Former U.S. president Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Manchester, N.H. on April 27. A grand jury has charged him with a total of seven counts, according to two people familiar with the indictment.SOPHIE PARK/The New York Times News Service
Donald Trump illegally stashed hundreds of classified documents on highly sensitive military secrets, including nuclear weapons, at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office and repeatedly obstructed government efforts to get them back, a federal criminal indictment unsealed Friday alleges.
The indictment, which details 37 criminal charges the former president will soon face, accuses him of taking 337 secret papers to his Florida mansion and social club, and keeping them on a ballroom stage, in a bathroom shower and a basement storage room.
On two occasions, Mr. Trump is accused of pulling out classified documents and showing them to people who did not have security clearances. When the FBI tried to recover the papers, the indictment charges, Mr. Trump orchestrated a scheme to deceive them and his own lawyers in order to keep the files.
The charges, laid by a Florida grand jury at the behest of special counsel Jack Smith, include willful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice and corruptly concealing documents. One of Mr. Trump’s aides, Waltine (Walt) Nauta, is charged with helping the alleged obstruction and lying to the FBI about it.
Mr. Trump is expected to turn himself in on Tuesday at 3 p.m. at a Miami courthouse to be formally charged.
Mr. Smith said he “will seek a speedy trial” in the case. “Our laws that protect national defence information are critical to the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced,” he told reporters at the Department of Justice. “We have one set of laws in this country that apply to everyone.”
The charges represent a major escalation in the former president’s legal troubles, which already include a separate state-level criminal case in New York involving a hush-money payment to a porn star and investigations into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
They are sure to be central to the 2024 presidential campaign, in which Mr. Trump is the leading contender for the Republican nomination, leaving the country on uncharted legal and constitutional ground as no previous president has ever been under criminal indictment.
On Friday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Smith “deranged” and maintained that he had done nothing wrong. “There was no crime, except for what the DOJ and FBI have been doing against me for years,” the former president wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Mr. Trump took a wide range of classified documents, packed into boxes with his other papers, to Mar-a-Lago, according to the indictment. These included information on “defence and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”
Photographs included in the indictment showed the boxes piled up in various locations around the estate, which is also a private club with hundreds of members and staffers regularly coming and going. One photo showed several boxes tipped over and classified documents spilled onto the floor, including one marked for sharing with Canada and other members of the Five Eyes intelligence network.
The FBI only discovered that Mr. Trump had kept the documents during a tussle between him and the National Archives, which spent a year trying to get him to return some of his presidential records. Mr. Trump ultimately handed over 197 classified documents to the archives, followed by 38 more to the FBI after a subpoena.
But, the indictment says, the former president tried to hide 102 more documents by having Mr. Nauta bring the boxes to Mr. Trump’s bedroom so he could pull the documents before his lawyers found them and turned them over to the FBI. These papers were only discovered in August of last year when the FBI returned with a search warrant.
According to notes by one of the lawyers, Mr. Trump said the attorney should take the documents back to his hotel room and “if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.”
On one occasion, the former president showed a classified military planning document for attacking a foreign country to several people at his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., the indictment says. “This is secret information,” he said, according to a tape of the conversation. “Look at this.”
In another episode at Bedminster, according to the indictment, he showed a sensitive military planning document to an official with one of his campaign groups but told him not to get too close.
There is nothing stopping Mr. Trump from running for or serving as president while under indictment or even after a conviction, the most serious of which could entail up to 20 years in prison. He might try to challenge the constitutionality of indicting a former president.
Mr. Trump is also fighting a separate set of charges in New York related to efforts to hide a US$130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to ensure that she did not talk before the 2016 election about an extramarital affair she says she had with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Smith is conducting a separate investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 re-election loss to Joe Biden, which culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Prosecutors in Atlanta are mulling state-level charges over the same thing.
A career prosecutor who most recently worked on the Kosovo war-crime tribunal at The Hague, Mr. Smith was brought in last year by Attorney-General Merrick Garland to put the investigation at arm’s length from the Biden administration. Mr. Garland appointed a separate special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate Mr. Biden, who turned over 20 classified documents he had in his houses and private office.
Mr. Trump made political hay in the 2016 election over his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, using a private e-mail server when she was secretary of state. In that case, the FBI chided Ms. Clinton for being reckless but ultimately decided not to lay charges when the e-mails turned out to be mostly routine.