The FBI has accused John Bolton of transmitting classified information using personal online accounts.
Former US National Security Adviser John Bolton has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified information.
A federal grand jury in Maryland indicted Bolton on Thursday on eight counts of transmitting and ten counts of unlawfully retaining national defense information.
“The FBI’s investigation revealed that John Bolton allegedly transmitted top secret information using personal online accounts and retained said documents in his house in direct violation of federal law,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.
“Anyone who threatens our national security will be held accountable,” he added.
According to the Justice Department, the documents contained intelligence on “future attacks, foreign adversaries, and foreign-policy relations,” as well as information about informants and “intelligence on an adversary’s leaders.”
Justice Department Statements Regarding Indictment of Former National Security Advisor John Bolton https://t.co/lrNzDZqzvi @FBIBaltimore pic.twitter.com/yLcEqSjkLF
— FBI (@FBI) October 16, 2025
Federal agents searched Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Maryland, and his office in Washington, DC, earlier this summer. Prosecutors alleged that he retained classified records even after the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at his residence was decommissioned following his departure from Trump’s cabinet.
Bolton served as US ambassador to the UN during George W. Bush’s presidency and as national security adviser between 2018 and 2019 during Trump’s first term in office.
Bolton’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, denied that her client broke the law. “These charges stem from portions of Ambassador Bolton’s personal diaries over his 45-year career — records that are unclassified, shared only with his immediate family, and known to the FBI as far back as 2021,” Lowell said in a statement.
The former diplomat has become increasingly critical of Trump in recent years, arguing that he is unfit to be president. Trump, for his part, has called Bolton a “whack job” and “one of the dumbest people in government.”
Hillary Clinton’s staff used BleachBit to delete emails from her private server, but Clinton herself did not operate the software.
During her tenure as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton used a private email server for official communications.
In 2015, after a congressional subpoena was issued for her emails, her staff used BleachBit, a free digital cleaning tool, to permanently delete archived emails from the server.
The FBI confirmed that BleachBit was used to wipe the server, making the deleted emails unrecoverable.
Clinton did not personally use BleachBit, but the action was taken by her IT team or aides under her direction.
Some of her mobile devices were also physically destroyed by aides using hammers, according to FBI reports.
The use of BleachBit became a political flashpoint during the 2016 election, often cited in debates about transparency and accountability.
BleachBit itself is a legitimate tool used for secure data deletion—its invocation in this case was part of a broader controversy over email handling and record retention.
https://www.bleachbit.org/
https://privazer.com/en/
Glary Utilities
https://www.glarysoft.com/
Every dog has its day…this time it’s a Schnauzer.
It looks like it was a lot easier to get the Left-wing leaning FBI to indict Bolton for a trumped-up charge than it was to get them to charge Comey for gross corruption.