Former Trump adviser John Bolton to plead guilty in classified information case

President Donald Trump's former national security advisor, John Bolton, is set to plead guilty to retaining classified information in a private diary. He was indicted in October last year on eight counts of transmission of retention of national defense information and ten counts of retention of national defense information, according to a CNBC report. Bolton, who has been a critic of the President, could face up to 60 months in prison and be fined $2.25 million as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors.

Bolton is set to appear in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Md., on June 26 to enter his guilty plea. According to the indictment against him, the former national security advisor had 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."

The two "unauthorized individuals" are his wife and daughter, neither of whom had a security clearance. While Bolton served as Trump's national security advisor from April 2018 through September 2019, he has been a loud critic of the President. As a result, he has drawn the ire of the President over the years. Back in 2020, relations between the two were already at a low point, and Trump claimed that Bolton "likes dropping bombs on people, and killing them."

Bolton is one of three Trump critics who were indicted in his second term as President. The other two were former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both of those cases were dismissed last year, but Comey was indicted for a second time in 2026 as the Trump administration claimed he made a threat on the President's life by posting a picture on Instagram with the numbers '8647.' Criminal and civil investigations into Bolton's book were first opened in 2020 and closed within a year. However, the FBI opened a new inquiry into Bolton during the Biden presidency, after his email was breached by suspected Iranian hackers.