John Bolton expected to plead guilty in national security case

John Bolton was set to enter a guilty plea in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Friday morning, narrowing an 18-count classified-information case to one felony count of retaining national security information. Under the deal, any prison term was capped at five years, with U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang holding the final say on sentence.

Prosecutors charged Bolton in October 2025 with eight counts of transmitting national defense information and 10 counts of unlawful retention. The indictment charged that he used personal email and messaging accounts to send sensitive material and kept diary-like notes at his home, including information classified as high as top secret and material dealing with future attacks, foreign adversaries and foreign-policy relations.

The plea carried lower legal exposure than the original case. Each of the indictment’s retention and transmission counts carried a maximum 10-year prison term, but the agreement reduced the case to a single count and a $2.25 million fine, with the possibility of probation or up to 60 months in prison.

Bolton’s case involved the same classified-information statutes used in prosecutions of other high-ranking officials, even as its politics were unusually charged because he served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser and later became one of Trump’s most outspoken critics. David Petraeus pleaded guilty in 2015 to unauthorized removal and retention of classified material and received two years of probation and a $100,000 fine, while Trump’s federal classified-documents case was dismissed in July 2024 after a judge found the special counsel’s appointment unlawful.

By resolving the case with a plea rather than a trial, Bolton avoided a public airing of the evidence that had already produced FBI searches of his Maryland home and Washington office in August 2025.