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Former President Donald Trump has consistently shown his desire to see critics probed, applying pressure on the Justice Department to prosecute ex FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

"We can't delay further, it's killing our reputation and trustworthiness," the president wrote recently in a social media post.

"They impeached me, and indicted me (five times!)" he said, mentioning the four criminal cases he encountered after leaving the White House in 2021 and James's civil case.

Each have since been charged, in situations that many specialists have stated seem to be politically motivated and challenging to succeed in legal proceedings.

But the latest charges against a presidential opponent, ex national security adviser John Bolton, differ significantly, legal experts and ex-prosecutors say.

"I would say, contrasting Bolton's charges to James' is like comparing apples to oranges," said Mark Lesko, a former federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of New York.

This Details of the Case

Bolton has been criminally indicted on federal charges pertaining to the supposed mishandling of classified information. Since leaving the White House in 2019, he has become a outspoken Trump critic, going so far as to call him "stunningly uninformed" and unsuitable for office in his memoir.

Experts contend that while there may be political reasons to go after Bolton, the methods used to obtain an indictment and the proof compiled against him indicate a possibly more substantial legal argument than the Justice Department presented against Comey.

"These actions that's being claimed is simultaneously more serious and seems to have taken place over a considerable period of time," commented Carissa Byrne Hessick, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

During his tenure as Trump's national security adviser, and following his 2019 White House exit, prosecutors claimed that Bolton placed the nation at risk by wrongfully keeping and sending classified information to relatives using insecure means, including AOL. Some of the documents were labeled top secret.

The charge states that at a certain time a hacker accessed to Bolton's system where documents were kept and sent an apparent threat to cause "the biggest controversy since Hillary [Clinton]'s emails were leaked".

Bolton entered a not guilty plea during a court appearance on recently to eighteen distinct counts of improperly handling classified information.

Retribution or a Strong Legal Argument?

The timing of his indictment - arriving on the heels of allegations against Comey - has renewed questions about political pressure on the justice system.

Trump once implied Bolton should be in jail, and called him a "sleazebag". Bolton, for his role, wrote a publication about his time in the Trump government that was sharply negative of the leader.

"There's no question that the schedule of this charge, when paired with additional cases, has prompted doubts about the strength of these allegations, and why these charges are being brought at this time," stated Jamil Jaffer, founder and executive director of the National Security Institute.

Nevertheless, he continued, "should the DOJ is able to demonstrate the facts stated and demonstrate the information is correctly classified, his conduct may very well have broken the statute".

Charging such a high-ranking figure for improperly handling sensitive materials is "rare" but not without precedent, said Carrie Cordero, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

"Situations that involve classified information pose challenges to prosecute, but they may and are brought against equally junior and senior personnel, from occasionally," she said.

Parallels to Investigations into Trump and President

Trump similarly faced charges of improperly storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and hindering their return, but that case was ultimately thrown out by a court official and voided by his re-election as leader.

A independent investigator additionally found that former President Joe Biden wrongfully stored classified documents from his period as vice president, but did not prosecute him.

Bolton's case shares characteristics to Biden's classified documents issues, said Mr Lesko, who also held a senior national security position at the Justice Department.

Rigorous procedures regulate the management of classified documents. To win a guilty verdict, the government must prove that Bolton knew the material he was sending was restricted, and he had to intentionally transfer it to someone not entitled to receive it.

"Due to the classified character of the information at question in this case, we don't have a great deal of details about the reasons the government contends elements like the diary entries and the additional material he shared by electronic message, and the reason there were restricted," said Mr Jaffer.

A Increasingly Conventional Legal Action

The process by which the DOJ brought this legal action will be under scrutiny, after Trump publicly expressed his wish to see his critics charged and several of those indictments came to fruition.

But Mr Lesko indicated in Bolton's situation, prosecutors seem to have followed protocol.

"The Bolton case and eventually the charge seemed to have followed the standard procedure including the regulations and standards within the Department of Justice," he stated.

Unlike Comey's brief, two-page charge, Bolton's was a increasingly "traditional" document that "clearly outlines the particulars concerning the circumstances and situation in this instance," Mr Lesko said.

"It appears fairly consistent with a series of cases... where public servants improperly handled and shared sensitive information."