![]() Garland himself was selected by Democratic President Joe Biden, whom Trump is seeking to challenge for the White House in 2024. Smith’s appointment was a recognition by Garland of the politics involved in an investigation into a former president and current White House candidate. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election. Attorney General Merrick Garland picked Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption probes, to lead investigations into the presence of classified documents at Trump’s Florida estate, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings - including some at the top secret level - have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trump’s lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.īut that assertion turned out to be false. That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trump’s possession. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trump’s Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained “a lot” of classified material. government and must be preserved.Ī Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago. Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration contacted representatives for Trump in spring 2021 when they realized that important material from his time in office was missing.Īccording to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the U.S. Trump’s lawyers have claimed that he can’t get a fair trial before the 2024 election. Prosecutors, who had wanted the case to go to trial in December, wrote in a separate court filing Thursday that the new charges “should not disturb” the May trial date, “and the Special Counsel’s Office is taking steps related to discovery and security clearances to ensure that it does not do so.” The top charges carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors alleged Trump showed off the documents to people who did not have security clearances to review them and later tried to conceal documents from his own lawyers as they sought to comply with federal demands to find and return documents. and other countries, according to the indictment. Trump is accused of keeping documents related to “nuclear weaponry in the United States” and the “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” along with documents from White House intelligence briefings, including some that detail the military capabilities of the U.S. The charges include counts of retaining classified information, obstructing justice and making false statements, among other crimes. Trump was indicted last month on 37 counts related to the mishandling of classified documents. 17, 2022 - nearly a year after he left office, according to the indictment. Trump had returned that document to the government on Jan. ![]() Details about that document and the meeting were included in the original indictment, but none of the charges had related to it until now. Investigators say Trump showed a classified document during July 2021 meeting at his Bedminster, New Jersey, resort to the writer and publisher of the memoir of his former chief of staff Mark Meadows. ![]()
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