There’s ‘No Excuse’ for John Bolton
Revisiting the charges against the former national security advisor as he reportedly prepares to plead guilty.
MEA CULPA. When, ten months ago, I wrote about John Bolton’s legal travails for The Bulwark, I concluded as follows:
Whatever one thinks of Bolton’s politics and policy ideas, he is a man—and a public servant—of integrity. The FBI raid on Bolton’s house and office is in all likelihood not about national security at all but a step designed to punish a prominent Trump critic, something which Bolton has bravely been in spades.
Now that Bolton, Donald Trump’s national security advisor from April 2018 to September 2019, is reportedly about to plead guilty to a single count of mishandling classified information, I have to take some of this back.
First, has Bolton been a man and a public servant of integrity? Up to a point, yes, but only up to a point. In his handling of classified materials, he has made significant self-interested mistakes. Bolton is not a stupid man so these mistakes can probably best be explained by arrogance. Whatever accounts for them, in plain language, he compromised his integrity.
Second, contrary to what I argued last year, the FBI raid on Bolton’s house on August 22, 2025 was indeed about national security—even if it was also part of Trump’s campaign to punish one of his critics.
The precise details of what Bolton will be pleading next week when his case next comes before the court are not yet clear. Whatever they are, for his transgression, he will reportedly be facing a $2.25 million fine and a maximum of five years in prison. This is deadly serious business. Let us unpack.
The indictment of Bolton contained eighteen counts of unauthorized transmission and retention of national defense information. None of the classified information appeared in Bolton’s 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened. Rather, the information at issue was preparatory materials for the writing of the book.
According to the indictment (the veracity of which has of course not been tested in a court of law), Bolton was apparently in the habit of taking extensive notes on his daily activities as national security advisor on yellow notepads, transcribing them in a word-processing program, and sending them via email accounts on Google and AOL to what the indictment describes as Individuals 1 and 2—widely reported to be his daughter and his wife. Much of this material was classified at very high levels of security, including TOP SECRET/SCI, which stands for sensitive compartmented information. Digital copies of the information were stored on unsecure devices in Bolton’s home. After he stepped down as national security advisor, Bolton did not inform the U.S. government that he was in possession of these materials.
After Bolton completed his book manuscript but before it had undergone prepublication security review, he submitted it to his literary agent. It was chock-full of government secrets. This too is alleged to be a crime.
There’s worse. According to the indictment, at some point, Bolton’s personal email account was hacked, evidently by an agent affiliated with the Iranian government, and access was gained to the classified materials stored in his accounts. A representative of Bolton, presumably one of his attorneys, notified the U.S. government of the hack in June 2021. But this representative did not disclose that the hacked account contained classified information.
In other words, some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets may have made it into Iranian hands and Bolton apparently remained silent about this.
WHEN THE “SIGNALGATE” SCANDAL occurred at the inception of the second Trump term and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was shown to be sharing information about an imminent U.S. military action with associates and family members on the private messaging app Signal, Bolton was one of his most outspoken critics. In an interview quoted in the indictment, Bolton said “Initially, I was totally without words. I couldn’t find, I couldn’t find, I couldn’t find a way to express how stunned I was that anybody would do this. You simply don’t use commercial means of communication, whether it’s supposedly an encrypted app or not for these kinds of discussions. . . . there’s no excuse for it.”
Bolton was right: There was no excuse for the leaks of Signalgate. Trump administration officials ought to have been punished for them.
As Bolton, it is expected, will soon himself be punished for what he did.
It is impossible to say whether, absent Trump’s perversion of the Justice Department for his campaign of vindictiveness, Bolton would find himself in legal jeopardy—although it is worth noting that the case against Bolton was brought by career prosecutors and not by Trump hatchet men. And Bolton did essentially what Hegseth did, and arguably worse.
When Bolton is sentenced, Trump will no doubt perform a victory dance and point to the case as if it were evidence that all his other vindictive prosecutions are similarly meritorious. It will be a disgusting spectacle. Shame on John Bolton for having created this situation.
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