The federal indictment against former President Donald Trump accuses him of illegally concealing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office and conspiring with aide Waltine Nauta to deceive the FBI and stop efforts to recover the documents.
Summary
The federal indictment against former President Donald Trump accuses him of illegally concealing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office and conspiring with aide Waltine Nauta to deceive the FBI and stop efforts to recover the documents.
- The Justice Department unsealed a 37-count indictment against the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination including 31 violations of the Espionage Act for the unauthorized possession of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and making false statements to investigators and to the grand jury.
- The charges carry sentences with maximum terms ranging from five to twenty years in prison. Trump will be placed under arrest on Tuesday when he surrenders to authorities in Miami to hear the charges against him and enter a plea in court.
- The indictment alleges Trump directed employees to haphazardly move dozens of boxes containing sensitive material around Mar-a-Lago, including his office, a ballroom, his bedroom, a storage area, and a bathroom in an attempt to keep them from federal investigators.
- Trump is described as brandishing a classified “plan of attack” against Iran in a recorded meeting to prove a point that he was right and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was wrong to criticize him. “This totally wins my case, you know,” Trump says in the audio recording of the meeting.
- Walt Nauta, Trump’s former military valet and close personal aide, was charged with six counts in the indictment. Five charges, including conspiracy to obstruct justice and withholding a record, were shared with Trump. Nauta also faced an additional false statements charge for allegedly lying to the FBI about whether he moved boxes of documents.
- In his first public comments since the indictment, Trump called the case against him a “joke” and a political witch hunt. “This is a sick nest of people that needs to be cleaned out,” Trump declared, and he attacked Smith as “deranged.”
- The former president’s case has been assigned to Judge Aileen M. Cannon of the Southern District of Florida, a Trump appointee. Cannon issued several rulings favorable to Trump during the investigation phase last fall.
- One of CNN’s takeaways was to highlight the obstruction charge, which “separates Trump from [the] Pence and Biden classified document snafus.” Additionally, Trump was not charged for any classified documents returned voluntarily in January 2022 – only documents that were under the Justice Department’s subpoena.
- NBC’s “11 key takeaways” include: Trump hid classified documents in a bathroom (with a crystal chandelier overhead!); he admitted on tape that he did not declassify the secret documents; Trump could’ve received a waiver to possess classified documents but he didn’t bother to get one, and Trump’s need to frequently move the documents “freaked out” his staffers.
- If Trump “winds up in the dock in front of a jury, it is no exaggeration to suggest that American justice will be on trial as well,” wrote Peter Baker for the New York Times. “History’s first federal indictment against a former president poses one of the gravest challenges to democracy the country has ever faced.”
- Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley called the federal indictment “a different ball game” than Alvin Bragg’s “political prosecution.” Turley continued, “It is an extremely damning indictment. There are indictments that are sometimes called narrative or speaking indictments…It’s overwhelming in details. And, you know, the Trump team should not fool itself, these are hits below the waterline.”
- The editors of National Review concurred with Turley about the “damning” indictment, writing: “It is impossible to read the indictment against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case and not be appalled at the way he handled classified documents as an ex-president, and responded to the attempt by federal authorities to reclaim them.”
- “The indictment contains references to Trump’s previous statements, as a candidate and as president, about the importance of handling classified documents properly,” wrote Wendell Husebo and Joel B. Pollak for Breitbart. They observed, “These statements could be used to prove evidence of Trump’s knowledge of the law, and could also have been included for public consumption, to suggest hypocrisy on the part of the former president.”
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
