Former national security advisor John Bolton pleaded guilty in federal court on Friday to one felony count of illegally retaining sensitive national security information.
The plea comes as part of a plea deal requiring Bolton to pay a $2.5 million fine but serve no prison time. He may receive probation, home confinement, or other type of punishment depending on what the court decides.
Prosecutors charged Bolton in October with 18 counts including the transmission and the retention of national defense information. However, the agreement dropped most of the other counts. The crime he admitted to is considered a serious felony because it involves information that could potentially threaten national security if it fell into the wrong hands.
The case grew out of Bolton’s time serving as national security advisor to President Donald Trump from 2018 to 2019 and the memoir he wrote about that time period. Since leaving the White House, Bolton became a virulent critic of the president.
🚨BREAKING: Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton is expected to plead guilty Friday to a single count of retaining classified information and pay a $2.25 million fine, according to CBS News.
— Off The Press (@OffThePress1) June 26, 2026
Bolton, originally indicted on 18 counts, is accused of sharing more than… pic.twitter.com/OPACtyj0o2
Federal prosecutors said Bolton wrote detailed diary-style notes on his personal computer and retained them in his Maryland home and Washington office. The notes included information from intelligence briefings, meetings with senior officials, and discussions with foreign leaders, some of it classified at the top secret or sensitive information levels.
Investigators said Bolton shared more than a thousand pages of these notes with two relatives who had no security clearance. They believed it was so they could help him write his book.
FBI agents raided his home and office last August and recovered materials and evidence. He initially pleaded not guilty and said the notes were personal records for his writing project. He also said the published version of his book went through prepublication review and did not contain classified content.
Ironically, Bolton has spent years criticizing President Trump over his classified documents case that Democrats launched against him during the 2024 campaign. “I think this is a potentially catastrophic turn of events for him. It certainly should be, because if proven in trial it should put Trump in jail for a long time,” he said during a June 2023 interview with NPR.
He argued that the government should “hold everyone accountable equally, and that does not exclude the president. I think this is a real issue that’s going to have profound impacts on our national security if we don’t take it seriously.”
After the Justice Department indicted him, Bolton issued a statement in which he complained that he had “become the latest target in weaponizing the Justice Department to charge those he deems to be his enemies with charges that were declined before or distort the facts.”
The plea deal ends the criminal case against him without any admission of wrongdoing tied to the information in his book.
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