Former President Donald Trump was indicted on charges of retaining classified government documents after leaving the White House. The indictment was unsealed on Monday, and Trump has been summoned to appear in court in Miami on Tuesday.
The indictment alleges that Trump took classified documents with him when he left the White House in January 2021. The documents included national security briefings, intelligence reports, and other classified materials. Trump is accused of storing the documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence, a private club in Florida.
The indictment is the latest legal development in Trump’s post-presidency. He is also facing a number of civil lawsuits, including one alleging that he incited the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Several Trump advisers confirmed the charges. Trump, who is the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said he has been summoned to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday at 3 p.m.
A seven-count indictment has been filed in federal court naming the former president as a criminal defendant, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a case that has yet to be unsealed.
The charges include illegal retention of government secrets, obstruction of justice and conspiracy, according to people familiar with the matter.
It is the second time Trump has been criminally charged since March, when he was indicted in state court in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments from 2016.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing in connection with the classified documents. He has said that he took the documents with him for “convenience” and that he never intended to keep them.
“I have been indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax,” Trump posted on social media site Truth Social. He claimed he was being treated unfairly. “I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States,” he said in a screed that ended: “I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!”
Trump is the only former president ever charged with a crime. He is currently seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
A spokesman for special counsel Jack Smith, who has been running the investigation since November, declined to comment.
The charges cap a high-stakes investigation that began in early 2022 and slowly built steam over the summer until FBI agents conducted a court-ordered search of Trump’s home in early August, when they discovered 103 classified documents, even after Trump’s advisers had claimed they had conducted a diligent search in June for such papers and handed over all they could find.
In the months since that raid, investigators have been gathering evidence to determine whether the former president deliberately set out to obstruct law-enforcement efforts to recover the top-secret material at his Florida home and private club.
Much of the investigation centered around the actions of Trump and his closest advisers following a May subpoena from the government for the return of all documents with classified markings. Witness and videotape evidence gathered by the FBI indicated that Trump may have sought to keep documents, despite having turned over some material to authorities in response to the subpoena.
In November, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith to serve as special counsel and take charge of the Mar-a-Lago case, saying that Trump’s announced candidacy for the presidency and President Biden’s likely reelection bid meant there should be another layer of independence for the investigations involving Trump.
A separate special counsel, Robert Hur, has been appointed to investigate how a much smaller number of classified documents were taken to Biden’s home and office. Trump has claimed that he should not be charged because Biden’s conduct was worse, but to date the known evidence against the former president appears to dwarf the facts of the Biden case.