Former President Donald Trump has been indicted by a federal grand jury after a months long investigation into his handling of classified documents after leaving office.
via: ABC News
He is set to be arraigned in federal court in Miami on Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET, sources said.
“We’re learning from our sources that there appears to be at least seven counts here. This ranges from everything from the willful retention of national defense information to conspiracy to a scheme to conceal to false statements and representations,” ABC News’ Katherine Faulders reported during a special report on the network.
In a statement on social media, Trump wrote that he had been told of the indictment and insisted the case was a “hoax.” He has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.
He wrote that he is “INNOCENT.”
The unprecedented federal indictment of a former president — who already faces a criminal case in New York City that he denies and who is the current front-runner for the Republican Party’s nomination for the White House in 2024 — further underlines what are potentially the most consequential prosecutions in U.S. history, with implications both global and domestic.
Experts say that a current U.S. government criminally prosecuting its former leader and current leading opposition party candidate upends long-held norms and could test the nation’s democratic system in a manner that stretches far beyond the merits of the case itself.
The federal probe has been led by special counsel Jack Smith, who was tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November to oversee the Department of Justice’s investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving office.
Smith is also overseeing the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Central to Smith’s efforts in the classified documents probe is determining whether lawyers who represented the former president falsely certified in response to a grand jury subpoena that Trump had returned all classified records to the government, or whether Trump himself sought to conceal records that he might have unlawfully retained.
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