John Bolton, accused of illegally sharing classified information, surrenders to authorities
Former national security adviser John Bolton appeared at the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, to answer 18 charges against him.
Faced with charges of illegally sharing and storing government information considered classified, John Robert Bolton, appeared at the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, and hours later pleaded not guilty.
Bolton faces eight charges of transmitting national defense information and 10 more for withholding national defense information.
At the end of August, a group of agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) entered the home of the former aide to President Donald Trump during his first term.
According to court records, multiple documents classified as “secret,” “confidential,” and “classified” were seized in the operation, including some about weapons of mass destruction.
Through a brief message posted on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, Kash Patel, director of the FBI, justified the search carried out.
“NO ONE is above the law… @FBI Agents on a mission,” he wrote.
As a result of this operation, a federal grand jury in Maryland issued the aforementioned accusations against the 76-year-old former diplomat.
In response, this Friday, Bolton He went to the U.S. marshal's office with his lawyers, expecting a potential initial court appearance later.
Prosecutors investigating him say that after leaving his post as national security adviser in September 2019, the Baltimore lawyer sent more than 1,000 pages of “diary-like entries” to two relatives describing his daily work exchanging views with Donald Trump on government matters and also retained records at his home in a Maryland suburb.
In his defense, Bolton says he is the “latest target” of Trump’s revenge campaign targeting his perceived political enemies.
Abbe Lowell,One of the lawyers representing the former diplomat said that keeping a diary, as Bolton has done, "is not a crime."
Bolton is the third high-profile Trump opponent to be criminally charged in recent weeks, following the same case with James Comey, the former FBI director accused of lying in his testimony before Congress in 2020; and recently with Letitia James, the New York attorney general, accused of being responsible for bank fraud related to the purchase of a house in Virginia.