John Bolton, former adviser to Donald Trump, was indicted. The third major political opponent to be criminally targeted in recent weeks

A federal grand jury indicted former national security adviser John Bolton on Thursday, a senior US Justice Department official announced. Bolton was indicted in federal court in Maryland, where he lives and where prosecutors have been investigating whether he improperly retained classified material after his scandalous departure from the White House in the first Trump administration.

Bolton is the third prominent person to be indicted federally in the past month, after President Donald Trump called for the prosecution of those he considers his personal enemies. The other two political opponents of Trump who have been accused in recent weeks are the former director of the FBI, James Comey, and the attorney general of the state of New York, Letitia James, reports NBC News and Reuters and News.ro.

The FBI searched John Bolton's home in Maryland and his office in Washington, DC in August, looking for evidence of possible violations of the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the theft, retention or transmission of national defense documents, according to search warrants filed in federal court.

Bolton's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, argued that the former diplomat handled the documents properly.

Trump, who built his presidential campaign on a promise of revenge after facing a series of legal problems as his first term in the White House ends in 2021, has ignored decades-old rules designed to shield federal law enforcement from political pressure. In recent months, he has publicly pressured Attorney General Pam Bondi's Justice Department to file charges against his opponents and even removed a prosecutor he deemed too slow to do so.

Bolton was the US ambassador to the UN as well as the White House national security adviser during Trump's first term before becoming one of the president's most vocal critics. He described Trump as unfit for the presidency in a memoir published last year.

The charges against Bolton come shortly after the Justice Department indicted former FBI Director James Comey, who investigated Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who previously filed a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump and his family's real estate company.

Comey, whom Trump fired in 2017, is charged with making false statements to Congress and obstructing Congress. He pleaded not guilty.

James is charged with bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution. She has denied the charges and is scheduled to appear in federal court later this month.

What the FBI found in Bolton's home

From John Bolton's Maryland home, FBI agents seized two cell phones, documents from files labeled “Trump I-IV” and a file labeled “Statements and Reflections on Allied Attacks,” according to court documents.

They also found documents labeled “confidential” in his Washington, DC office, including documents referring to weapons of mass destruction, the US mission to the United Nations and other materials related to the US government's strategic communications, according to court documents.

Court documents also show that a foreign entity hacked Bolton's email account, although the details of the hack are not public.

Bolton's attorney previously said the documents seized by the FBI were ordinary documents that a former government official might have.

Trump himself has previously been charged with violating the Espionage Act for allegedly transporting classified documents to his Florida home after leaving the White House in 2021 and has refused repeated government requests to return them. Trump pleaded not guilty, and the case was dismissed after he won the election in November 2024.

The case against Bolton is being handled by federal prosecutors in Maryland. That institution is separately investigating Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California, a longtime critic of Trump, for possible mortgage fraud. Schiff denied the allegations and was not charged.

A problematic book for Trump

Bolton wrote a book in 2020, “The Room Where It Happened,” chronicling his tumultuous time as Trump's national security adviser. The 2020 book became problematic for Trump before it was even released during his first impeachment trial.

The case involved allegations that the president withheld military aid to Ukraine to force it to announce an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter. Bolton claimed in the book that Trump explicitly told him that was why he was withholding aid, a claim Trump denied.

Trump was acquitted in his Senate trial and demanded that Bolton be prosecuted after the publication of his book. “He leaked massive amounts of classified and confidential information. It's illegal and punishable by prison time,” Trump told Fox News in an interview at the time.

Bolton denied that the book contained classified information.

Court documents related to the search warrant show that the FBI had been investigating Bolton for years. According to the request, the agents questioned him eight times between October 2020 and June 2025, at his office.