President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton pleaded guilty Friday to a single count of hoarding national defense information while working in the White House, leaving the 77-year-old facing up to five years in federal prison.
Bolton, an Iran hawk and former US ambassador to the United Nations, copped to the charge during a nearly hour-long hearing in federal court just outside Washington, responding to US District Judge Theodore Chuang’s inquiry about whether he was guilty: “I am, Your Honor, and sorry for it.”
A court clerk later read the count aloud and asked Bolton, clad in a dark suit and striped tie, to formally enter his plea — which he did by saying “Guilty” in a resolute tone.
“As Mr. Bolton just admitted, he put our national security at grave risk in violation of the law,” Hayes said of the 77-year-old former White House official. “No one is above the law.”
“The national defense information at issue in this case was classified at the highest classification levels,” Hayes added, claiming that it “revealed intelligence about an adversary’s plans for an attack conducted against US forces in another country; it contained human intelligence using sensitive sources; and it discussed a covert action program.”
Sentencing was set for Oct. 28, with Chuang noting that Bolton would not be eligible for parole before releasing him. The case judge, appointed to the federal bench by Barack Obama in 2014, made headlines last year for temporarily blocking efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency to dissolve the US Agency for International Development.
The ex-Trump official’s plea makes his case the first in a series brought by the 47th president’s Department of Justice against political adversaries — including former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James — that has resulted in a conviction.
Bolton has been a frequent critic of Trump since his departure from the 45th president’s administration in September 2019.
Prosecutor Tanner Kroeger said Bolton shared “more than 1,000 pages” of classified information “in the form of diaries with two family members” — believed to be his wife and daughter — in anticipation of a memoir that he would be paid a $1.5 million advance to write.
That information was transmitted between the personal email accounts of Bolton and his relatives and stored digitally. The notes also existed in handwritten form based on jottings from his 17 months in the Trump White House.
While holding a top-secret security clearance, Bolton also transmitted eight documents over his private email despite “at no point” being authorized to do so, according to Kroeger.
Seven of those were determined to be classified at the “top secret” level, the highest under the US government’s national security system.
The longtime GOP foreign policy figure was indicted by a federal grand jury this past October on 18 counts of illegally hoarding or sending sensitive information, raising the prospect that Bolton would spend the rest of his life behind bars after his Maryland home and DC office were raided by federal investigators on Aug. 22, 2025.
Bolton pleaded guilty to count 12 of the indictment, with prosecutors intending to formally dismiss the remaining counts at October’s sentencing hearing.
Among the items recovered by the FBI were documents about weapons of mass destruction, internal government communications about strategy, secret travel memos, and the US mission to the UN.
Portions of Bolton’s diaries were exposed in July 2021 after his AOL email account was infiltrated by Iranian-linked hackers, Kroeger and Bolton affirmed Friday.
Bolton subsequently told federal agents of the hack, but not that it compromised some national security information, according to the prosecutor.
The former national security adviser has faced constant security threats from Iran since the January 2020 killing of notorious military commander Qassem Soleimani.
Friday’s guilty plea by Bolton wraps up a long-running investigation that began near the end of Trump’s first term and that FBI sources previously told The Post was mysteriously “shelved” during the administration of President Joe Biden.
In 2020, Bolton faced a separate investigation into his handling of classified information surrounding the publication of his best-selling White House memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”
The Trump administration asserted that Bolton’s manuscript could harm national security if published. Bolton’s lawyers have said he moved forward with the book after a White House National Security Council official, with whom Bolton had worked for months, said the manuscript no longer contained classified information.
Bolton’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, had argued that many of the documents seized by the feds in August had been approved during a pre-publication review for “The Room Where It Happened,” were decades old and dated from his client’s long career in government.
“Today, Ambassador Bolton did what real leaders do. He took responsibility for a mistake he made, thereby saving the government resources to pursue a case that could expose additional sensitive information,” Lowell said in a statement.
By contrast, President Trump thumbed his nose at the classified information laws, took actual classified documents to his Florida mansion, interfered with the investigation of that conduct, and has never accepted any accountability for his conduct,” he added.
“Ambassador Bolton, whose offense was only keeping a diary which contained classified information, kept a record to preserve history, but Donald Trump kept secrets to serve himself.”
Notably, Kroeger confirmed Friday that no classified information was published in Bolton’s book that related to the October indictment.
As part of the plea deal, the prosecutor confirmed that Bolton would “participate in a debrief with the intelligence community and members of the Justice Department,” forgo his government pension and perform 100 hours of community service.
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