Trump’s former national security adviser has been indicted

John Bolton, who served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser before becoming a fierce critic of the president, has been indicted on federal charges.

The Justice Department presented the case to a Maryland grand jury on Thursday, and they agreed there was enough evidence to indict Bolton, who issued a statement pleading his innocence.

It comes after FBI agents searched Bolton’s home and office in August as part of an investigation into the handling of classified information.

The indictment makes Bolton, 76, the third political opponent of the US president to face charges in recent weeks. He could get decades in prison.

According to a 26-page indictment filed in court in Greenbelt, Md., on Thursday, Bolton is charged with eight counts of transmitting national defense information (NDI) and 10 counts of unlawfully withholding NDI.

An indictment in the US court system is a formal charge issued by a grand jury—a group of members of the public created by a prosecutor to review the evidence to determine whether the case should proceed.

Prosecutors accuse Bolton of illegally transmitting highly classified U.S. national defense information using his personal email and other messaging apps.

“These documents revealed intelligence about future attacks, foreign adversaries and foreign policy relations,” the court documents said.

If convicted, Bolton could face up to 10 years in prison on each charge. He is expected to surrender to authorities on Friday.

“No one is above the law,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement announcing the charges.

Bolton said in a statement that he looked forward to defending his “lawful conduct” in court as he accused Trump of seeking “retribution against me.”

“I have now become the latest target for the Department of Justice to weaponize those he (Trump) deems to be his enemies with charges that have been dismissed before or that distort the facts,” Bolton said.

Bolton’s lawyer, Abe Lowell, said the charges stemmed from diary entries kept by his client during his 45-year career in public service.

“Like many public servants throughout history, Amb Bolton kept diaries – that is not a crime,” Mr Lowell said.

He described the records as “unclassified, shared only with his immediate family and known to the FBI as recently as 2021.”

The indictment says Bolton shared “more than a thousand pages of information about his daily activities,” including information classified as top secret, with two unnamed relatives.

He is said to have shared the information with his wife and daughter, according to US media reports.

The unauthorized information includes “diary-like records from Bolton’s time as national security adviser” and is said to have been “printed and stored” at Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Maryland.

The indictment also says that at some point between September 2019 and July 2021, “a cyber actor believed to be affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran” hacked his personal email account and accessed the classified information.

It said one of Bolton’s representatives told the FBI about the hack, but the agency was not alerted that the hackers might have accessed sensitive information.

Bolton was fired by the first Trump administration in 2019. His 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, chronicled his time working under Trump and portrayed him as a president who was ill-informed about geopolitics.

The White House sued to block publication of the book, arguing that it contained classified information and had not been properly vetted. A the judge denied the motion and the book was released days later.

The US Department of Justice then launched an investigation into whether Bolton had handled classified information by disclosing certain information in the book.

Court documents state that while “the original manuscript contained significant amounts of highly classified information that should have been redacted,” the published version contained nothing covered by the indictment.

Asked about the accusation Thursday at the White House, Trump said he was unaware of it, but added that Bolton was a “bad guy.”

Bolton, who was George W. Bush’s U.N. ambassador, was among former officials critical of Trump who were stripped of Secret Service protection in January.

He is the third Trump critic to be criminally charged since September.

was New York Attorney General Leticia James accused of bank fraud in October.

Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted in late September for lying to Congress.

The cases were filed after Trump called on the US attorney general to prosecute his political opponents.

“We can’t delay any longer, it kills our reputation and credibility,” he wrote on social media.