Trump Indicted in Classified Documents Case and Faces Federal Charges - The New York Times 6/10/23, 15:58

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/us/politics/trump-indictment-
charges-documents-justice-department.html

Justice Department Charges Trump in

Documents Case
The indictment, handed up by a grand jury in Miami, is the first time a former
U.S. president has faced federal charges.

By Alan Feuer, Maggie Haberman, William K. Rashbaum and Ben Protess

June 9, 2023

The Justice Department on Thursday took the legally and politically momentous
step of lodging federal criminal charges against former President Donald J.
Trump, accusing him of mishandling classified documents he kept upon leaving
office and then obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them.

Mr. Trump confirmed on his social media platform that he had been indicted. The
charges against him include willfully retaining national defense secrets in
violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and a conspiracy to
obstruct justice, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The Justice Department made no comment on the indictment Thursday and did
not immediately make the document public.

The indictment, handed up by a grand jury in Federal District Court in Miami, is

the first time a former president has faced federal charges. It puts the nation in
an extraordinary position, given Mr. Trump’s status not only as a onetime

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Trump Indicted in Classified Documents Case and Faces Federal Charges - The New York Times 6/10/23, 15:58

commander in chief but also as the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican
presidential nomination to face President Biden, whose administration will now
be seeking to convict his potential rival of multiple felonies.

Mr. Trump is expected to surrender to the authorities on Tuesday, according to a

person close to him and his own post on his social media platform, Truth Social.

“The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been
indicted,” Mr. Trump wrote, in one of several posts around 7 p.m. after he was
notified of the charges.

The former president added that he was scheduled to be arraigned in federal

court in Miami at 3 p.m. on Tuesday. In a video he released later on Truth Social,
Mr. Trump declared: “I’m an innocent man. I’m an innocent person.”

F.B.I. agents enforcing a subpoena seized about 100 classified documents from Mar-a-

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Trump Indicted in Classified Documents Case and Faces Federal Charges - The New York Times 6/10/23, 15:58

Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida residence, last August. U.S. Department of Justice

A lawyer for Mr. Trump, Jim Trusty, told CNN on Thursday night that the former
president’s legal team had not been shown the indictment itself but that the
court summons gave some details on the charges. He mentioned alleged
Espionage Act violations, false-statement charges and “several obstruction-
based” charges, including offenses under Section 1512, which criminalizes
witness tampering or other means of obstructing an official effort.

Mr. Trusty said he believed there was also a conspiracy charge. But he added:
“This is not biblically accurate, because I’m not looking at a charging document.
I’m looking at a summary sheet.” He also said the Trump legal team had not
been told of anyone else being indicted.

The indictment, filed by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, came about
two months after local prosecutors in New York filed more than 30 felony
charges against Mr. Trump in a case connected to a hush money payment made
to a porn actress in advance of the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump remains under investigation by Mr. Smith’s office for his wide-
ranging efforts to retain power after his election loss in 2020, and how those
efforts led to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. He is
also being scrutinized for potential election interference by the district
attorney’s office in Fulton County, Ga.

A senior Biden administration official said the White House had learned of the
indictment from news reports.

Public filings in the documents case have painted a picture of Mr. Trump as
spending more than a year consistently stonewalling efforts by both the
National Archives and Records Administration and the Justice Department to
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Trump Indicted in Classified Documents Case and Faces Federal Charges - The New York Times 6/10/23, 15:58

retrieve the trove of hundreds of sensitive government records that he took with
him from the White House and mostly kept at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and
residence in Florida.

While the nature of a few of the documents found in Mr. Trump’s possession is
known — he had held onto letters from the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un,
for example — it remains unclear what other classified materials were found at
Mar-a-Lago and moreover what, if any, damage to national security his
possession of them caused.

Mr. Trump has claimed — without evidence — that he declassified all the files taken to
Mar-a-Lago. Saul Martinez for The New York Times

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Trump Indicted in Classified Documents Case and Faces Federal Charges - The New York Times 6/10/23, 15:58

Mr. Trump has repeatedly characterized the investigation as a politically

motivated witch hunt, and in recent weeks his lawyers have sought to raise what
they say are issues of prosecutorial misconduct. As early as Thursday morning,
Mr. Trump sought to discredit the investigation, complaining about
improprieties by a member of Mr. Smith’s team in a post on Truth Social.

The saga of Mr. Trump’s mishandling of government documents reaches back to

2021, when the National Archives discovered he had failed to return certain
records after leaving office. Mr. Trump was initially reluctant to hand back any
material, despite persistent warnings from some of his lawyers that he could
face serious consequences if he ignored the archives’ requests.

After much negotiation, Mr. Trump sent the archives 15 boxes of materials in
January last year. When officials at the archives examined the records, they
discovered classified materials interspersed among them and alerted the Justice
Department.

So began an extensive investigation of Mr. Trump’s handling and retention of the

classified records.

In May 2022, prosecutors issued a subpoena for the return of all classified
documents in the possession of his presidential office. When Mr. Trump received
the subpoena, he asked the lawyer hired to help him comply with it, M. Evan
Corcoran, if he had to obey its demands, according to a description of Mr.
Corcoran’s notes of the conversation.

Eventually, Mr. Corcoran conducted a search of Mar-a-Lago for anything that

might fall under the subpoena’s provisions and drafted a sworn statement that
everything it demanded had been found. In early June 2022, prosecutors from

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Trump Indicted in Classified Documents Case and Faces Federal Charges - The New York Times 6/10/23, 15:58

Washington visited Mr. Corcoran at the Florida compound to enforce the

subpoena and to collect a folder he had prepared for them with about 30
classified documents he had discovered during his search.

Within a matter of weeks, however, prosecutors developed evidence that the

search Mr. Corcoran had conducted was incomplete and that more classified
material likely remained at Mar-a-Lago. They convinced a federal magistrate
judge in Florida to issue a search warrant and in August, F.B.I. agents descended
on the property, hauling away about 100 additional classified documents.

Even after the extraordinary search, prosecutors remained unconvinced that

they had recovered all of the classified material in Mr. Trump’s possession. They
prevailed upon a federal judge in Washington, Beryl A. Howell, to compel new
searches by Mr. Trump’s legal team not only of Mar-a-Lago, but also of other
properties owned by Mr. Trump, including Trump Tower in New York; Mr.
Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.; and a storage site in West Palm Beach,
Fla.

During the search of the storage site, Mr. Trump’s lawyers found at least two
more classified documents.

As the investigation continued, prosecutors scored a handful of breakthroughs.

In March, they persuaded Judge Howell that Mr. Trump had likely used Mr.
Corcoran’s legal advice to further a crime — a finding that allowed the
government to work around the usual protections of attorney-client privilege
and gain access to Mr. Corcoran’s extensive audio notes of his dealings with the
former president.

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Trump Indicted in Classified Documents Case and Faces Federal Charges - The New York Times 6/10/23, 15:58

Around the same time, investigators discovered a recording of Mr. Trump in a

meeting with his aides in July 2021, openly discussing a classified document in
possession related to military options about confronting Iran. In the recording,
according to several people familiar with it, Mr. Trump expressed regret that he
had not declassified the document while he was in office and acknowledged that
he could no longer do so.

That admission appeared to cut against one of the chief defenses he had
repeatedly raised during the inquiry: that he had declassified all of the material
that he took with him from the White House.

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence. He joined The Times in 1999. @alanfeuer

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of
Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for
reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. @maggieNYT

William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer on the Metro desk, where he covers political and municipal
corruption, courts, terrorism and law enforcement. He was a part of the team awarded the 2009 Pulitzer
Prize for Breaking News. @WRashbaum • Facebook

Ben Protess is an investigative reporter covering the federal government, law enforcement and various
criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies. @benprotess

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump is Indicted Over Classified
Files

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