The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition, defines “hubris” as “overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance.”
When you look it up in the 6th Edition, you’ll see a picture of John Bolton.
In literature, hubris precedes an epic downfall. On Thursday, Bolton was indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland on eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of unlawful retention of national defense information.
If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of ten years in prison per count.
Bolton was President Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019. “As National Security Advisor, Bolton had access to some of the U.S. government’s most sensitive and closely guarded national security secrets,” the indictment states. To obtain the top secret security clearance necessary to have access to highly classified information, “Bolton signed numerous non-disclosure agreements” acknowledging that unauthorized disclosure could cause “damage or irreparable injury to the United States.”
Nonetheless, during his tenure as national security advisor, “on a regular basis,” Bolton wrote and shared “more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities as the national security adviser — including information relating to the national defense which was classified up to the TOP SECRET/SCI [Sensitive Compartmented Information] level — with two unauthorized individuals” identified in the indictment as “Individuals 1 and 2.”
He did this by transcribing his handwritten notes of the day’s activities into word processing documents, then sending them by commercial messaging and email services to “Individuals 1 and 2,” who are described in the indictment as members of Bolton’s family, both unauthorized to receive classified information.
Call the dictionary editors: the definition of hubris is the national security advisor sending classified future book highlights through AOL and Gmail accounts.
Two years after leaving government, Bolton reported that his personal email was hacked, apparently by Iran. He did not report that he had transmitted classified information through that account.
Who would be crazy enough to send sensitive and classified information through insecure servers all over the internet and think it would not be discovered?
“Bolton, a real dope,” is how President Trump described him in an interview with Tucker Carlson some time ago, also calling him “stupid,” a “nutjob” and “a moron.”
Trump said Bolton was useful for negotiations because he was such a well-known warmonger that if he was brought to a meeting with hostile foreign leaders, they would think the U.S. was ready to go to war with them.
Bolton was in the George W. Bush administration, serving as undersecretary of State, when he pushed hard for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on wildly exaggerated evidence that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
In a 2023 interview with NPR, Bolton said, “Knowing everything I know now, I would do exactly the same thing.”
Throw away the key just for that.
NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Bolton if “there was perhaps some hubris in the idea that the United States could get in quickly to that country and get out again.”
Bolton pontificated on hubris versus prudence, said “terrorists were still around” after 9/11, and denied that anyone had lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
“It depends on how you define a lie,” Bolton told NPR.
Trump fired Bolton in September 2019, citing “disagreements” on foreign policy.
In a recorded interview with Washington Post reporter and author Bob Woodward, available in an audiobook titled “The Trump Tapes,” Trump describes how Bolton derailed promising talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by going on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in April 2018 and unexpectedly declaring that North Korea should follow the “Libya model.”
Trump said Kim Jong Un took that to mean regime change through gruesome torture and murder. Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi met his end with a bayonet inserted into his end. “As soon as he mentioned that, the relationship went bad,” Trump told the Post.
In addition to the charges for sending the nation’s secrets as AOL email attachments, Bolton is charged with retaining classified information in his home after he left government service. It can’t be written off as an oversight. While he was national security adviser, he had an “SCIF” — a U.S. government-installed Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — in his home in Maryland. After he was fired in September 2019, U.S. government personnel “retrieved all classified equipment and marked classified documents that were stored in Bolton’s home SCIF,” according to the indictment. “During that visit, Bolton was told that he could no longer store classified information at his home.”
But he did. He printed copies of the thousands of Word documents he had sent to his family and stored them on devices at his home. According to the indictment, he also retained classified “documents, writings and notes relating to the national defense.”
The indictment states that one day after Bolton left the White House, his literary agent contacted a publisher with a pitch for a book about his time as national security advisor that would include “direct quotes from all parties based on contemporaneous notes.”
The book was published in June 2020. A legal dispute over the inclusion of classified material in it — the indictment states that the 18 counts relate to other material that was not in the book — was settled with an agreement that Bolton would return all materials containing classified information that were in his possession to the government.
Federal authorities executed a search of Bolton’s home in August and removed binders and boxes of documents as well as two iPhones, four computers and two USB drives.
The investigation into Bolton’s mishandling of classified information began in 2020, under the first Trump administration. It was dropped during the Biden administration. FBI Director Kash Patel reopened it.
Despite the noisy accusations that Trump is pursuing political enemies, the facts suggest something else: “Overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance.”
Hubris, and a downfall.
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