According to Michael Torina who was then chief inspector of the Secret Service, Bolden's assignment was routine and "we aren't making anything of it or providing any biographical matter, as is the same for any other agent.
[12][14] Bolden stated that two weeks earlier, prior to leaving for Washington, D.C. to attend an in-service training, he mentioned to a fellow agent that he would try to testify before the Warren Commission.
[8][12] He told the media: "I wanted to, and I still intend to, tell the commission about the laxity and nonchalant attitude of secret service agents handling the protection of the President.
"[12] Bolden charged that agents drank heavily before and after assignments guarding Kennedy in Washington and at his summer home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, that they missed their work shifts or reported to them "half drunk", and that they used official Secret Service cars to transport female companions or to visit bars.
[12][14] Edward Hanrahan, the then United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, issued a statement that described Bolden's allegations as "fantastic" and said: "The accuracy of these charges should be judged by the fact that the man who made them was silent from 1961 until after he was arrested..."[14] Newspaper reports indicated that the Warren Commission was made aware of Bolden's allegations and quoted an unnamed member of the Commission as stating: "It would appear that he is trying to get off the hook by making such charges now.
"[17] Rankin then interrupted his questioning of Rowley to state: "I think the record should show, Mr. Chairman, that we were never advised that he wanted to testify, nor had we any inquiry or anything about the matter, until after we learned about it in the newspapers.
[17] In response to Rankin's questioning, Rowley answered that Bolden's indictment was the first time he could remember that a criminal complaint was lodged against a Secret Service agent.
Secret Service agent Maurice G. Martineau, the first witness for the prosecution, testified that Spagnoli complained to him in a telephone call that the government was attempting to entrap him.
"[26] Acknowledging Bolden's apology, Hanrahan told the media: "The verdict completely rejects the outrageous charges made by the defendant and confirms the public's belief in the absolute integrity of the U.S. Secret Service.
[27] While his appeal was pending, Bolden was employed in Chicago by the Ingersoll Products Division of the Borg-Warner Corporation as an assembly line inspector of government ordered helmets and canteens.
[28] At Ingersoll, he was credited with starting a collection among fellow employees that raised enough money to send 75,000 cigarettes to American military forces in South Vietnam.
[13] In a decision issued December 29, 1965, Judges John Simpson Hastings, Winfred George Knoch, and Luther Merritt Swygert for the Seventh Circuit Court upheld Bolden's conviction and denied a retrial.
[13] The Court wrote that they found no merit to his claim that he had not received an impartial trial under Perry, and that his opinion to the deliberating jurors as to what the evidence showed could not be equated with personal bias.
[13] Addressing the issue of perjury that was at the core of Bolden's appeal, the Seventh Circuit Court noted what Spagnoli had testified at both trials, and said he had not actually perjured himself about his source of income.
[13] The Court noted that Spagnoli's "livelihood was clearly a collateral matter bearing upon his credibility" and that they did not believe "the jury's overall appraisal of this witness would have been substantially affected by the knowledge that he was being less than forthright concerning his source of income.
"[34] Due to Fensterwald's article and a subsequent in-depth account by journalist Edwin Black in the November 1975 issue of Chicago Independent magazine, more of Bolden's story became known.
[36] According to Bolden, the Chicago Secret Service office had received word from the FBI on Wednesday, October 30, 1963 that an attempt on the President's life would be made on Saturday, November 2.
[36] As James W. Douglass writes based on his 2003 interview with Bolden: "Martineau told the agents the FBI had learned from an informant that four snipers planned to shoot Kennedy with high-powered rifles.
"[37] Vallee had recently gotten a job on the third floor of the IPP Litho-Plate warehouse on 625 West Jackson, overlooking where the President's limousine would have to make a slow, left-hand turn en route to the football stadium.
But because two members of the suspected sniper team remained at large, the Chicago Secret Service warned the White House about the still-unresolved security situation.
[36] On March 21, 1970, Sherman Skolnick appeared on an FM radio program with Ted Weber of WTMX and stated that Bolden was falsely imprisoned to prevent him from revealing the fact that there had been a plot to kill Kennedy in Chicago.
[39] Skolnick's key contention was that the Warren Commission had turned over documents to the National Archives, to be held in secret for 75 years, which showed among other things a connection between Thomas Arthur Vallee and Lee Harvey Oswald.
He cited his many months tracking down and scrutinizing federal, state, and local documents; plus his dozens of interviews, including with Vallee, Skolnick, and with two named Secret Service agents (other than Bolden) working in the Chicago office in 1963.
"[44] It said that Secret Service offices in Chicago and Miami failed to relay to the Dallas region two separate threats by individuals, the first by Vallee and the second by Joseph A. Milteer, to assassinate Kennedy with high-powered rifles in early November 1963.
The questionable authenticity of the Bolden account notwithstanding, the committee believed the Secret Service failed to make appropriate use of the information supplied it by the Chicago threat in early November 1963.
He was interviewed for Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann's 2005 book Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK.
[48] Author James W. Douglass interviewed Bolden seven times between 1998 and 2004, and devoted a chapter to the Chicago plot in his book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.
[54] Reviewing the memoir for The Washington Post, critic Bruce Watson called it "a shocking story of injustice", sometimes marred by "plodding prose and drab dialogue".
In the "Life Sentences" episode, President Kennedy turns to Bolden as a sounding board during the crisis surrounding the 1962 desegregation of the University of Mississippi.
[citation needed] The character Eben Boldt in Target Lancer, a crime fiction novel by Max Allan Collins, is based on Abraham Bolden's role in an assassination attempt against John F. Kennedy in Chicago.