Wearing a dark suit and red tie, the former president arrived shortly before 2 p.m. at the the federal courthouse in Miami, where a few hundred people, most of them Trump supporters, had gathered waving flags and chanting. Within 15 minutes, he was processed by the U.S. Marshals, which included taking his fingerprints with a digital scanner.
As the first American former president to be accused of federal crimes, Trump faces the possibility of years in prison. Earlier in the day, Trump publicly attacked the veteran prosecutor heading up the case, calling special counsel Jack Smith a “Thug” and a “lunatic” in social media posts.
Helicopter television crews tracked Trump’s motorcade heading to the courthouse — a scene similar to his April court appearance in New York City, where he faces state charges of fraud stemming from 2016 hush money payments. After Trump entered the courthouse, one of his lawyers spoke to reporters gathered outside. “What we are witnessing today is the blatant and unapologetic weaponization of the criminal justice system,” Alina Habba said.
Trump, who is again seeking the Republican presidential nomination, faces the remarkable prospect of sitting at a defendant’s table for federal and state trials that may overlap with the presidential primaries or nominating conventions. He is also under investigation in Georgia’s Fulton County, where the district attorney is weighing whether to charge Trump and his supporters with crimes related to their efforts to undo Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. Smith is separately conducting a federal investigation into those issues.
Trump’s longtime aide, Waltine “Walt” Nauta, was due to appear in court with his boss on Tuesday. Nauta served in the White House before and during Trump’s presidency and then followed him to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s home and private club. He is charged with conspiring with the former president to hide some of the classified documents from the government agents trying to recover them.
Both Trump and Nauta were named in a 38-count indictment unsealed Friday, setting the stage for a high-stakes public trial in which prosecutors will allege that the 45th former president risked national security by stashing secret papers in a bathroom, a ballroom and his bedroom, among other places, months after leaving the White House.
Trump faces 31 counts of alleged willful retention of national defense information. Each count represents a different classified document he allegedly withheld — 21 that were discovered when the FBI searched the property in August 2022, and 10 that were turned over to the FBI in a sealed envelope two months earlier.
The secret papers the FBI recovered from Mar-a-Lago included one about the “nuclear weaponry of the United States” and another describing the “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” according to the indictment.
The charging document accuses Trump of talking about and showing others some of the classified papers. It offers only broad descriptions of the documents he allegedly withheld: a White House intelligence briefing from 2018, communications with a foreign leader, documents concerning operations against U.S. forces and others from January and March 2020, and military activities and attacks by foreign countries.
Trump was not charged with mishandling any of the 197 classified documents that he returned to the National Archives and Records Administration in early 2022, an indication that if the former president had simply handed over all classified material when he was subpoenaed, he might not have been indicted at all.
In announcing the case, Smith — who was appointed as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November to distance Justice Department leadership from the investigation — said national security laws “are critical for the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced.”
“We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone,” Smith declared.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.
