Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who repeatedly declared that those violating the Espionage Act should be executed, has pleaded guilty today to committing such a violation.
The disgraced 77-year-old neoconservative warmonger faces a $2.25 million fine and 100 hours of community service after admitting to illegally transmitting and retaining classified information. He could also serve up to five years in federal prison.
Bolton, President Trump’s national security advisor from 2018 to 2019, was indicted on October 16 by a federal grand jury on 18 counts of mishandling classified material. The indictment alleges that from April 9, 2018, through at least August 22, 2025, Bolton shared over a thousand pages of classified national defense information with two unauthorized individuals—his wife and daughter, neither of whom had security clearances.
The documents included handwritten notes transcribed into word processing files and sent via commercial email services. Bolton also used personal AOL and Google accounts to transmit the classified material.
According to the indictment, a cyber actor believed to be associated with Iran hacked Bolton’s personal email account after he had previously emailed classified information to his family. Despite reporting the breach to federal authorities, Bolton did not disclose that the account contained classified secrets or that the information was sent through a non-governmental application.
Bolton collected the material for his memoir, The Room Where It Happened, which led to the revocation of his security clearance by then Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The Justice Department confirmed Bolton pleaded guilty to one count, resolving all 18 charges.
U.S. District Court Judge Theodore D. Chuang will sentence Bolton on October 28. The fine is nearly equal to the $2 million advance he received for his memoir.
Bolton has long advocated severe punishments for whistleblowers, including calling for life imprisonment or execution. He stated that Julian Assange should receive 176 years in prison and that Chelsea Manning—real name Bradley—should be “punished to the fullest extent possible.”
In a Fox News interview, Bolton said: “Snowden committed treason. He ought to be convicted of that and then he ought to swing from a tall oak tree.”
Bolton has also criticized President Trump for mishandling classified materials at Mar-a-Lago.
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald, who disclosed the NSA’s domestic surveillance program to Snowden, described Bolton’s guilty plea as “a level of karmic justice I didn’t know existed,” given Bolton’s decades-long advocacy for harsh penalties against whistleblowers.
Bolton’s history of warmongering includes advocating military action against Cuba and North Korea. He avoided combat duty in Vietnam by joining the Maryland National Guard after graduating from Yale University, stating: “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.”
In his book Surrender Is Not An Option, Bolton wrote that he concluded the Vietnam War was lost and made “the cold calculation that I wasn’t going to waste time on futile struggle.”
Almost 10,000 Americans died in Vietnam from 1970 through April 30, 1975.