Former U.S. president Donald Trump will appear in a Miami courtroom Tuesday on dozens of federal charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified materials after he left the White House, a historic moment for the United States and its Justice Department.
Trump arrived in Miami on Monday ahead of Tuesday’s arraignment at 3 p.m. Eastern, where he is set to surrender to authorities. He is expected to plead not guilty to 37 criminal counts detailed in an explosive indictment that was unsealed on Friday.
The appearance will mark the second time in three months that Trump will face a judge on criminal charges, after he was arraigned in April in Manhattan.
Unlike those charges involving hush money payments to cover up an alleged affair, the federal charges are considered much more serious, with prosecutors alleging Trump endangered national security by holding onto top-secret information and failing to properly secure it. Some of the charges, filed under the U.S. Espionage Act, carry the prospect of a significant prison sentence.
After his court appearance, Trump will return to New Jersey, where he’s scheduled a press event to publicly respond to the charges. He’ll also be holding a private fundraiser.
Trump has said there are no circumstances “whatsoever” under which he would leave the 2024 presidential race, where he’s been dominating the Republican primary — even if he is convicted.
He has maintained his innocence in the case and has called on his supporters to protest outside the Miami courthouse.
Similar calls for protests at his Manhattan arraignment were met with little enthusiasm. But there are concerns Tuesday will be different amid Republican attacks on the Justice Department, which has never before indicted a former U.S. president and is being accused by Trump supporters of political bias.
Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, a staunch Trump supporter, noted ominously over the weekend that if prosecutors “want to get to President Trump,” they’re “going to have to go through me, and 75 million Americans just like me. And most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.”
Miami police chief Manuel A. Morales said Monday that downtown could see anywhere from a few thousand up to 50,000 protesters. He said the city would be diverting traffic and possibly blocking streets depending on crowd size.
“Make no mistake about it,” Morales said. “We are taking this event extremely serious. We know there is a potential of things taking a turn for the worse but that’s not the Miami way.”
Of the 37 charges facing Trump, 31 counts involve the willful retention of national defence information. Other charges include conspiracy to commit obstruction and false statements.
The indictment alleges Trump intentionally retained hundreds of classified documents that he took with him from the White House to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, after leaving the White House in January 2021.
Documents kept by Trump allegedly included information on U.S. and foreign countries’ defence and weapons capabilities, U.S. nuclear programs, U.S. vulnerabilities to potential military attacks, and plans for possible retaliation in response to foreign attacks, according to the indictment.
At least one document kept at Mar-a-Lago was meant only for the intelligence agencies of the Five Eyes alliance of the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
Prosecutors say Trump, on at least two occasions, showed classified materials to guests at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club and resort who did not have proper security clearances, including a Pentagon “attack plan” on a foreign country.
The information, if exposed, could have put at risk members of the military, confidential human sources and intelligence collection methods, prosecutors said.
Walt Nauta, a former aide to Trump accused of conspiring with his then-boss to hide the sought-after materials from law enforcement and even Trump’s own lawyers, is expected to also appear in court on Tuesday to answer the six charges against him.
The indictment said Nauta and other aides, at Trump’s direction, repeatedly moved boxes to different rooms around the Mar-a-Lago resort — including a ballroom and bathroom, and later Trump’s personal quarters — and later to Bedminster as lawyers worked to comply with an FBI subpoena for the documents.
The investigation into Trump’s withholding of materials, which began in May 2021 when they were discovered to be missing, spilled into public view last summer when the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago.
Some fellow Republicans have sought to press the case that Trump is being treated unfairly, citing the Justice Department’s decision in 2016 to not charge Democrat Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified information through a private email server she relied on as secretary of state. But those arguments overlook that FBI investigators did not find any evidence that Clinton or her aides had willfully broken laws regarding classified information or had obstructed the investigation.
The Justice Department earlier this month informed former vice-president Mike Pence that it would not bring charges over the presence of classified documents in his Indiana home. A separate Justice Department special counsel investigation into the discovery of classified records at a home and office of President Joe Biden continues, though as in the Clinton case, no evidence of obstruction or intentional law-breaking has surfaced. In the Biden and Pence cases, both men and their lawyers quickly returned the documents when their whereabouts became known.
Trump’s own former attorney general, William Barr, offered a grim assessment of Trump’s predicament, saying on Fox News that Trump had no right to hold onto such sensitive records.
“If even half of it is true,” Barr said of the allegations, “then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a pretty — it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning. And this idea of presenting Trump as a victim here — a victim of a witch hunt is ridiculous.”
— with files from the Associated Press