Former Trump adviser John Bolton pleads guilty to mishandling classified information

John Bolton, the former US national security adviser who became an arch-enemy of Donald Trump after serving under him and then being fired, pleaded guilty on Friday to a charge of mishandling classified information that could result in him going to prison.

Bolton admitted the charge, as widely anticipated, in an appearance at a federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a plea deal designed to produce a lesser sentence by reducing the seriousness of the accusations against him.

He was scheduled to be sentenced at a hearing on 28 October to be presided over by the US district judge Theodore Chuang.

The guilty plea amounted to a reversal of Bolton’s initial denial of the charges, which were brought last October and accused him of using a personal email address and messaging app to share more than 1,000 pages of diary-style notes containing national security information with two close relatives who did not have security clearance. The relatives were later revealed to be his wife and daughter.

The notes were being kept as research for Bolton’s memoir, The Room Where It Happened, which was published in 2020 during Trump’s first presidency, despite attempts by the White House and the justice department to block it on national security grounds.

The notes were later penetrated by a hacker linked to the Iranian government, a breach that Bolton reported to the authorities.

Under the original indictment, Bolton faced 18 charges, each carrying a possible 10-year jail sentence.

The new deal, agreed to with prosecutors, is believed to carry a sentence ranging from probation up to a maximum five-year jail sentence. Bolton has also agreed to pay a $2.25m fine.

Bolton, who has become one of Trump’s most vociferous critics, accused the president of pursuing him as part of his well-trailed agenda of retribution against political opponents that had already seen criminal indictments filed by the justice department against critics including former FBI director James Comey and Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, when the charges were first laid.

FBI investigators had earlier raided Bolton’s office and home in Bethesda, Maryland.

However, the Bolton investigation began during Trump’s first administration and intensified during Joe Biden’s presidency, as FBI agents investigated the hack into his emails.

Bolton reported the hack but did not disclose that his email account contained classified information.

A hardline conservative who identified with the Republican party’s neocon wing, Bolton served for a year under Trump before being fired in 2019. His memoir painted a deeply unflattering picture of Trump, accusing him of being “stunningly uninformed”.

Trump, for his part, has described Bolton as “a bad guy” and a “crazy” warmonger, who would have pushed the US into “world war six”.

The justice department greeted Bolton’s guilty plea with a series of statements from several officials condemning what they depicted as his irresponsibility and damage to national security that “put Americans’ lives at risk”.

Hayden O’Byrne, acting deputy assistant attorney general for the department’s national security division, said: “John Bolton held a position of extraordinary public trust as the country’s top national security adviser, and he betrayed that trust, jeopardizing our nation’s security.

“Today’s resolution ought to send a message to other public officials whom the public has entrusted with classified national defense information. If you willfully mishandle these state secrets, the Department of Justice, led by the national security division, will investigate and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”