Andrew McCabe on Bolton Indictment: It Will Be Hard for Bolton to Argue that He Didn‘t Know He Was Mishandling Classified Information

TAPPER: “Andy, sources told CNN prosecutors that Bolton shared this highly classified information with his wife and his daughter over email. In the indictment, it’s just referred to as Person 1 and Person 2 who are related to him, but we’ve been told it’s his wife and daughter. You held a leadership role in the FBI. You know how serious classified information is regarded, although there are also over-classification issues in the government. What’s your reaction to the indictment?”

McCabe: “Yeah, Jake. So, the indictment is very serious and it stands out to me from the recent investigations that we have seen of the, you know, poor storage, unauthorized storage of classified information, most notably the investigation of Vice President Pence and investigation of Vice President Biden. In both of those cases, what prosecutors lacked was any indication, any evidence of intent to hold that material in an unauthorized place. And there’s a lot of circumstances that support those findings. In this case, the opposite seems to be true. At least the allegations are that Mr. Bolton was frequently taking, essentially, his summaries of his day’s work, much of which was classified material, and he, from his position, was certainly in a position to know that that, the substance of that material was classified, and sending it to Person 1 and Person 2 over unauthorized systems, open email systems like AOL and Google, things like that. So, that allegation alone imparts a great deal of intent. It’s going to be hard for Mr. Bolton to argue that those transmissions were inadvertent or that he didn’t know that he was mishandling classified or national defense information. So that alone elevates the seriousness of this case and the strength of the prosecution far beyond anything we’ve seen recently in the instances of Vice President Pence and President Biden.”