Why John Bolton probably WON’T pay big if guilty in his documents case

John Bolton has pleaded “not guilty” on 18 counts of illegally hoarding or sending sensitive national-security information, charges that could bring decades in prison — and if the feds have the evidence they claim, the case seems open-and-shut.

Figuring out where justice lies is a bit tougher.

These charges, note, come from career Justice Department officials; if politics entered into this case, it was the Biden-era decision to stop pursuing it.

Let us note that Bolton, a former UN ambassador and national security adviser, has long been a friend of these pages. Yet if he truly used his AOL account to email classified info to his wife and daughter, they seemingly have him dead to rights.

Thing is, the public doesn’t get to know what’s beneath “classified” and “top secret” labels — and over-classification is a notorious problem in Washington, as Jim Bovard noted in these pages when it was President Donald Trump in Team Biden’s crosshairs.

Was Bolton just sharing his schedule with his family?

A larger complication: For long years before the Biden crew went after Trump, government bigwigs got away with outrageous conduct on this front, even as small fry suffered for lesser offenses.

Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger actually got caught smuggling classified documents (the only copies of at least some; it seemed he wanted to destroy embarrassing records) out of the National Archives in 2003; he wound up paying a $50,000 fine, plus two years’ probation and 100 hours of community service.

Gen. David Petraeus gave the mistress who was writing his biography access to secrets he’d improperly brought home; he got two years of probation plus a $100,000 fine in a plea deal that dropped charges to a misdemeanor — and lost his job as CIA director.

Hillary Clinton never faced prosecution for blatant malfeasance as secretary of state: She ran all her work emails (including tons of classified stuff) through a private account on an unsecured home server to ensure the government she worked for would have no record of her communications.

She didn’t even pay a price for destroying evidence (the server in question) after the feds told her to turn it over: It seems Washington somehow decided that having lost to Trump in 2016 was punishment enough for all her sins.

And of course Joe Biden skated on his own violations (docs he filched long before becoming president) — because the special counsel decided he was so senile, no jury was likely to convict him — while the case against Trump imploded after he won re-election last fall.

So our best guess is that Bolton, if convicted, will face something like the fine-plus-probation humiliation that Petraeus and Berger received.

Somehow, though, the nation needs a “reset” on the real rules here, so that wayward generals and secretaries of state pay a far lower price than lowly lieutenants.