The Justice Department did not immediately confirm the indictment, but two people familiar with the situation who are not authorized to discuss it publicly told the agency that the indictment included seven criminal charges.
A person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press that prosecutors contacted Trump’s lawyer shortly before he announced on the “Truth Social” platform that he had been charged.
The New York Times said that it is the first time in American history that a former president has faced federal charges, which puts the country in an exceptional position, because Trump is not only a former president but also the most likely candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to confront the current president. Joe Biden.
Within 20 minutes of his announcement, Trump, who said he was scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday afternoon, began fundraising for his 2024 presidential campaign.
He said in a video, “I am an innocent man!” He repeated his familiar line that the investigation was a “witch hunt”.
The case adds to the heightened legal risk for Trump, who has already been charged in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that could also lead to criminal charges.
The accusation pits Trump against Attorney General Merrick Garland’s motto “that no one, including the former commander-in-chief, should be held above the law.”
The indictment builds on a months-long investigation by Special Counsel Jack Smith into whether Trump broke the law by keeping hundreds of documents marked secret at his residence in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and whether the former president took steps to To impede government efforts to recover documents.
The prosecution says that Trump transferred about 300 secret documents to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, including about 100 documents that were seized by the FBI last August during a house search, which confirms the seriousness of the Justice Department investigation.
Trump and his team have always considered the Special Counsel’s investigation much more dangerous politically and legally than the New York case, and his team has been preparing for the repercussions of the investigation since Trump was told that he was being targeted, because it is not a matter of whether charges will be brought, but rather when they will be made.
It remains unclear the consequences of the political accusations on Trump, but it has spurred millions of dollars in contributions from angry supporters and has not hurt Trump in the polls.
The indictment, and the legal battle that follows, will put Trump back in the spotlight, diverting attention away from other candidates trying to build momentum in the 2024 presidential race.
Trump insisted that he had the right to keep the aforementioned documents when he left the White House, and also claimed without evidence that he had declassified them.
The case is a landmark for the Justice Department, which has investigated Trump for years as president and private citizen, but has never before charged him with a crime.
Garland was appointed by current US President Joe Biden, who is seeking re-election, in 2024.
The former president has long sought to exploit mounting legal troubles for his political advantage, complaining on social media and at public events that Democratic prosecutors are pushing cases to hurt his 2024 campaign.
And Trump will likely count on it again, reviving his long-running allegations that the Justice Department, which during his presidency investigated whether his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia, was somehow being used as a weapon against him.
In contrast to the other investigations he faces, legal experts including Trump’s former attorney general see the Mar-a-Lago investigation as one of the most likely to lead to indictment, and one in which the evidence appears to be in favor of the government.
Court records, made public last year, showed that federal investigators believed they had potential evidence of a crime including retaining national defense information, destroying government records and obstructing the investigation.
The Department of Justice collected additional evidence and obtained grand jury testimony from people close to Trump, including his attorney.
Evidence mounted for weeks of imminent indictment, including a June 5 meeting between Trump’s lawyers and Justice Department officials. After that meeting, Trump said on social media that he expected to be indicted, even as he insisted he did nothing wrong.
Trump’s legal troubles extend far beyond the New York indictment and the classified documents case.
A separate investigation is under way and is focusing on efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The attorney general in Fulton County, Georgia, is investigating Trump over alleged efforts to sabotage the 2020 election in that state.
Trump is accused of having taken with him, when he left the White House, in early 2021, entire boxes of official documents, including defense documents classified as “top secret” and that he had refused to return them for safekeeping as required by law when those in charge of the archives asked him to do so, in violation of federal laws. .
The Justice Department said Trump and his attorneys repeatedly resisted efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration to recover the documents before returning 15 boxes of records in January 2022, including about 184 documents that officials said had secret markings on them.