John Bolton, who served as national security adviser during President Donald Trump’s first term and later became one of his fiercest critics, has agreed to plead guilty to one count of retaining national security information, two sources familiar with the matter said.
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As part of the agreement reached with federal prosecutors, Bolton will be arraigned again on June 26, at which point the judge will have up to 90 days to render a sentence, the sources said.
Bolton faces a potential sentence ranging from probation to 60 months in prison, the sources said. He has also agreed to pay $2.25 million in restitution, one of the sources said.
Bolton described the national security information in question in an electronic diary entry that he shared with two members of his family, the two sources said.
“So, there’s no allegation that he took home any classified documents, or that he leaked any documents or that he shared any documents with foreign adversaries,” one of the sources said.
When he was arrested in October, Bolton initially pleaded not guilty to charges of mishandling classified information. He was indicted that month by a federal grand jury in Maryland on eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of unlawful retention of that information.
One of the sources, who is close to Bolton, told NBC News that he changed his plea for the good of the country.
“This was a very difficult decision for him,” the source said. “Most importantly, he is doing what leaders do and taking responsibility. He understands that if he went to trial what that would mean, which essentially would be the disclosure of many, many more classified documents that he would need to reveal to defend himself. And given the Ukraine and the Middle East, he didn’t want to do that.”
Bolton ran afoul of Trump after wrote an unflattering book about his experience working for the president and by continually criticizing the president’s foreign policy moves, especially on Russia.
Just days after returning to the White House, Trump canceled Bolton’s Secret Service detail even though he was the target of an alleged murder-for-hire scheme by a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In June 2020, Trump publicly called for Bolton to be prosecuted.
“He released massive amounts of classified, and confidential, but classified information,” Trump told Fox News in an interview at the time. “That’s illegal and you go to jail for that.”
Bolton, however, maintained that he had fulfilled his legal obligations and obtained a letter from a National Security Council official in 2020 that said the book contained no classified material.
Trump himself was indicted in 2023 on charges of mishandling classified documents and obstructing efforts to recover them after he left office. But U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, threw out the charges in 2024.







