“Madman Who Only Wanted to Sow Chaos and Wars.”

The comment was prompted by Bolton’s guilty plea in a case involving the unlawful handling of classified documents. Trump’s former ally, and later one of his harshest critics, pleaded guilty to unlawfully retaining information related to U.S. national security. According to investigators, Bolton kept at his home and office a large number of notes and documents connected to his work in the White House, used personal email and messaging apps to transmit classified materials, and also passed them to relatives who did not have clearance for classified information.

Bolton had been charged on 18 counts, but under a plea deal he admitted guilt to only one of them—presumably concerning the mention of classified information in his diary entries. Bolton agreed to pay a $2.25 million fine; the full sentence is to be announced on October 28, and he faces up to five years in prison.

Bolton served as Trump’s national security adviser from April 9, 2018, to September 10, 2019. After his dismissal, he became one of Trump’s most prominent critics and published The Room Where It Happened, a book that described the administration’s internal workings in detail and in far from positive terms. The charges against Bolton were filed before Trump returned to power, though after he had won the presidential election.