GREENBELT, Md. — John Bolton, President Trump’s former national security adviser, pleaded guilty Friday to one count of retaining national defense information from his time in the White House, exposing the 77-year-old to as much as five years behind bars in federal prison.
Bolton, a longtime hard-liner on Iran and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, entered the plea during a short proceeding in federal court outside Washington. When U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang asked whether he was guilty, Bolton replied, “I am, Your Honor, and sorry for it.”
Although the offense carries a statutory maximum of 10 years in prison, U.S. Attorney Kelly Hayes told reporters after the hearing that, under the plea deal, the Justice Department would seek a five-year term. The agreement also requires Bolton to pay a $2.25 million fine.
Chuang scheduled sentencing for Oct. 28 and noted that Bolton would not qualify for parole before allowing him to leave the courthouse.
Prosecutor Tanner Kroger said Bolton provided “more than 1,000 pages” of classified material “in the form of diaries with two family members” — understood to be his wife and daughter — as he prepared a memoir for which he was set to receive a $1.5 million advance.
The material was sent through personal email accounts belonging to Bolton and his relatives and was kept in digital form. Prosecutors said the records also included handwritten notes drawn from his 17 months serving in the Trump White House.
During the period from April 2018 to September 2019, when he held a top-secret security clearance, Bolton also sent eight documents using his private email account.
Investigators later determined that seven of those documents were classified as “top secret,” the most sensitive designation in the U.S. government’s national security classification 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.
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Among the items recovered were documents about weapons of mass destruction, internal government communications about strategy, secret travel memos, and the US mission to the UN.
The diaries were exposed in July 2021 after Bolton’s AOL account was infiltrated by Iranian-linked hackers, Kroger and Bolton affirmed Friday.
Bolton subsequently told federal agents of the hack, but not that it compromised some national security information, according to Kroger.
Bolton 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 as part of a pre-publication review for “The Room Where It Happened,” were decades old and dated from his client’s long career in government.
Notably, Kroger confirmed Friday that no classified information was published in the book that related to the October indictment.
