Donald Trump Indicted on 7 Charges Over Classified Documents

VIVA – Donald Trump has just become the first former president in American history to face federal criminal charges. Federal prosecutors have charged Donald Trump with illegally retaining national security or espionage documents and obstructing government efforts to recover them after he stepped down from the White House. 

The exact nature of the indictment, filed in federal district court in Miami, is unclear because it remains under seal and the justice department had no immediate comment.

Trump confirmed the indictment on his Truth Social social media platform on Thursday afternoon, shortly after his lawyers received an email from prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith that outlined the charges and summoned the former president to surrender himself to authorities in Miami next Tuesday.

The charges listed in the summons included: willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document, corruptly concealing a document, concealing a document in a federal investigation, engaging in a scheme to conceal and false statements, people familiar with the matter said.

Trump lawyer Jim Trusty confirmed that prosecutors had listed seven charges on the summons paper. Trusty said he had not seen a copy of the indictment but added he was hopeful that it might be unsealed before Trump makes his first appearance in court.

If Trump is found guilty, he faces a maximum sentence of 100 years in prison. However, the judge can also impose the lightest sentence, which is no jail time at all.

From his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, Trump denounced the charges in a series of posts on Truth Social. "I never thought that anything like this could happen to a former President of the United States," Trump said, adding: "I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!" 

The former president was said to be resigned to the fact that he would probably be indicted after prosecutors impaneled a new grand jury in Florida to take evidence in the case last month, which his advisers saw as a sign that the case had been moved from Washington for its final stages.

The criminal allegations in the Mar-a-Lago documents case deepen the legal risks for Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, after he was indicted earlier this year on state charges in New York by a Manhattan district attorney for his role in bribing an adult film star. 

Trump also remains under criminal investigation for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. 

For more than a year, prosecutors have been examining whether Trump knowingly kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he left office as president and took steps to hide those documents after the justice department issued a warrant to return them.

The criminal investigation began back in February when the National Archives issued a referral to the justice department after finding more than 100 classified documents mixed with presidential records in 15 boxes returned by Trump.

At issue was the volume and sensitivity of the classified material in the boxes. According to estimates provided to Trump's lawyers at the time, the 15 boxes contained more than 100 documents, over 700 pages, potentially involving national security. 

The discovery poses a problem for the department because Trump is no longer authorized to keep such documents after he leaves office and officials are increasingly concerned that Trump may have further classified documents that are also national security material.

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22 November 2024