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President Trump’s former national security adviser has reached a deal to plead guilty to mishandling classified information.

Getting into it: The agreement, first reported by CNN, will see John Bolton plead guilty to a single felony count of illegally retaining sensitive national security material and pay a fine of $2.25 million. The deal, which still has to get signed off by a judge, puts the possible penalty anywhere from zero prison time up to five years, with the court making the final call.

Bolton is only admitting to having written sensitive national security details into his private diaries from his time in the administration, not to sharing them, nor to anything involving his book. Sources said the deal pins no fault on his 2020 memoir, and Bolton is expected to continue to maintain that he never removed marked classified documents from government offices and that nothing classified appeared in the book, while still taking responsibility for his actions.

The original case was far broader. Bolton was indicted on 18 counts under the Espionage Act for routing more than a thousand pages of diary-style notes, some stamped top secret, through his personal email and a chat app to his wife and daughter, neither of whom had clearance, as he worked on his memoir. When the FBI searched his Maryland home last summer, agents came across documents bearing classified markings. Had he taken this to trial and lost, he would have been looking at decades behind bars. The probe picked up steam after Iran-linked hackers broke into his email account and at one point taunted him with a message warning of “the biggest scandal since Hillary’s emails.”

This all comes as Bolton, a longtime foreign-policy hawk who served as national security adviser in 2018 and 2019 before publishing a memoir that branded Trump unfit for office, has remained a thorn in the president’s side, even criticizing Trump’s handling of the war on Iran despite having spent years pushing for regime change there.

Trump had for years demanded Bolton be jailed over the book, and while a guilty plea delivers a measure of that, the fine-without-prison outcome echoes the 2015 case of former CIA director David Petraeus, who similarly pleaded guilty to one retention count over sharing his diaries.