Donald Trump has been indicted on seven charges—including a violation under the Espionage Act—for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago long after he left the White House, his lawyer said on Thursday night.
Trump reacted in predictable fashion to the news, which was delivered by prosecutors in an email, ranting about the “Boxes Hoax” on his social media platform Truth Social.
“I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.,” he wrote. “This is indeed a DARK DAY for the United States of America. We are a Country in serious and rapid Decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!”
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A spokesman for Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has been handling this investigation, declined to comment to The Daily Beast.
James Trusty, one of Trump's lead defense lawyers in this case, said on CNN that the team has not seen the actual indictment and might not until they show up at the federal courthouse next week.
But he said a summary sheet that accompanied the summons mentioned a number of criminal charges, including “willful retention of documents,” which is a violation of the Espionage Act, “conspiracy to obstruct” a law enforcement investigation, and making “false statements.”
None of those would be a surprise, but accusations of a conspiracy notably would mean that the feds discovered that someone—or several others—tried to help the former president allegedly commit a cover-up.
The Espionage Act is a 1917 law put in place to crack down on disloyal Americans and spies stealing secrets during wartime. “Willful retention of documents” is an element of 18 U.S.C. § 793, one of the statutes cited by the FBI when special agents searched Trump’s Palm Beach estate at Mar-a-Lago in August.
Federal law makes it illegal to have “unauthorized possession” of “information relating to the national defense” that could injure the country—and it would similarly violate the law to “willfully retain” the documents by failing to turn it over to the feds. The latter alone carries a hefty penalty of up to 10 years in prison, plus a fine.
Late Thursday night, Trusty expanded on the charges during an interview with conservative-friendly Fox News host Laura Ingraham, where he said Trump was in “initial shock” and that his team has only received a summary of the accusations. He counted “several types of obstruction, conspiracy, and false statements,” describing it as the special counsel throwing “everything and the kitchen sink” at the former president.
He also previewed aspects of Trump’s upcoming defense in court, posturing that “you can’t obstruct a non-crime” on the unsupported theory that as a former president, Trump had the unfettered power to handle the nation’s secrets however he wished.
“He could have had a party throwing stuff in a bonfire and it wouldn't have been obstruction,” Trusty said, curiously raising even more unanswered questions about what exactly Trump did with the records he repeatedly refused to turn over to the DOJ.
Trusty also explained how he and fellow defense lawyers made a last-ditch effort to convince Smith and his team to drop the threatening investigation—pushing the unsupported conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden himself was somehow behind the indictment.
“This was basically trying to appeal for somebody in that Praetorian guard to have a conscience,” Trusty said, comparing the team of assembled federal prosecutors to the feared elite bodyguards who once served Roman emperors.
During the interview, Trusty also signaled another potential defense: that the initial FBI raid violated the Constitution's Fourth Amendment right against unfair searches.
The unprecedented move to indict Trump—an investigation that was nearly two years in the making—marks the second time in the country’s history that an American president has been criminally charged after leaving office. The first time was in April, when the Manhattan District Attorney charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
It sent MAGA loyalists into hyperventilation mode; right-winger Mike Cernovich tweeted, “This is the JFK assassination all over again.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running against Trump for the GOP nomination for president, said he would pardon him in the unlikely event he is elected. Even Ron DeSantis, whose fight with Trump for the nomination has grown increasingly nasty, slammed prosecutors for being overly “zealous” in their pursuit of Trump.
The Mar-a-Lago case stems from a dispute Trump had with the bureaucrats at the National Archives and Records Administration, the historians who are tasked with preserving an account of each outgoing president. After leaving the White House, Trump initially refused to turn over records they requested. When he finally did, it was clear he’d been holding a number of documents with secret and top secret classification markings.
For months, Trump has been fighting to slow down the federal investigation. His attorneys successfully schemed to land a friendly judge in South Florida who briefly stopped the FBI from reviewing the evidence and later forced a massive document review that tied down the Department of Justice.
On top of the feds probing whether Trump broke the law for keeping classified documents, the Fulton County District Attorney in Atlanta is conducting a criminal inquiry over the way Trump intimidated an elections official there. Trump has repeatedly dismissed all these investigations as politically motivated and seems to be using his 2024 presidential run as cover.
Trump, who was twice impeached by Congress but spared conviction by Republicans in the Senate, is the first of the nation’s 46 presidents over 233 years to be criminally indicted after leaving office.
In a four-minute video taken in front of a painting of a former American president called “The Doctrine Of Monroe,” Trump repeatedly asserted his innocence and called the charges “warfare.”
“I am innocent, and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly,” he said.
In a speech that started in the third person and ripped into the American justice system, Trump dismissed the entire ordeal as nothing more than a baldfaced attempt to snatch away his spectacular return to the White House.
“It's election interference at the highest level,” he said. “They come after me, because now we're leading in the polls again by a lot—against Biden and against the Republicans, by a lot... they figured they way they're going to stop us is by using what's called ‘warfare.’ And that's what it is. This is warfare for the law. And we can’t let it happen. Our country is going to hell, and they come after Donald Trump, weaponizing the Justice Department.”
