Overview

• Federal prosecutors met this weekend to finalize potential charges, weighing a fast criminal complaint versus seeking a grand jury indictment next week.
• Court-approved searches on August 22 at Bolton’s Bethesda residence and Washington office seized documents labeled secret, confidential and classified, as well as computers, phones and storage drives.
• Now-unsealed filings describe items referencing weapons of mass destruction, “allied strikes,” and folders labeled “Trump I–IV,” according to inventories reported in court records.
• A heavily redacted affidavit includes a section titled “Hack of Bolton’s AOL Account by Foreign Entity,” with sources saying intelligence collected on a foreign government helped prompt the inquiry.
• Acting U.S. Attorney Kelly Hayes has told colleagues there is a reasonable basis to charge, while Bolton’s lawyer Abbe Lowell says he did nothing improper and DOJ has declined public comment.