Former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton leaves federal court after pleading not guilty to charges of mishandling classified material on Oct. 17, 2025 in Greenbelt, Maryland. Bolton was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday.
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John Bolton, who previously served as national security advisor to President Donald Trump, has agreed to plead guilty to retaining classified information in a private diary, MS NOW reported Thursday.
Bolton, who is a strong critic of Trump, faces a sentence of up to 60 months in jail and a fine of $2.25 million as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors on the single count, according to MS NOW.
The only people who were exposed to the secret information were his wife and daughter, according to a source cited by the outlet.
Bolton was indicted in October by a federal grand jury in Maryland on eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of retention of national defense information. FBI agents had raided Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Md., and his office in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 22 as part of the probe.
Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security advisor from April 2018 through September 2019, is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Md., on June 26.
He is expected to enter his guilty plea in the case on that day.
When he was indicted, Bolton said he was innocent and that he was being targeted because of his public opposition to Trump.
The indictment against him says that from 2018 until August 2025, Bolton shared “more than a thousand pages of 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 [sensitive compartmented information] level — with two unauthorized individuals” who were relatives of his.
Neither of those two people, who were identified by MS NOW as Bolton’s wife and daughter, had security clearances, the indictment says.
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