Legal cases dominated much of President Trump’s two terms in office.
But now the biggest bombshell has just dropped.
And one Trump needed to be sitting down when he heard about this guilty plea.
John Bolton Pleads Guilty
Former National Security Advisor turned Trump critic John Bolton pled guilty to mishandling sensitive national security information and now faces up to five years in prison.
“He intends to plead guilty to one felony count of illegal retention of sensitive national security information, 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 could come with a sentence between 0 and 60 months in prison,” CNN reported.
Prosecutors charged Bolton with writing down his diary entries and sending them to himself on his personal email and account and then sharing them with two unauthorized individuals as part of the anti-Trump book he wrote after leaving the White House in Trump’s first term.
Bolton was always an odd fit to work with Trump, as he was a neoconservative from the Bush era who favored the kind of endless wars that Trump campaigned against in 2016.
Comeuppance for Bolton
Bolton’s pleading guilty to mishandling national security information is ironic in light of how Bolton savaged Trump in the press following the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in 2022 as part of the classified documents hoax.
In an interview with the New York Times, Bolton mocked the idea that Trump declassified the papers he kept with him at Mar-a-Lago before leaving office.
“When somebody begins to concoct lies like this, it shows a real level of desperation,” Bolton stated
“I was never briefed on any such order, procedure, policy when I came in,” Bolton added.
Bolton then told CBS’s Catherine Herridge that Trump’s handling of the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago represented a national security threat.
“Well, to the extent that the newspaper clippings were treated like most people in this country would treat newspaper clippings, it shows a real disdain for the seriousness of the classification at issue,” Bolton declared. “In most offices, you would have a very clear segregation of the sensitive classified material locked in safes, handled very carefully, versus all the unclassified material. This, to me, is more evidence that Donald Trump didn’t give much attention to the sensitivity of the classified information.”
“My concern was that he didn’t feel that the confidentiality of much of this information was as important as we knew it to be,” Bolton continued, “It just didn’t register with him that safeguarding this information for its own sake, and because of the risk to sources and methods of obtaining the intelligence, could be jeopardized.”
A judge will now decide Bolton’s fate at sentencing.
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