Donald Trump is in his most serious legal trouble yet
IT IS NOT every day that a former American president faces federal indictment. Donald Trump became the first to earn this ignominious distinction on June 9th when the Department of Justice (DoJ) unveiled an array of federal charges, the culmination of a 16-month investigation into the removal of classified documents from the White House after Mr Trump left Washington, DC, in January 2021.
The details of the indictment were unsealed in a 49-page document. The allegations are stunning. Mr Trump, prosecutors say, stored sensitive documents—including those concerning matters of national security—in boxes in a remarkably haphazard and irresponsible way. They were found strewn in various corners of Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s Florida estate, including a shower stall, a bathroom, an office, a bedroom and—most ostentatiously—the stage of a ballroom “in which events and gatherings took place”. Mr Trump’s lawyers had maintained the documents were all held in a storage room.
The documents were seized last August, when investigators from the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago to retrieve highly classified documents Mr Trump had not returned, despite a series of requests. The extraordinary action suggests that Mr Trump’s hubris may be to blame for his new headache. An important defence Mr Trump offered at the time—that he had the power, as president, to declassify the documents by fiat—is at odds with an audio recording from 2021, obtained by prosecutors, in which he seems to acknowledge that some files in his hands were still classified. “This totally wins my case, you know… Except it is like, highly confidential… Secret. This is secret information,” he told two writers working on a book about an aide. Mr Trump seemed to understand the situation clearly: “As president”, he said, “I could have declassified… Now I can’t.”
2023-06-09 15:42:55
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