U.S. prosecutors have unsealed an indictment against Former President Donald Trump on Friday, accusing him of risking some of the country’s most sensitive security secrets with his handling of unclassified documents after leaving the White House in 2021.
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.
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Trump is due to make a first court appearance in the case in a Miami court on Tuesday, a day before his 77th birthday.
According to the indictment, the documents include some of the most sensitive U.S. military secrets, including information on the U.S. nuclear program and potential domestic vulnerabilities in the event of an attack.
One document concerned a foreign country’s support of terrorism against U.S. interests.
Materials came from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies, the indictment said.
Prosecutors said Trump showed another person a Defence 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.
During an interview with the FBI on May 26, 2022, 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.
The indictment includes photographs of Trump’s boxes on a ballroom stage, in a club bathroom, and in a storage room, where some were laying 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.
Prosecutors said the unauthorized 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.
(Editor: Oloyede Oworu)
