Lawfare and misconduct are not mutually exclusive.
Lawfare and misconduct are not mutually exclusive.
A ccording to several reports, John Bolton has agreed to plead guilty to mishandling classified information in connection with his memoir about his tenure as national security adviser in the first Trump administration. The book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, was a blistering critique of the president strategically timed to be published in the run-up to the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden.
Bolton has reached a deal with Trump DOJ prosecutors to plead guilty to a single felony count of illegal retention of classified information. He would face up to five years’ imprisonment (there is no minimum sentence, so it’s possible he’d face no incarceration time).
He’d also be compelled to pay what could be a hefty fine — perhaps as high as $2.25 million.
The standard maximum fine for a felony conviction in federal law is $250,000 (see Section 3571 of the federal penal code). A sentencing judge can go higher, however, if there was profit from the wrongdoing — up to twice the pecuniary gain. A big objective of the Trump Justice Department’s charging of Bolton was to force forfeiture of the profits of his scathing account. The Room Where It Happened sold nearly 800,000 copies in its first week, debuting at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.
To repeat what I explained when Bolton was indicted in autumn 2025, the Bolton investigation was always qualitatively different from other episodes in President Trump’s lawfare campaign to prosecute his political enemies. I admire Bolton, so I take no pleasure in saying his case involved concrete evidence of misconduct.
According to prosecutors in the district of Maryland, to assemble materials for his book, Bolton retained copious notes he’d taken in connection with his activities as national security adviser — many such activities being highly classified — by typing them into more than 1,000 pages of Word documents. The indictment further alleged that Bolton sent most of the documents to family members via unauthorized channels. The book was derived from the edited notes.
The memoir made it through the government’s clearance process, but only after a great deal of allegedly classified information was excised at the government’s insistence — making it obvious that the intelligence had been removed from government safekeeping even if it hadn’t ended up in the book. As I said when the charges were filed, for all the talk about the book, the criminal case was actually about what wasn’t in it.
Under the anticipated plea deal, Bolton would admit guilt only to the unlawful retention of intelligence information, not to illegally disseminating it.
Clearly, the Trump administration politicized the review process, dragging it out as the 2020 election approached. Eventually, the exasperated Bolton instructed his publisher to go ahead with printing hundreds of thousands of copies of the book. Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee to the Washington, D.C., District Court whose distinguished career includes a stint as chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (which handles top-secret matters), refused to block publication of the book. Nevertheless, he inveighed that Bolton had “exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potential criminal) liability.”
That last observation now seems prescient. The Trump DOJ is pursuing Bolton as part of its lawfare campaign against the president’s political enemies. That said, lawfare and real misconduct are not mutually exclusive.
The plea deal would be in lieu of a trial on the 18-count indictment. If Bolton had been convicted at trial, he’d potentially have faced decades of imprisonment (though it is highly unlikely he’d have been sentenced to anything approaching that).
Bolton’s offense is analogous to similar misconduct for which former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Joe Biden, and Trump himself escaped liability. (Clinton and Biden were not charged at all for mishandling classified intelligence; Trump was charged, but the indictment was thrown out on a technicality related to the special counsel’s appointment, and the government dropped its appeal when he won the 2024 election.)
With the government insisting on a felony plea, moreover, Bolton would be receiving harsher treatment than did former CIA Director David Petraeus, who illegally transmitted very highly classified information. In 2015, the Obama DOJ permitted Petraeus to plead guilty to a misdemeanor — a slap on the wrist resulting in two years’ probation but no term of imprisonment.
The imminent Bolton guilty plea is sad news. Bolton has graced the pages of National Review many times, incisively breaking down foreign policy challenges and threats. The incident detailed in the charges reflects a serious lapse of judgment on his part.
On the heavier side of the ledger, however, John Bolton has patriotically served the United States for decades, in vital matters of national defense and at significant risk to himself and his family. Indeed, in 2022, the Justice Department charged a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with plotting to murder Bolton, in retaliation for his years of outspokenness against the jihadist “Death to America” regime and in the aftermath of the Trump-approved U.S. assassination of IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani (which occurred in January 2020, after Bolton had resigned as national security adviser).
If Bolton goes through with a guilty plea in the coming days, it is my hope that the court bears in mind the full ledger when it comes time to impose a sentence.