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Ex-Trump Aide John Bolton Pleads Guilty In Classified Info Case; Bolton Sentencing Set For Oct. 28; Will Pay Fine And Could Face Jail; Vance: Watergate Would Be A "12-Hour News Story" Today; Vance On Nixon's Career: "It Kind Of Sounds Like J.D. Vance"; Texas Poised To Require That Students Study Bible Stories. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired June 26, 2026 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:00:00]

WOLF BLITZER, CNN CO-ANCHOR, THE SITUATION ROOM: And when the founder of CNN, Ted Turner, first hired me, I recalled. He told me not to include personal opinions on the news just reported fairly and accurately. That's something that I and everyone here at CNN, we continue to do every single day. Also honored last night, by the way, a former CNN colleague of mine, the Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, and actor Sam Waterston. I'm thankful to the freedom forum for its recognition and all the work it does. It's so important to uphold the First Amendment.

And to our viewers, thanks very much for joining us this morning. You can always keep up with us on social media @wolfblitzer and @pamelabrowncnn. We'll see you back here Monday morning, 10 am Eastern. Inside Politics with our friend and colleague, Dana Bash, starts right now.

DANA BASH, CNN HOST, INSIDE POLITICS: He was White House National Security Advisor, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and now John Bolton is a convicted felon.

I'm Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines at Inside Politics.

When you stop and think about it, it is really remarkable. John Bolton, a pillar of the Republican foreign policy establishment, pleaded guilty this morning to charges that he illegally retained sensitive national security information. Bolton was accused of keeping diary entries from his time serving as National Security Advisor during the first Trump administration.

Today's plea is a rare win for the Trump Justice Department in their attempts to go after President Trump's self-proclaimed enemies, but unlike some of the other DOJ efforts, there was a real crime here, real evidence against Bolton, pursued by an apolitical group of prosecutors.

CNN's Katelyn Polantz is live outside the federal courthouse in Maryland. Katelyn, I'm curious, what is -- what went on inside the courtroom, and what it was like when he made his plea? KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Dana, whenever John Bolton made his plea, there was something he said that he didn't have to say. When he said he was guilty, he then said, I'm sorry about it. That to the judge today. He's very likely to speak again when he's sentenced, but that was a moment where he was expressing remorse for what he did with classified information.

Keeping them in all kinds of unsecured ways, so insecure that the Iranians, or a hacker affiliated with the Iranian government, was able to get into his personal email account and look at notes he had wrote to himself, and that he was keeping for his own archives, personal archives at his home, and in his email, as he was working on a memoir about the Trump administration. After he left, all of it was information he was learning while he was the National Security Advisor to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.

The U.S. Attorney Kelly Hayes, she is the U.S. attorney for Maryland, so the top prosecutor here in this jurisdiction. She spoke at a press conference after she was also in the courtroom.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KELLY HAYES, U.S. ATTORNEY FOR THE DISTRICT OF MARYLAND: One of the reasons why there are so many safeguards protecting national defense information is so that this sensitive information does not fall into the hands of our enemies, and that is exactly what happened here. A cyber actor believed to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran, packed Mr. Bolton's personal email account and gained unauthorized access to some of the classified and national defense information in that account.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

POLANTZ: Dana, you said it was remarkable in court. It was indeed to see John Bolton in this situation, pleading guilty to a felony, taking responsibility, and saying it was wrong. Also, it was remarkable that there were, I counted, 20 different prosecutors from either the National Security Division of the Justice Department, the FBI, or from the U.S. attorney's office in Maryland, all in court to watch this plea.

The sentencing isn't until October, but at that time we're going to learn more about what happens, and I'm really going to be watching for how much prison time, if any, the Justice Department asks for the agreed upon issue here is that Bolton could face up to five years in prison. Obviously, he's not going to want that.

BASH: No, I would say so. The legal team representing John Bolton, what did they say?

POLANTZ: Well, Dana, there's a couple of things that they agreed to here in this plea, in addition to the sentencing term, Bolton is willing to give over $2.25 million. That represents what he was earning when he wrote that memoir about the Trump administration. That would be part of sentencing. The other thing he's able to agree to here is that he will give community service to help the Justice Department handle classified information appropriately, remediate issues that might arise. So, he's going to be helping the Trump administration for at least hundred hours as part of this plea deal.

[12:05:00]

I tried to ask him as he exited if Donald Trump, the president, would be in favor of that? He gave me a little smile, but he didn't say anything separately. His attorney, Abbe Lowell, put out a statement, and Abbe Lowell said that today Ambassador Bolton did what real leaders do. He took responsibility for a mistake he made, thereby saving the government resources to pursue a case that could expose additional sensitive information at a trial.

And then he contrasts Bolton to Donald Trump, and says Bolton, whose offense was only keeping a diary which contained classified information, kept a record to preserve history, but Donald Trump kept secrets to serve himself. Therefore, referring to Donald Trump being accused of his own set of charges related to classified documents, mishandling something that never went to trial, and that Trump has never been convicted on. Dana?

BASH: Katelyn, thank you so much for that reporting. Appreciate it. And I have a terrific group of reporters here at the table on this wonderful Friday. Hello, everyone. Jeff Mason, you've been covering the Trump White House, not just 2.0 but 1.0. What's your sense of the import and the impact of this plea this morning?

JEFF MASON, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, BLOOMBERG NEWS: Well, it's certainly one that President Trump is no doubt rejoicing about. I mean, the president is not a fan of John Bolton. He had him as a staff member for a little while, and then, of course, had a falling out, and Bolton turned on him quite publicly as well. So, the president, as we all know at this table has spent a good chunk of this 2.0 going after his perceived opponents and actual opponents and Bolton was one of them.

So, this is a feather in his Justice Department's cap in terms of actually making -- not only making good on but following up and finishing off, basically an opponent that President Trump did not like.

BASH: And as we said at the beginning, and we just need to keep underscoring this case, at least on its face, so far is quite different from other attempts at retribution against his perceived political enemies through the courts, just a little bit of proof to that. Listen to the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee about this earlier in the month.

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REP. JIM HIMES (D-CT): I'm not going to get into details, but I'm going to tell you that in this instance, John Bolton pleading guilty. First of all, that tells you that there was a there, there. In this case, there was -- there was, in my opinion, some pretty significant mishandling of classified information.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: Go ahead.

TIA MITCHELL, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, THE ATLANTA JOURNAL- CONSTITUTION: I was going to say multiple things can be true, right? So, in this case, there was a there, there, but that does not negate also the reality that we know President Trump has directed the Justice Department to go after his, you know, people that he perceives are no longer loyal to him, or people he's fallen out of favor with.

But I do also think it goes to show you that when there's there, there, it gets resolved in a way that I think there's no one saying poor John Bolton. If he did the crime, he does the time and he pays the fines, and he does the service, or whatever he needs to do to get right with the law.

The question is, are there people who are currently in the crosshairs of the Justice Department who don't deserve it, where there is not the proof, where there is not the justification for what they're facing.

BASH: Well, let's put up on the screen a list, a long list of the again president's perceived enemies who are in the legal and political crosshairs of the president. You, of course, saw this morning, John Bolton. James Comey is indicted again, Southern Poverty Law Center. The Comey and Letitia James, a different Comey case was dismissed as was one against Letitia James, and you have a long list of people under investigation, a long list of people whom the president wants to investigate, and only one dropped, and that is against Jerome Powell, which we'll talk about in a second.

ADAM HARRIS, CO-HOST, RADIO ATLANTIC: Yeah. And as Tia and Jeff were both saying, right, this case is functionally a little bit different than the rest of them. You saw Letitia James just on the -- on the screen there, where that case was thrown out because they said the special prosecutor was illegally -- illegally appointed, and the case sort of deteriorated from there.

You've seen other cases that have been brought on more sort of specious circumstantial evidence, but the fact that these -- there's this old saying, right, where you can sort of -- if you look hard enough, you can find something, and this wasn't one where they were looking very, very hard. It was to say that John Bolton has these classified documents. He's been in a leak.

There's been an attempted blackmail against him and he admitted. He said he shared these -- shared some information that he probably shouldn't have shared with his wife and his daughter. And so, justice in this case would be -- would seem to have been served. Of course, he's going to try to push not to have any of that prison time.

[12:10:00]

BASH: There are some new anecdotes from our friends over at The Times, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, their new book, Regime Change. And I just want to read a couple, and the first is about Jerome Powell. This is from the book. Trump said of Powell during a July staff meeting. What about that effing building? Can we stop it? Can we stop construction? I just want to bust his effing balls, f him.

And then the appetite to go after people who -- who he thinks are, you know, have gone sideways with him. He seems to be so strong, he even wants to go after people he doesn't remember their names. An example, I remember there was this lawyer who was in the administration who said the election was fair and there's no fraud. Who was he? Boris Epshteyn pulled out his phone and did a quick search. Oh, Chris Krebs, he said. Yeah, Chris Krebs, whatever happened to him? He was a bad one -- bad one. Take a look at him.

MASON: No notes. I mean, the president again has been on a retribution tour since his re-election campaign, and the thing about that is he also made very clear that that was what he was planning to do. I mean there is no surprise in terms of what he implemented as soon as he got into office.

I think in the first year there was some surprise at how quickly some people rolled over or didn't stand up to some of the pressure that the president and his administration were putting on institutions and some of his enemies, but this is not a surprise that he's done this. And Jerome Powell was absolutely at the top of that list, and ironically, continues to be, even though he is no longer the head of the central bank.

BASH: Yeah. Well, he said, I will be your retribution, but he's trying to be his own retribution in many, many ways. OK. Speaking of, imagine if Watergate never happened, at least then. Imagine if it happened now. Well, Vice President J.D. Vance is imagining that. We're going to tell you what he said. Plus, Democratic lawmakers are trying to make sense of the big wins for Democratic socialists in New York City. Does the party need new leadership, as some people are saying? Well, ask member of the U.S. Senate, Delaware Democrat Chris Coons.

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BASH: Vice President J.D. Vance has been splitting his time recently between negotiating the U.S.-Iran ceasefire deal and promoting his new book on his Catholic conversion. That book tour took an interesting turn yesterday when he made this comment at the Nixon Presidential Library.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

J.D. VANCE, VICE PRESIDENT: I'm actually fascinated by Nixon as a character in history. I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so. As I joked with Robert backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy. And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it's not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration. There is a parallel. I also just -- at a personal level, you know, OK, young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media. It kind of sounds like J.D. Vance.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: So much to unpack there with our panel. First of all, I think he's right that Watergate would be a quick story, but that's likely because there are so many other, oh my gosh, stories competing for attention, especially during the Trump years. And also, he is right that it was career people who work for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies who thought we have to do something to stop him, meaning Richard Nixon, because he's corrupt.

MITCHELL: Yeah. So, I mean, to me it was very interesting because I don't know if he's making the point he thinks he's making. Because at the end of the day, Watergate was about a robbery, that is -- it happened, right? It was about this conspiracy that went all the way up to the president, that happened, it's provable, it's proof. So, if you believe it's the deep state, or you want people to believe this conspiracy theory, you're the one feeding the lies and the misinformation, and that's what we see currently from the Trump administration.

He has done things, things are provable. He has faced investigations and allegations that are based in truth, but what he tells the people who are on his side is, don't believe that, just believe me, it's not, it's not true, it's a mirage. And our politics has changed in ways that unfortunately that works on people, and I think that has led to Trump and his allies. J.D. Vance can kind of move a certain segment of the population by saying don't believe what you see, just believe what we tell you.

HARRIS: Yeah. Just to say that it's right, it would be a 12-hour news story. Is to say that we've become so accustomed to corruption that we've become so accustomed to its illegality, right? This was destruction of evidence, it was, you know, the literally burglary, right? As you're talking, bribing the burglars, right?

[12:20:00]

So, there were -- there was a legality there, but the argument that it would be a 12 hour news story, say that, well. Like you said, right, we would have moved past it. It would have been something like a blip on the radar compared to the levels of corruption that we've seen in recent years.

MASON: Yeah. Honestly, it's surreal to me that we're debating Watergate in 2026, like it's just, why that's even a topic. What political benefit president -- Vice President Vance gets from some bringing that up. I'm not -- I'm not really sure who he's appealing to with that. But I will use it as an opportunity to note that it was pioneering work by two journalists that led to that story, not just being a 12-hour blip. And uncovering news and facts that were real and that did happen, and that you can't just brush away decades later.

MITCHELL: And I would just argue that relitigating the past, relitigating facts that happened to try to distort them into something else, is another kind of byproduct of this Trump era of politics. And I don't know if it's good for our politics, I don't know if it's good for the state of our democracy. But again, this is just kind of another example of what has happened in the age of Donald Trump.

BASH: The other element in this statement was that he compared himself to Richard Nixon. Obviously, the sort of wink and not implication is that Nixon went on to be president after he was vice president, although there was time in the middle there, but just any comparison to Richard Nixon is interesting.

HARRIS: It is. It's -- as Tia was saying, right, a sort of re- litigation of the past, where it is an attempt to say that, oh, these people in history who have done corrupt things. We've seen Andrew Jackson come back into the fold as someone who should be celebrated. We've seen presidents who have been in some ways shamed across the -- across the years for the things that they have done that have been unseemly. And yet, sort of to bring them back in and say, well, there were other things that they did too, and let's excuse this part of it and just think about the positive direction of their political career.

BASH: All right, everybody, stand by. Coming up, why one in ten public students in the United States could be required to read Bible stories and verses in school. We'll explain after a break.

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BASH: Bible stories and Bible verses could become required reading for more than 5 million public school students in Texas. The state's school board is scheduled to vote any moment now on an unprecedented measure, and that is again a school board meeting that is taking place. You see there in the corner of your screen as we speak. Now, if it passes, an approved reading list would go into effect for K through 12 students for the 2030 school year.

CNN senior national correspondent Ed Lavandera is following this from Dallas. Hi, Ed, good to see you. First of all, is it expected to pass? And if it does, will students learn about the Bible, or will they be learning from the Bible?

ED LAVANDERA, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's probably a little bit of both, because this is a curriculum that establishes the English literature and reading material that would be implemented starting at the kindergarten level, working its way all the way up to 12th grade and it evolves as the children would get older. So, it starts off, I think, on some level, we have a list there of some of the proposed amendments and reading material that is being considered. Starts off with stories about David and Goliath and then might get up to more straight readings from the Bible as they get into high school and that sort of thing.

So, it is definitely evolving. There's a great deal of contentiousness surrounding all of this. There has been hours and hours, hundreds of people who have testified for and against these -- this curriculum that is being considered by the State Board of Education here in Texas, a board that is dominated by Republicans. And that is why it's very likely that all of this curriculum will pass, but the debate around this has been incredibly intense this week.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RABBI DAVID SEGAL, FIELD ORGANIZER, RELIGIOUS ACTION CENTER OF REFORM JUDAISM: The First Amendment does not permit the state to anoint one religious tradition above all those. Texas students deserve an education that broadens their understanding of the world's religious tradition, rather than narrowing it. If religious texts are included, they should reflect the diversity of our society.

SUSAN PEREZ, FOUNDER, CITIZENS FOR EDUCATION REFORM: Our nation wasn't founded on all religions, and we don't need to apologize for that. We don't have to incorporate every religious belief in our history or in our literary works because our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LAVANDERA: Dana, it's not exactly clear when this board is going to take this vote. They have been debating several amendments, trying to go over the reading list, and Democrats trying to get some reading material taken off. Other Republicans trying to ensure that the material that they want to see on this list remain on that list. So, all of that contentiousness and debating is going on as we speak, but this vote is expected to take place today, Dana.

BASH: And Ed, this is part of a larger push by Texas Christian conservatives, right? And just last year, the state required the 10 Commandments to be displayed in all public-school classrooms.

LAVANDERA: Yeah. It really has been in the last few years, Christian conservatives here in Texas have felt very much emboldened and pushed for this. They have pushed a bill that required that allowed Christian chaplains.