Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Donald Trump said on Friday that he has been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida residence, igniting a federal prosecution that is arguably the most perilous of multiple legal threats against the former US President who is trying to reclaim the White House in 2024, the media reported.
He declared in a video, “I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!”, and repeated his familiar refrain that the investigation against him is a witch hunt.
The Justice Department did not immediately confirm his indictment publicly, but the media reported the indictment included seven criminal counts.
Prosecutors contacted Trump’s lawyers shortly before he announced on his Truth Social platform that he had been indicted.
It’s the Justice Department’s first case against a former president, which upends a Republican presidential primary that Trump is currently dominating, and any felony charges would raise the prospect of a yearslong prison sentence.
Within minutes of his announcement, Trump started fundraising for his 2024 presidential campaign.
The indictment came after a long investigation by special counsel Jack Smith into whether Trump broke the law by holding onto hundreds of documents marked classified at his Palm Beach property, Mar-a-Lago, and whether the ex-President obstructed the government’s efforts to recover the records.
Prosecutors said that Trump took roughly 300 classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, including a hundred that were seized by the FBI in August 2022 underscored the gravity of the Justice Department’s investigation.
But it is unclear what the immediate and long-term political consequences will be for Trump, whose first indictment spurred millions of dollars in contributions from angry supporters and which didn’t damage him in the polls. The indictment and the legal fight that follows will throw Trump back into the spotlight, sucking attention away from the other Republican candidates trying to stay afloat in the 2024 presidential race.
Trump insisted that he was entitled to keep the classified documents when he left the White House and has also claimed, without evidence, that he had declassified them.
The case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years as president and private citizen but had never before charged him with a crime. He sought to use the mounting legal troubles to his political advantage, complaining on social media and at public events that the cases are being driven by Democratic prosecutors out to hurt his 2024 election campaign.
After a June 5 meeting between his lawyers and Justice Department officials, Trump said on social media that he anticipated he could be charged, even as he insisted that he had done nothing wrong.
But his legal troubles extend beyond the New York indictment and classified documents case.
The special counsel has a separate probe underway focused on efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And the district attorney in Georgia’s Fulton County is investigating Trump over alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election in that state.
The classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, along with thousands of other unclassified government records, were taken from the White House to the Florida club after Trump left office in January 2021.
The Justice Department said Trump and his lawyers repeatedly resisted efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration to get the documents back. After months of back-and-forth, Trump representatives returned 15 boxes of records in January 2022, including about 184 documents that officials said had classified markings on them.
In August 2022, the FBI agents removed 33 boxes containing classified records, including top-secret documents stashed in a storage room and desk drawer and commingled with personal belongings. Some records were so sensitive that investigators needed upgraded security clearances to review them, the Justice Department said.
Investigators quickly zeroed in on whether Trump, who for four years as president expressed disdain for the FBI and Justice Department, had sought to obstruct the inquiry by refusing to turn over all the requested documents. The focus on obstruction was reminiscent of the special counsel investigation Trump faced as president when prosecutors examined whether Trump illegally tried to thwart the Russia probe, including by firing his FBI director.