On Oct. 16, 2025, a Maryland federal grand jury indicted John Bolton for eight counts of unlawful transmission of classified information and 10 counts of unlawful retention of classified information. These are all charges under 18 USC 793: Gathering, transmitting, or losing defense information.
In other words, Bolton has been charged with "I'm far too important for the rules to apply to me!"
There has been plenty of that going around, and I've been reporting on it since 2010, when Private First Class Bradley "Chelsea" Manning, and all I can say is "Good God, fifteen years?"
You may recall that Bradley extracted and leaked a whole lot of information to WikiLeaks under the creative interpretation that, as a whistleblower, he was entitled to do so. The courts disagreed and sentenced him to 35 years in prison in 2014, but Obama commuted his sentence in 2017.
The famous whistleblower exemption was tested again by Reality Winner — yes, "Reality" actually is her name, honest — who leaked NSA information to The Intercept.
Meet Reality Leigh Winner. The 25-y-o was charged today with leaking top secret NSA report on Russian hacking to @theintercept pic.twitter.com/YhKk688LWJ
— The Smoking Gun (@tsgnews) June 5, 2017
The reality was that Reality was charged and went to prison for about four years.
Bolton's escapades actually were more like what Gen. David Petraeus was caught with in 2011 and 2012. It appears Petraeus was keeping notebooks of very sensitive information that he was sharing with his biographer, and that led to his resignation from the position of Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in November 2012.
Of course, the most glaring example was the way Hillary Clinton treated classified information. I reported on that at some length in 2015.
Related: Incompetence or Indifference? The Continuing Story of the Clinton Emails
Related: It’s Not Classified Because It’s Marked; It’s Marked Because It’s Classified
What Bolton was doing seems unusually self-important and obtuse, though. Apparently, starting the day after he became National Security Advisor, he started keeping a diary, which he emailed through his AOL account and passed to his wife and daughter through an encrypted chat application. The FBI apparently found boxes of classified material stored in his home office.
As I've talked about quite a bit in the past, I was in the Intelligence Community myself, cleared for TOP SECRET and for special access, and I remember quite clearly the lengthy examination before I was cleared, the polygraph interview, and the lengthy lecture I got before I actually received the clearance. That was followed by actually swearing an oath that I wouldn't disclose what I knew.
That didn't mean I couldn't keep any notes, of course; it was part of my work. But the notes were in a special notebook. Each notebook had an identifying number, the pages were numbered, and if I wasn't using it, it was stored in a secure, locked file cabinet inside the Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) in which I worked behind a vault door that would have done credit to a bank.
Petraeus was at least forced to resign, and he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for which he got two years of probation and a $100,000 fine. Manning did seven years, and Winner got a four-year reality check.
And, of course, Clinton got off for bad behavior.
So it's going to be very interesting to watch the Bolton case. I have the feeling that he's not going to be nearly as well treated as Petraeus; I don't think Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, and finally Donald Trump are feeling very forgiving. And in Bolton's case, there are a couple of co-conspirators — his wife and daughter — who would provide a bit of leverage, as Gen. Flynn discovered.
I guess it's down to the "find out" part of Bolton's story.
