Former Trump White House adviser John Bolton surrendered at a federal courthouse on Friday after FBI investigators caught him leaking classified information.
Bolton allegedly leaked seven documents while working for Trump at the White House and leaked another shortly after the president fired him in September 2019, ABC News reported.
The longtime Trump critic pleaded not guilty to 18 felony counts and denounced the indictment as a sham, echoing Democrats who have accused Trump of "weaponizing" the law to target his political foes.
Bolton had a brief and rocky tenure as Trump's national security adviser during the president's first White House term.
A Republican fixture in Washington, D.C. foreign policy circles for decades, Bolton's aggressive personality and hawkish views clashed with those of the commander in chief, who would denounce Bolton as a reckless "warmonger" after firing him. After departing the White House, Bolton published a tell-all book that led to a reprimand from a judge for compromising national security.
In August, Bolton fell under scrutiny again after federal investigators raided his Maryland home and Washington, D.C. office. Many Democrats reflexively denounced the raid as an intimidation tactic, but few Democrats rushed to Bolton's defense after the charges were unveiled.
The indictment accuses Bolton of using a personal e-mail account to send over 1,000 pages of top secret and other classified information in "diary-like entries" to members of his family.
Prosecutors also say that Bolton unlawfully retained physical documents inside his home and also kept copies on his personal devices. Some of the information Bolton transmitted, which included sensitive details on "future attacks, foreign adversaries, and foreign-policy relations," was allegedly exposed by Iranian hackers.
When Bolton reported the hack of his e-mail to the FBI in 2021, he failed to mention that he had used the account to send classified information, prosecutors say.
Bolton appeared to be aware that his clandestine actions could get him in trouble, telling one relative whom he sent a file, "None of which we talk about!!!", to which the person responded, "Shhhhh," the AP reported.
Bolton faces eight counts of unlawful transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of unlawful retention of national defense information.
According to Bolton's lawyer Abbe Lowell, Bolton shared "unclassified" information with his immediate family only, and the FBI knew all about it in 2021. "Like many public officials throughout history," Lowell said, "Bolton kept diaries -- that is not a crime."
The prosecution of Bolton comes within weeks of indictments being brought against New York attorney general Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey, both Trump antagonists who have been accused of weaponizing the power of government in their own ways.
Unlike Comey and James, Bolton may have difficulty winning sympathy from the liberal media.
Even the left-leaning Associated Press acknowledged that the case against Bolton "was already well underway by the time Trump took office" and that it appears to be more "conventional" than the cases against James and Comey.
