John Bolton reaches plea deal over mishandling of sensitive national security documents

John Bolton, former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, has reached a plea deal to plead guilty to one felony count of illegal retention of sensitive national security documents and pay a fine of more than $2 million. The agreement resolves a case in which Bolton was originally charged with 18 counts related to mishandling classified information, including sharing diary entries from his White House tenure via personal email. The plea comes after years of legal scrutiny and Trump’s calls for Bolton’s prosecution over his critical 2020 memoir.

Getting your Trinity Audio //trinityaudio.ai player ready... CNN — John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser-turned-adversary, is expected to plead guilty over mishandling classified documents, according to three sources familiar with the matter. He intends to plead guilty to one felony count of illegal retention of sensitive national security documents, according to one of the sources. He has also agreed to pay a more than $2 million fine, according to one of the sources. A conviction on one count of illegal retention comes with a sentence between 0 and 60 months in prison. The Justice Department declined to comment and referred CNN to the court docket, which indicates a hearing was set for June 26. Watch Katelyn Polantz discuss Bolton’s plea deal: The plea deal comes months after the top Trump foe was charged by prosecutors in Maryland for allegedly keeping diary entries from the first Trump White House in his home. Prosecutors accused Bolton of sharing “more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities” through his personal email account with two unauthorized individuals, who CNN has reported are his wife and daughter. https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/17/politics/investigation-john-bolton-indictment The alleged transmission of classified information isn’t part of the charges he expects to plead guilty to. Bolton, who served for one year in the first Trump administration, was originally charged with eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of retention of national defense information. Trump had long been long been calling for Bolton to be arrested over his 2020 memoir that was highly critical of the president, claiming Bolton should have gone to jail because classified information was contained in the book. But unlike cases against Trump’s other perceived enemies, like FBI Director James Comey and the now-dismissed case against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Bolton’s case has maintained the support of career prosecutors and investigators, people briefed on the matter previously told CNN. Trump’s first Justice Department opened criminal and civil investigations into the book in 2020, but it was closed within a year. But the FBI opened a new inquiry into Bolton the next year, still during the Biden presidency, after his email was breached by suspected Iranian hackers, as investigators discovered “diary-like entries” containing top secret information from his time as national security advisor. This story is developing and will be updated. The-CNN-Wire ™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.