(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton is expected to plead guilty over mishandling classified information, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News Thursday.
Bolton could not immediately be reached for comment. The Department of Justice is declining to comment.
Bolton is expected to plead guilty to one count of illegal retention of sensitive documents, sources familiar with the matter said. Sources told ABC News that Bolton has also agreed to pay a fine of $2.25 million.
The count that he’s pleading guilty to involves keeping classified national security information in diaries, according to a source familiar with the matter. Bolton is expected to maintain that he did not take documents with classification markings out of government offices.
Bolton is expected to maintain that there’s no classified information in his 2020 memoir “The Room Where It Happened,” but that he wants to take responsibility for his actions, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
There is a rearraignment scheduled for June 26, which indicates it’s intended for Bolton to plead guilty.
The guilty plea would make Bolton thus far the only successful case that we’ve seen so far in Trump’s campaign of retribution against those he perceives to be his political enemies.
Bolton was indicted by a grand jury in October 2025 on charges that he allegedly unlawfully transmitted and retained classified documents. The indictment, handed up by a federal grand jury in Maryland, charged Bolton with eight counts of unlawful transmission of national defense information as well as 10 counts of unlawful retention of national defense information.
Prosecutors had accused Bolton of using a non-government personal email account and messaging application to transmit at least eight documents to unauthorized individuals that contained information classified at levels ranging from “secret” to “top secret.”
Seven of the transmissions allegedly occurred during the time when Bolton was serving as Trump’s national security adviser in 2018 and 2019, while another document was allegedly sent by Bolton just days after Trump removed him from the administration in September 2019.
Bolton has been a target of Trump’s ire since leaving Trump’s first administration and publishing a tell-all book. Bolton has denied ever unlawfully removing documents with classification markings and has said no such information was published in his book.
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