John Bolton spent four years telling America he was the most serious man in the Trump White House. He was the hawk, the grown-up, the man who knew how to keep a secret.

Now he's asking a federal judge to keep him out of prison, and he's sent a stack of 135 letters to help.

Bolton pleaded guilty in June to willfully retaining national defense information. Prosecutors say that for 17 months, the former National Security Advisor copied classified material he learned on the job into personal "diary" entries. He then sent them to his wife and daughter, neither of whom was cleared to see them, while he worked on his memoir. The entries went through his personal email. Prosecutors say a hacker believed to be working for Iran got into that account, and that Bolton didn't tell investigators what was in it.

The Justice Department wants five years in federal prison. "Defendant Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States," prosecutors wrote. "He has exposed his country to harm." They also wrote: "The only conceivable explanation for Mr. Bolton's brazen conduct is that he thought he was above the law."

Bolton's lawyers want probation, and their 62-page memo asks the judge for that in every way it can.

"For five decades John Bolton has lived an exemplary life," it begins, "one dedicated to public service, family, honor, and love of country." Attached are 141 pages of letters vouching for his character. The memo says the diaries were an effort to create "a clear record for history," and "not an effort to subvert U.S. National Security."

Then the memo asks the judge to spare Bolton from prison because the Bureau of Prisons supposedly can't protect him from Iran.

It's the same Iran whose hackers, prosecutors say, got into the email account where he kept those diary entries. Bolton spent years calling for regime change in Tehran. Now he's using the threat from Tehran as his argument for staying home.

His lawyers also want the judge to treat him like Sandy Berger, the Clinton adviser who walked out of the National Archives with classified documents in his clothes and got probation. They also point to David Petraeus, who gave classified notebooks to his biographer and mistress and also got probation. Bolton's best argument for his own sentence is that two other men got away with it.

Prosecutors don't accept the honest-mistake story. "Given his decades of experience with classified information," they wrote, "Mr. Bolton's actions demonstrate aggravated, willful conduct." Bolton knew the rules better than almost anyone in Washington. He'd helped write some of them.

He has already won one round. The original indictment had 18 counts, and he pleaded to one. The deal caps his prison time at five years. He'll pay a $2.25 million fine and give up his government retirement pay.

After he left the Trump White House, Bolton went on television to call Donald Trump unfit and a danger to national security. He testified, sold a bestselling book, and became the "principled conservative" on cable news.

According to federal prosecutors, he was sending classified material to his family's inboxes for 17 months the whole time.

Robert Hur declined to charge Joe Biden partly because a jury would see him as a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." Bolton has no such excuse. Nobody believes the man who ran the National Security Council forgot how classified information works.

Judge Theodore Chuang will sentence him in Maryland federal court on December 4.