Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said Thursday that former National Security Adviser John Bolton will struggle to convince any court that he’s a victim of retribution by President Donald Trump.
A federal grand jury in Maryland indicted Bolton on 18 counts for allegedly mishandling classified information. In an appearance on “The Evening Edit,” Jarrett said Bolton’s legal defense mirrors James Comey’s old argument that Trump pursued “selective and vindictive prosecution.” Jarrett said that such a claim rarely succeeds.
“His defense, I think, is going to be a page out of James Comey’s playbook, that he’s a victim of retribution by Donald Trump, that this is all selective and vindictive prosecution,” Jarrett said. “The problem with that is that under the law, it’s an uphill climb for anybody who tries to ply that defense in a pretrial motion to dismiss the case because the burden is on the defendant to prove with clear evidence that there was an unjustified motive for the prosecution.”
Jarrett added that a grand jury has already determined there was probable cause to indict.
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“If the evidence is there and it’s justified, that’s not a defense. And remember, a grand jury has found that it’s justified by probable cause in issuing the indictment,” Jarrett said. “The irony, of course, is Trump was really the victim of historic weaponization of the law, politically driven prosecution.”
Prosecutors say a hacker tied to Iran breached Bolton’s email after he left office and accessed classified material he had shared with two others. Bolton now faces eight counts of transmitting national defense information and 10 counts of unlawfully retaining it.
FBI agents found documents marked “confidential” and “secret,” including material referencing weapons of mass destruction, during an Aug. 22 raid on Bolton’s Washington, D.C. office, according to a September court filing. Bolton’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said the materials had been cleared years earlier as part of the pre-publication review for Bolton’s book.
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