Former president Donald Trump said Thursday night that he’s been charged by the Justice Department in connection with the discovery that hundreds of classified documents were taken to his Mar-a-Lago home after he left the White House — a widely anticipated but also seismic event in the nation’s political and legal history.
Several Trump advisers confirmed the charges. Trump said he has been summoned to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday at 3 p.m. A seven-count indictment has been filed in federal court naming the former president as a criminal defendant, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a case that has yet to be unsealed.
A spokesman for special counsel Jack Smith, who has been running the investigation since November, declined to comment.
Trump has long insisted he did nothing wrong, and accused investigators of pursuing him for political reasons.
The charges cap a high-stakes investigation that began in early 2022 and slowly built steam over the summer, until FBI agents conducted a court-ordered search of Trump’s home in early August which turned up 103 classified documents, even after Trump’s advisers had claimed they had conducted a diligent search in June for such papers and handed over all they could find.
In the months since that raid, investigators have been gathering evidence to determine whether the former president deliberately set out to obstruct law-enforcement efforts to recover the top-secret material at his Florida home and private club.
Much of the investigation centered around the actions of Trump and his closest advisers following a May subpoena from the government for the return of all documents with classified markings. Witness and videotape evidence gathered by the FBI indicated that Trump may have sought to keep documents, despite having turned over some material to authorities in response to the subpoena.
In November, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to take charge of the Mar-a-Lago case, saying that Trump’s announced candidacy for the presidency in 2024 and President Biden’s likely reelection bid meant there should be another layer of independence for the investigations involving Trump.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.
