John Bolton Indicted

John Bolton, a former national advisor to President Donald Trump, was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury in Maryland.

Bolton, 76, is charged in a 26-page indictment with eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of retention of national defense information.

Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security advisor from April 2018 through September 2019, only to become a leading critic of him, is the third high-profile Trump foe to be criminally charged in recent weeks after being criticized by the president.

The 26-page indictment says that Bolton, from April 2018 through this past August, shared “more than a thousand pages of his day-to-day activities as the National Security Advisor — including information relating to the national defense which was classified up to the TOP SECRET/SCI [sensitive compartmented information] level-with two unauthorized individuals” who were relatives of his.

Neither of those two people had security clearances, the indictment says.

“Bolton also unlawfully retained documents, writings, and notes relating to the national defense, including information classified up to the TOP SECRET/SCI level, in his home in Montgomery County, Maryland,” the indictment said.

Bolton is accused of electronically sending, through non-governmental messaging applications, “diary-like entries” to the two other people that contained information classified as top secret.

The charges against Bolton, who, like Trump, is a Republican, were unsealed shortly after the indictment was handed to a magistrate judge in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt. He faces a maximum possible sentence of 10 years in prison on each individual count if convicted, although federal sentencing guidelines would recommend a much less-severe punishment.