John Bolton, US President Donald Trump's former national security adviser who later became a critic, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland.
The investigation into Mr Bolton, who served for more than a year in Mr Trump's first administration before being fired in 2019, was revealed in August when the FBI searched his home in Maryland and his office in Washington for classified records he may have held on to after his sacking.
Agents during the August search seized documents labelled “classified”, “confidential” and “secret” from Mr Bolton’s office, according to previously unsealed court filings.
Some of the seized records appeared to concern weapons of mass destruction, national “strategic communication” and the US mission to the UN, where Mr Bolton previously served as envoy, the filings stated.
Questions about his handling of classified information go back years. He faced a lawsuit and a Justice Department investigation after leaving office over information in a 2020 book he published, The Room where it Happened.
The book portrayed Mr Trump as grossly uninformed about foreign policy. The Trump administration asserted that Mr Bolton’s manuscript included classified information that could harm national security if exposed.
Mr Bolton’s lawyers have said he moved forward with the book after a White House National Security Council official, with whom he had worked for months, said the manuscript no longer contained classified information.
The former adviser has attracted much criticism from Mr Trump and the wider Make America Great Again movement.
The charges against Mr Bolton come after the Justice Department indicted former FBI director James Comey, who investigated Mr Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who earlier lodged a civil fraud case against Mr Trump and his family real estate company.
The White House also recently revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former intelligence professionals it accused of politicising and manipulating intelligence. Mr Bolton's security clearance was revoked in January.
In an interview with The National after the presidential election last year, won by Mr Trump, Mr Bolton voiced concern over the direction in which his former boss would take the country.
“If you tell me the fight is between Donald Trump and the Constitution, the Constitution is going to win. It may be ugly but the system will prevail,” he said.
“People still have faith in the basic institutions. I believe and hope, anyway, that Trump is an aberration in American politics. He did damage in the first term. Some of that’s being repaired. He’ll do more damage in the second term. There’s no doubt about it.”
