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The Department of Justice announced this week that former national security adviser John Bolton has been indicted on 18 criminal counts — eight counts for transmission of national defense information and ten counts for unlawful retention. This is not a garden-variety bureaucratic slap on the wrist; it is a serious indictment returned by a federal grand jury that accuses a one-time senior official of jeopardizing our country’s secrets.
Prosecutors say Bolton transmitted classified material using personal online accounts and messaging apps and that agents later recovered marked documents at his Maryland residence and Washington office. The charging papers allege he shared more than a thousand pages of diary-like notes with family members and others while preparing his post-White House memoir, conduct the DOJ says violated federal law.
Americans remember Bolton as a hawkish, headline-chasing Washington insider who turned on the president who appointed him and then wrote a tell-all book. That same book prompted past legal fights with the government, and now prosecutors say the dispute goes far beyond politics into clear-cut mishandling of classified intelligence.
Conservatives should be blunt: national security is not a partisan football. If a former official — especially one who publicly gnashed his teeth about policy and then leaked sensitive material to private channels — broke the law, the Justice Department was right to act. We believe in the rule of law and in protecting American lives and sources above cable-news grandstanding.
The indictment alleges the material included intelligence about future attacks, foreign adversaries, and diplomatic relations — the very kinds of things that, if exposed improperly, can cost lives or hamstring our operatives overseas. That kind of conduct, intentional or careless, cannot be waved off as mere politics; it is a national-security failure that deserves scrutiny and accountability.
Predictably, Bolton and his allies cried politically motivated persecution, while some in the media rushed to paint this as retribution because he criticized President Trump. Bolton himself called the indictment weaponization of the Justice Department, and former President Trump dismissed him in plain terms. Those claims will be litigated, but rhetoric should not eclipse facts when classified material is at stake.
Let the courts run their course, but Americans should demand equal justice and ironclad defenses for our national secrets. Washington’s cocktail-party class cannot be allowed to hoard access to classified information and then casually leak it when it suits their book deals or vanity. Our priority must always be American security, not protecting insider elites who treat classified material like fodder for memoirs.
