A federal judge in Maryland has set a schedule for considering classified documents in the criminal case against John Bolton that is likely to push the former national security adviser’s trial into 2027.
Bolton, who was national security adviser during President Donald Trump’s first term but later became a vocal critic, was indicted last month on charges of mishandling classified and sensitive material. He has pleaded not guilty.
At a hearing Friday morning in U.S. District Court in Maryland, Judge Theodore D. Chuang pressed the Justice Department and Bolton’s defense team to work quickly, expressing frustration with the long runway requested by attorneys to find and review the classified information that prosecutors allege was mishandled.
“The government is moving as quickly as possible with the intelligence community,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Sullivan, a career prosecutor who heads the Maryland office’s national security division.
Cases involving classified materials typically take a long time to go to trial because the law governing the use of sensitive materials in court — the Classified Information Procedures Act — is complex and time consuming. Judges overseeing these cases often have to schedule far more hearings than in a typical case to ensure that every provision of the law is followed.
At Friday’s hearing, prosecutors and Bolton’s attorneys told the judge that this case has additional complicating factors that could slow the process. Unlike in other criminal investigations involving classified information, this one is not solely about possession of classified documents. Bolton is accused of including classified material in more than a thousand pages of private diary entries. Those must be evaluated by U.S. intelligence officials to determine how much classified information they include, the prosecutors said.
In addition, all relevant documents are being sent through a “filter team” to ensure they aren’t protected by attorney-client privilege because of previous litigation involving whether Bolton had used classified material in his book about his government service.
Further complicating matters, the classified materials must be reviewed by attorneys in a SCIF — Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — to ensure the involved information is protected.
A federal grand jury charged Bolton in October with 18 counts of transmitting or retaining national defense information. The charges each carry a maximum 10-year prison sentence should he be convicted.
The indictment alleges Bolton shared more than a thousand pages of “diary-like” updates detailing his work between 2018 and 2019 with two relatives who were assisting him in preparing the book he published in 2020.
Bolton sent those messages through a personal email account that was later hacked by someone U.S. authorities believe was linked to the government of Iran, the indictment says. Prosecutors also accused Bolton of printing and storing many of those records at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, which FBI agents searched earlier this year.
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