John Bolton will reportedly plead guilty over mishandling classified documents

Justice department filed charges against Trump’s former adviser in 2025 as part of onslaught against president’s critics

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John Bolton, the former US national security adviser who left Donald Trump’s first administration and became a staunch critic of the US president, has reached a plea agreement in a case criminally charging him with mishandling classified documents, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The agreement, subject to court approval, will allow Bolton to plead guilty to one count of illegal retention of sensitive national security information and requires him to pay a $2.25m fine, the person said, and serve anywhere between no time and five years in prison.

The US Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Court records showed that Bolton will appear in court to enter a new plea in the case on 26 June.

The justice department filed federal charges in October 2025 against Bolton , one of a string of Trump critics against whom it secured criminal charges in a matter of weeks.

Trump claimed at the time he was not aware of charges against Bolton, but that his former adviser was a “bad guy”.

Bolton had long fallen out of favor with Trump by the time he released a memoir, The Room Where It Happened, including a critical behind-the-scenes look into his administration, in 2020. The book went through a lengthy review under the first Trump administration before it was published. The charges are related to notes and diary entries Bolton made during his time as national security adviser.

Bolton’s book presaged much of the foreign policy direction Trump has taken in his second term, in which more than half the world’s countries have no US ambassador and America’s foreign relationships have become secondary to Trump’s personal vendettas and mercurial temperament.

Bolton is represented by Abbe Lowell, who has built a practice defending the targets of Trump’s retributive impulses. Lowell has argued that the notes were memoirs, not officially classified, and that the timing of the prosecution was politically motivated. Lowell did not immediately return a call and email seeking comment.

Other prosecutions of Trump’s perceived adversaries, like the charges against former FBI director James Comey and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, have faced hurdles in court and widespread accusations of political motivation.

The publication of Bolton’s 2020 memoir elicited a civil complaint from the Department of Justice in June 2020, seeking to block the publication of the book on national security grounds. The FBI then began investigating Bolton during the Biden administration, with an inquiry regarding the memoir and a 2021 investigation into a foreign hack of his personal email.

Bolton’s book dropped bombshells. He wrote that Trump had been open to repealing presidential term limits, praised the construction of concentration camps in China, and offered to drop investigations against authoritarian allies to win favor, and asked China to use its economic power to help him win a second election.

Trump “stunningly” alluded to China’s economic capability during a meeting with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, and started “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win”, Bolton claimed in his book. “He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome,” Bolton wrote. “I would print Trump’s exact words, but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”

Prosecutors alleged a pattern of mishandling classified material in diaries kept on a computer in his home in Bethesda, Maryland, and in his Washington DC office from April 2018 through August 2025. Material recovered in an August raid included briefings about weapons of mass destruction, intelligence on foreign adversaries’ leadership and foreign-policy relations.