9th June, 2023
* Two Trump lawyers resign
U.S. prosecutors unsealed a 37-count indictment against former President Donald Trump on Friday, accusing him of risking some of the country’s most sensitive security secrets after leaving the White House in 2021.
The indictment includes photographs of Trump’s boxes on a ballroom stage, in a club bathroom and in a storage room, where some laid on the floor.
Trump kept the documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and his golf club in New Jersey.
Mar-a-Lago hosted tens of thousands of guests at more than 150 events during the time they were there, the indictment alleges.
Trump is alleged to have mishandled classified documents that included information about the secretive U.S. nuclear program and potential domestic vulnerabilities in the event of an attack, the federal indictment said.
Trump also discussed with lawyers the possibility of lying to government officials seeking to recover the documents; stored some of the documents around a toilet, and moved boxes of them around his Mar-a-Lago Florida resort home to prevent them from being found, the charges said.
“Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Trump said to one of his attorneys, according to the 49-page indictment.
The Justice Department made the criminal charges public on a tumultuous day in which two of Trump’s lawyers quit the case.
The indictment charges Trump with 37 counts. A former aide, Walt Nauta, faces charges in the case as well.
Trump is due to make a first court appearance in the case in a Miami court on Tuesday, a day before his 77th birthday. Since Trump would serve any sentences concurrently if convicted, the maximum prison time he faces is 20 years for obstruction of justice, which carries the highest penalty.
U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the prosecution, said in a brief statement: “Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced.”
“We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everybody.”
He said as with any defendant, those accused were presumed innocent until proven guilty and he pledged to seek a speedy trial before a jury of citizens in Florida.
Trump has proclaimed his innocence in the case. After the charges were unsealed, he attacked Smith on social media.
“He is a Trump Hater – a deranged ‘psycho’ that shouldn’t be involved in any case having to do with ‘Justice,'” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Materials Trump took away came from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies, the indictment said.
One document concerned a foreign country’s support of terrorism against U.S. interests.
Prosecutors said Trump showed another person a Defense Department document described as a “plan of attack” against another country.
They said Trump conspired with Nauta to keep classified documents he had taken from the White House and hide them from a federal grand jury. Nauta, who worked for Trump at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, faces six counts in the case.
Nauta falsely told the FBI he did not know how some of the documents ended up in Trump’s suite at Mar-a-Lago, when in fact he had been involved in moving them there from a storage room, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors said the unauthorised disclosure of the classified documents could risk U.S. national security, foreign relations, and intelligence gathering.
The indictment of a former U.S. president on federal charges is unprecedented in American history and emerges at a time when Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination next year.
Trump’s support has held steady through many lawsuits and scandals but the charges laid out against him on Friday could give his Republican rivals in the presidential race ammunition to attack his record, especially on national security.
Investigators seized roughly 13,000 documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, nearly a year ago. One hundred were marked as classified, even though one of Trump’s lawyers had previously said all records with classified markings had been returned to the government.
Reported by Reuters via NAN