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GREENBELT, Md. (CN) — Former National Security Adviser John Bolton pleaded not guilty in federal court Friday, to charges of unlawfully transferring classified information during his time in the Trump administration between 2018-2019.
Bolton arrived at the federal courthouse in Greenbelt Thursday morning, surrendering himself to the U.S. Marshals Service in advance of his hearing before Chief Magistrate Judge Timothy Sullivan.
Sullivan released Bolton as he awaits his trial and set a scheduling conference for Nov. 21, with the first set of pre-trial motions due Nov. 14.
Under Sullivan’s release conditions, Bolton turned over his passport to his attorney Abbe Lowell and must request court approval to travel outside the United States.
Bolton quickly exited the courthouse and drove away, declining to speak to the journalists gathered outside. He was briefly hounded by Ivan Raiklin, a far-right political operative who has appeared repeatedly at the U.S. District Courthouse in Washington for cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
Bolton’s case will be transferred to U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang, a Barack Obama appointee, who found in March that the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development was illegal.
Each of the 18 felony counts carries a maximum potential penalty of 10 years in prison, although sentencing guidelines generally push judges to impose terms below the maximum.
This is the third case brought against an adversary of President Donald Trump — albeit with much more evidence than those against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James in Virginia.
Bolton likened his indictment to something Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin would use against his political enemies.
“I have become the latest target in weaponizing the Justice Department to charge those he deems to be his enemies with charges that were declined before or distort the facts,” Bolton said in an emailed statement.
On Thursday, jurors approved an 18-count indictment — eight counts of transmission of national defense information, and another 10 counts of retention of national defense information — based on prosecutors’ reports that Bolton shared more than a thousand pages of classified information, including top secret documents, with two family members between April 9, 2018, and Aug. 22, 2025.
Prosecutors said in the 26-page indictment that after Bolton left his position in the White House, he didn’t tell government personnel he had sent national defense and classified information to the two unnamed people over unsecured email and messaging services, or that the three stored such information on personal devices.
Led by U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Kelly Hayes, prosecutors say Bolton referred to detailed notes he took about his daily activities at the White House as his “diary,” which he shared with the two family members.
Prosecutors claim Bolton would transcribe the notes and share them with the relatives via email and a commercial messaging app, frequently including national defense and classified information, such as details about a foreign government’s activities or from a military briefing in the White House Situation Room.
In at least one message, prosecutors said, Bolton referred to the relatives as his “editors.”
According to the government prosecutors, Bolton shared top secret information that included: intelligence that a foreign adversary was planning a missile launch in the future; a covert action in a foreign country; intelligence about an adversary’s knowledge of planned U.S. actions; intelligence about an adversary’s plans for an attack conducted against U.S. forces in another country; and intelligence on an adversary’s leaders.
Bolton was partially charged under the same statute, U.S. Code 18 Section 793(e), as State Department senior consultant Ashley Tellis, who was arrested in Virginia Wednesday for retaining more than 1,000 pages of top-secret U.S. Air Force documents.
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