Opposing Donald Trump is a perilous business, but working for him can be equally as dangerous. That’s one lesson from Thursday’s indictment of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton for mishandling classified documents.
A federal grand jury in Maryland indicted Mr. Bolton on eight counts of transmitting national defense information and 10 counts of retaining such information.
The charges relate to the contemporaneous diary notes Mr. Bolton took during his time in the Trump White House. They allege that Mr. Bolton wrote diary entries and then transmitted those on eight occasions to “Individual 1” and “Individual 2,” who are his wife and daughter. Neither had clearance to handle classified material, though the indictment makes no claim that they mishandled it.
Mr. Bolton is likely to claim that he had every right to keep a diary based on his memory to write a book, “The Room Where It Happened.” Jimmy Carter’s NSC adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote extensive journal entries that informed his memoir, “Power and Principle.”
The indictment makes much of the fact that the information Mr. Bolton is accused of mishandling didn’t appear in his book after his draft was reviewed by the White House. But the review process exists to safeguard national secrets, and Mr. Bolton subjected himself to it. Prosecutors will have to prove Mr. Bolton knew his diary notes contained national secrets rather than being recollections that would be subject to review before becoming public.
Prosecutors also make much of the detail that one of Mr. Bolton’s personal accounts was hacked by Iran. But Mr. Bolton disclosed that to the FBI and worked closely with the bureau as it sought to counter the Iranian effort to assassinate Mr. Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. There is no evidence in the indictment that Iran used information in the emails to harm the U.S. Tehran wanted to kill Mr. Bolton, and Mr. Trump pulled his protective detail this year.
Mr. Bolton said in a statement Thursday evening that “My book was reviewed and approved by the appropriate, experienced career clearance officials. When my e-mail was hacked in 2021, the FBI was made fully aware. In four years of the prior administration, after these reviews, no charges were ever filed. Then came Trump 2 who embodies what Joseph Stalin’s head of secret police once said, ‘You show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.’”
There’s little doubt that the underlying motivation for this prosecution is retribution. The President has targeted Mr. Bolton at least since 2020 when Mr. Trump called for his prosecution after Mr. Bolton wrote his book.
“He released massive amounts of classified, and confidential, but classified information. That’s illegal and you go to jail for that,” Mr. Trump said at the time. Mr. Bolton’s book had been reviewed and cleared for publication by Ellen Knight, the White House official then in charge of vetting such books. Mr. Trump was furious, and White House aides spent hours with Ms. Knight, a classification expert, pressuring her to say classified information had been used in the book—to no avail.
The Biden Justice Department didn’t pursue the case, but the Trump FBI raided Mr. Bolton’s office and home in August. Mr. Bolton’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said then that “an objective and thorough review will show nothing inappropriate was stored or kept by Amb. Bolton.” He added that “these are the kinds of ordinary records . . . that would be kept by a 40-year career official.”
The 76-year-old Mr. Bolton has held top posts at the State and Justice departments, and he was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations as well as national security adviser.
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The press will add Mr. Bolton to the President’s revenge prosecution list with former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. But the latter two were part of concerted efforts to defeat or prosecute Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump recruited Mr. Bolton to work for him and cast him aside over policy disagreements. The lesson is that if you work for the President, he then sours on you and you criticize him, you are not safe.
One irony of the Bolton indictment is that Mr. Trump was indicted for mishandling classified documents after his first term. The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and allegedly found highly classified documents. We argued at the time that this was a bad road for Democrats to go down, but Mr. Trump was rescued by a judge who dismissed the case and ultimately by his re-election.
Mr. Bolton will get his day in court, and we look forward to his defense. In our experience he is a patriot who would do nothing to compromise national security. He never leaked classified information to us. If Mr. Bolton had praised Mr. Trump in his book, it’s safe to say he wouldn’t have been indicted.
