Politics
BREAKING: John Bolton Indicted By Federal Grand Jury
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland just two months after federal agents executed searches of his Bethesda home and downtown D.C. office building.
According to a report from Fox News, Bolton has been indicted on 18 counts by the federal grand jury. Specifically, he faces eight counts of transmission of national defense information and ten counts of retention of national defense information
The indictment alleges that Bolton sent classified materials from an unsecured, private email server, which were then hacked by agents from Iran.
Agents during the August 22 search seized multiple documents labeled “classified,” “confidential” and “secret” from Bolton’s office, according to previously unsealed court filings. Investigators also seized additional electronic devices, USB drives, several pages of documents and more.
A separate disclosed court filing revealed that the former Trump official was being investigated for Espionage Act violations.
John Bolton National Security Advisor to the United States during a visit to Kyiv, Ukraine. 24-08-2018
Bolton, 76, served in President Donald Trump’s cabinet from 2018 through the following year and has since become a vehement critic. A longtime advocate of interventions in foreign wars, Bolton has frequently criticized Trump’s foreign policy moves and cheered on the Biden DOJ’s indictments against him in 2020.
Accusations against Bolton first surfaced in 2020, when the Trump Administration filed a lawsuit attempting to block the release of his book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” The government argued that Bolton did not go through the proper vetting process with the National Security Council when drafting the book, a mandatory process for government officials seeking to publish works that may contain classified information.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth refused to block the publication, but only because it was too late. He did conclude, however, that Bolton “likely published classified materials” and had “exposed his country to harm.” He later allowed the wider lawsuit to go forward, which was ultimately dismissed by the Biden Administration in 2021.
