John Bolton, who was national security adviser during President Donald Trump’s first term and later became one of his fiercest critics, has agreed to plead guilty to one count of retaining national security information, two sources familiar with the matter said.
As part of the agreement with federal prosecutors, Bolton will be arraigned again June 26, at which point the judge will have up to 90 days to render a sentence, the sources said.
Bolton faces a potential sentence of probation to 60 months in prison, the sources said. He has also agreed to pay $2.25 million in restitution, one of the sources said.
Bolton described the national security information in question in an electronic diary entry that he shared with two members of his family, the two sources said.
“So there’s no allegation that he took home any classified documents or that he leaked any documents or that he shared any documents with foreign adversaries,” one of the sources said.
CNN was first to report the plea deal.
When he was arrested in October, Bolton pleaded not guilty to charges of mishandling classified information. A federal grand jury in Maryland indicted him that month on eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of unlawful retention of that information.
One of the sources, who is close to Bolton, told NBC News that he changed his plea for the good of the country.
“This was a very difficult decision for him,” the source said. “Most importantly, he is doing what leaders do and taking responsibility. He understands that if he went to trial what that would mean, which essentially would be the disclosure of many, many more classified documents that he would need to reveal to defend himself. And given the Ukraine and the Middle East, he didn’t want to do that.”
Bolton, well known in Republican foreign policy circles for his hawkish views and his strident support for the Iraq war, ran afoul of Trump when he wrote an unflattering memoir about his experience working for him called “The Room Where It Happened.”
Bolton, who served in Trump’s first administration for only a year before he was fired over disagreements over how to contain Iran and North Korea, continued to antagonize Trump by criticizing his foreign policy moves, especially on Russia.
Trump, in turn, blasted Bolton, calling him a “lowlife dummy” and a “war mongering fool,” among other things.
Just days after he returned to the White House last year, Trump canceled Bolton’s Secret Service detail even though he was the target of an alleged murder-for-hire scheme by a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In June 2020, Trump publicly called for Bolton to be prosecuted.
“He released massive amounts of classified and confidential but classified information,” Trump told Fox News in an interview. “That’s illegal, and you go to jail for that.”
Bolton, however, maintained that he had fulfilled his legal obligations and that he obtained a letter from a National Security Council official in 2020 that said the book included no classified material.
Trump himself was indicted in 2023 on charges of mishandling classified documents and obstructing efforts to recover them after he left office. But U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, threw out the charges in 2024.
