By Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Justice Department is expected to ask a grand jury on Thursday to indict President Donald Trump’s former U.S. national security adviser John Bolton, a person familiar with the matter said.
The possible indictment comes two months after FBI agents found documents labeled as “confidential” in Bolton’s Washington, D.C. office that referenced weapons of mass destruction, unsealed court records show. It was not immediately clear whether the charges prosecutors would seek were related to those documents.
If the grand jury decides to indict Bolton, it would mark the third time in recent weeks that the Justice Department has secured criminal charges against one of the Republican president’s critics.
Bolton’s lawyer Abbe Lowell did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Lowell has previously denied that Bolton engaged in wrongdoing and said that the records the FBI seized were ordinary documents for a former government official to possess.
TRUMP VOWS RETRIBUTION
Trump, who campaigned for the presidency on a vow of retribution after facing a slew of legal woes once his first term in the White House ended in 2021, has dispensed with decades-long norms designed to insulate federal law enforcement from political pressures.
In recent months, he has actively pushed Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department to bring charges against his perceived adversaries, even driving out a prosecutor he deemed to be moving too slowly in doing so.
Bolton served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations as well as White House national security adviser during Trump’s first term before emerging as one of the president’s most vocal critics. He described Trump as unfit to be president in a memoir he released last year.
The possible charges against Bolton come shortly after the Justice Department indicted FBI director James Comey, who investigated Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who previously brought a civil fraud case against Trump and his family real estate company.
FBI SEARCHED BOLTON’S HOME
Senior leaders at the U.S. Justice Department had been pushing for swift charges against Bolton, despite initial concern from some line prosecutors in Maryland, as well as attorneys in the National Security Division who felt more investigation was needed and feared the case was being rushed, two people familiar with the matter previously told Reuters.
Prosecutors more recently concluded they were comfortable proceeding after taking more time to review the evidence and worked over the weekend to prepare the case, one of those sources added.
FBI agents conducted a search of Bolton’s home and office in August, seeking evidence of possible violations of the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime to remove, retain or transmit national defense records, according to partially unsealed search warrants filed in federal court.
Trump himself was previously indicted on Espionage Act violations, after he transported classified records to his Florida home after departing the White House in 2021 and refused repeated requests by the government to return them. Trump had pleaded not guilty and that case was dropped after Trump won reelection in November 2024.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Additional reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Noeleen Walder)
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