Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton is being indicted on 18 counts which accused him of using personal email and a messaging app to share more than 1,000 pages of “diary” notes about his day-to-day activities in 2018 and 2019.
Each count carries a maximum potential sentence of 10 years.
According to the indictment, Bolton’s notes were sent to two unidentified family members who did not have security clearances, and included national defense information, such as details classified as top secret. Bolton occasionally used his AOL and Google email accounts to send the information.
Those emails were hacked by someone associated with the government of Iran, a Bolton representative reported. He was investigated during the Biden administration when intelligence agencies gathered what former officials have described as troubling evidence.
“A representative for Bolton notified the U.S. government of the hack in or about July 2021, but did not tell the U.S. government that the account contained national defense information, including classified information, that Bolton had placed in the account from his time as national security adviser,” according to the filing.
The indictment showed exchanges between Bolton and the family members that made it clear he was gathering sensitive information for a book reveal, and knew they were needing to be discreet. They began using an encrypted messaging app. Bolton’s book, “The Room Where it Happened,” was released in 2020 as a memoir.
In August Trump’s FBI searched Bolton’s home and office where they carried out boxes of papers, computer files, and other materials. The indictment states that some of those materials contained low-level classified documents, and that printed copies of his diaries were found at his home that contained classified information.