The acting U.S. Attorney in Maryland is moving forward quickly to seek criminal charges against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, according to two people familiar with the case.
A complaint or an indictment could come as early as next week, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters without authorization.
A grand jury in Maryland has been hearing evidence for several weeks related to claims that Bolton improperly kept classified national security information in his Maryland home. But the pace of the case has recently sped up, the two people said.
If Bolton is criminally charged as attorneys in the Maryland office expect, he would be the third of Trump’s perceived enemies to face federal prosecution under Trump’s Department of Justice in a matter of a few weeks.
If Bolton is criminally charged as attorneys in the Maryland office expect, he would be the third of Trump’s perceived enemies to face federal prosecution under Trump’s Department of Justice in a matter of a few weeks. Bolton, whom Trump fired from his first administration, has been a vocal critic of the president. His lawyer has said he did nothing improper.
Unlike the widespread resistance career prosecutors in Virginia have shown to Trump’s pressure campaign to charge former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, career prosecutors in Maryland consider charges against Bolton to have some factual merit, the people said.
Kelly Hayes, the acting U.S. Attorney for Maryland, has told Justice Department colleagues she believes there is a reasonable basis to pursue charges against Bolton, the people said.
In Virginia, the first U.S. attorney installed by Trump resigned under pressure after he pushed back against charging Comey and James. Both were indicted after Trump made his personal attorney, Lindsey Halligan, the top prosecutor in the commonwealth. She single-handedly presented evidence to grand jurors in both cases.
Ed Martin, who served briefly as Trump’s acting U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia and whom Trump has since named to head the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group, has met multiple times with Hayes to monitor the Bolton case.
According to one of the people familiar with the status of the case, Hayes and her team are weighing whether to file charges against Bolton in a rushed complaint — a court filing that would allow the office to lodge criminal allegations quickly and seek a grand jury indictment at a later date.
FBI agents conducted a surprise raid of Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Maryland, on Aug. 22 in what sources at the time said was a search for suspected classified records. The search warrant was based on information provided by the CIA and approved by a federal judge. On the same day of the search, FBI Director Kash Patel circulated a social media post on X that read: “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission.”
Bolton’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, has repeatedly said that documents with classified markings kept by Bolton dated back to the George W. Bush administration, when Bolton served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and would be typical of those kept by a long-time government employee.
“An objective and thorough review will show nothing inappropriate was stored or kept by Ambassador Bolton,” Lowell said in a statement last month. Neither Lowell nor the Justice Department immediately returned requests for comment on Friday. Last month, a judge unsealed a heavily redacted version of the affidavit of probable cause used by the FBI to support its search of Bolton’s home. Page 12 of the document has a heading titled “Hack of Bolton’s AOL Account by Foreign Entity.” That section is entirely blacked out. Two people familiar with the matter told MSNBC that the redacted section describes how the U.S. government discovered Bolton’s AOL emails during intelligence collection directed at that unnamed foreign government. What was found, they said, fueled an investigation into whether Bolton has mishandled classified information that began during the Biden administration. The sources said that the sensitivity of how the government came by those records was one factor that slowed the Bolton investigation. By moving forward, they said, the United States has now revealed to a foreign government that it has access to specific systems — a revelation, the sources said, that is likely more damaging to U.S. national security than any secret Bolton may have revealed. CORRECTION (Oct. 13, 2025, 3:30 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated when FBI agents raided John Bolton’s Maryland home. The raid occurred on Aug. 22, not Sept. 22.
Ken Dilanian is the justice and intelligence correspondent for MS NOW.
Carol Leonnig is a senior investigative reporter with MS NOW. Recommended
