WASHINGTON
John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s third National Security Adviser, has pleaded not guilty to 18 Department of Justice charges that he illegally transmitted and retained classified national defense information. He should be presumed innocent unless and until he is proved guilty.
That said, I’m not buying Bolton’s pose as a national security graybeard who just wanted to help America and but now is the target of Trump’s quest for “retribution.”
That may be true of the case against former FBI Director James Comey. Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy wrote in National Review, that the case against Comey was “so ill-conceived that the longer one analyzes it, the worse it gets.”
But the Bolton indictment details how he allegedly flouted national security protocols in furtherance of naked self-promotion. While he was supposed to be putting U.S. national security first, he was hoarding information for his book.
The 26-page indictment alleges that Bolton kept “TOP SECRET” and other classified documents at his home and wrongly shared them with “Individual 1,” presumed to mean his wife, and “Individual 2,” their daughter, as a draft of sorts for a tell-all he would write about his time in the Trump White House. Neither family member had a security clearance.
While he was the administration’s big foot on national security, Bolton nonetheless shared more than a thousand pages of sensitive information via AOL, a Google email account and a non-governmental commercial messaging application.
After Bolton left the Trump administration in September 2019, the indictment charged, “a cyber actor believed to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran” hacked into Bolton’s personal email and gained access to classified and national defense information.
Yes, you read that correctly. Iran.
Bolton notified the government about the hack on or about July 2021, but, according to federal prosecutors, he did not tell the government that his account contained classified information.
According to the indictment, Bolton earned more than $1 million from his book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”
That’s a nice chunk of change — especially for work described as “bloated with self-importance” in a New York Times book review.
Of course, the most likely way for Bolton to sell boatloads of his memoir — Simon & Schuster sold more than 780,000 copies during the first week of its release — would be to trash Trump. That’s not a complaint. It’s an observation about the world in which we live.
In March, when Washington learned that Secretary of Defense (now War) Pete Hegseth had used Signal to send texts on U.S. plans to bomb Houthi militias in Yemen, Bolton piled on, ripping the new Sec/Def for a “terrible lack of judgment” and pronounced that “Hegseth sadly proved himself to be a lightweight.”
Oh, the irony of Bolton finding himself on the same lightweight scale as Hegseth.
Except, with his decades in government service, Bolton knew better. The government built a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) in his home to protect his communications from hackers. And still, he used AOL and gmail.
Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.
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