What to know about John Bolton, the former Trump adviser under indictment
John Bolton, a former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday, accused of mishandling classified and sensitive material. The longtime Republican has been a controversial figure for decades and a thorn in Trump’s side, having written a scathing book about his time in the White House during the first Trump administration. Here’s what to know about Bolton as he finds himself in the news once again.
He was a Trump adviser
Bolton served as national security adviser to Trump from April 2018 until September 2019. He was the third person to hold the job during Trump’s first 16 months in office. His departure came after disagreements with the president about foreign policy regarding Iran, North Korea, Ukraine and other countries. Trump said he had asked Bolton to exit the post; Bolton said he had offered to resign.
The pair clashed over issues including Trump’s repeated meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the idea of direct meetings between U.S. and Iranian officials, which ran contrary to Bolton’s deep distrust of diplomatic engagement with North Korea and Iran, administration officials told The Washington Post at the time. He also opposed Trump’s eagerness to see Russia rejoin the Group of Seven nations, officials said at the time.
After Bolton’s departure, he became a target of insults from his former boss, who labeled him a “sick puppy” in 2020, among other colorful phrases. Bolton, in turn, said that Trump was “unfit for office.”
He wrote a book about the first Trump presidency
Bolton released a book in 2020, “The Room Where It Happened,” about his time in the Trump White House. His account, according to The Post’s reviewer, “eviscerates Trump’s foreign policy record and exposes him, in Bolton’s words, as ‘stunningly uninformed.’”
The memoir was highly critical of Trump’s actions toward Ukraine as he sought an investigation there into Joe Biden, his political rival in the 2020 presidential election, and Biden’s son, Hunter. Bolton characterized the affair as “fantasy conspiracy theories” and “bad policy, questionable legally, and unacceptable as presidential behavior.”
Bolton also claimed Trump sought help from Chinese leader Xi Jinping to win the 2020 election and was scathing of his foreign policy decisions toward nations such as Iran and Venezuela.
He is a longtime Republican hawk
Bolton’s appointment as Trump’s national security adviser came after decades in the public eye as a prominent Republican lawyer, commentator and writer, as well as an official posted to agencies including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Justice Department and the State Department across several administrations, from Reagan onward. He also served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, an organization he expressed disdain for, during the George W. Bush administration.
His allegiance to conservative politics arose during his teenage years in Baltimore, when he could be found handing out leaflets for Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) in what would ultimately be an unsuccessful presidential run by the senator in the mid-1960s, The Washington Post reported.
He built a reputation as a hawk and tough combatant—drawing epithets such as “human scum and a blood sucker” by North Korea’s state news agency and “too competent” by then-Sen. Joe Biden in the early 2000s. At the time of his appointment to Trump’s inner circle, he was outspoken in his aversion to former president Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which was scuppered shortly after Bolton’s tenure began. A member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attempted a plot to assassinate him, according to Justice Department officials in 2022.
He is accused of mishandling sensitive material
The indictment against Bolton stems from his book. He is accused of sharing classified and sensitive material with people who were helping him prepare its contents during the writing process. A federal grand jury in Greenbelt, Maryland, indicted Bolton on Thursday on 18 counts of transmitting or retaining national defense information, each of which carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence if he is convicted.
The indictment alleges that Bolton shared updates in a “diary-like” form through a personal email account that was hacked by someone U.S. authorities believe was linked to the government of Iran. He is also accused of printing and storing records at his home in Bethesda.
Bolton denies wrongdoing. His attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement Thursday that the materials at the heart of the case “stem from portions of Amb. Bolton’s personal diaries over his 45-year career—records that are unclassified, shared only with his immediate family, and known to the FBI as far back as 2021.”
“We look forward to proving once again that Amb. Bolton did not unlawfully share or store any information,” Lowell added. Bolton, in a statement, said that the charges were part of Trump’s “intensive effort to intimidate his opponents.”
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