more than a thousand pages of information about his daily activities through a personal email account with two unauthorized individuals, whom CNN has reported are his wife and daughter. The alleged transmission is not part of the charge to which Bolton is expected to plead guilty.
The FBI raided Bolton’s home in August in a search focused on classified materials. Court documents showed agents seized multiple documents marked secret, confidential and classified.
At his arraignment, Bolton’s attorney Abbe Lowell argued the matter had been settled long ago, calling the records unclassified personal diaries shared only with immediate family and known to the FBI as far back as 2021. Bolton himself called the prosecution a form of political retribution, describing himself as the “latest target” of what he characterized as an effort to intimidate Trump’s opponents.
Bolton’s case is one of several brought by the Justice Department against figures Trump has publicly identified as adversaries, following indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Trump had long called for Bolton to face charges over his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” which was sharply critical of the president and which Trump claimed contained classified information.
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