Former President Donald Trump rolled up to Miami federal court Tuesday afternoon to be arraigned on more than three dozen federal charges — most of which allege unlawful hoarding of national security information.
The 45th president’s motorcade from his Trump National Doral Miami resort arrived at the downtown courthouse at 1:50 p.m. ahead of Trump’s 3 p.m. appearance. The former president was taken to an underground parking garage, from which he will be escorted to court.
Trump, 76, is the first sitting or former president to be charged with a federal crime. He will not be handcuffed and no mugshot will be taken before he appears in front of Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman.
Special counsel Jack Smith last week unveiled a 37-count indictment alleging Trump improperly held onto classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in his post-presidency, and then lied to federal officials who sought them.
The indictment lists 31 counts of willful retention of the classified documents — which allegedly contained sensitive defense information and an “attack plan” on a foreign nation — as well as charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements.
Walt Nauta, a former White House military aide who was working for Trump as a body man at his Palm Beach resort in Florida, was also indicted as a co-conspirator on six charges including conspiracy, concealing and withholding documents, as well as making false statements.
Trump and Nauta conspired to move boxes of the documents out of the reach of federal authorities and even his own lawyers, storing the material at different points in a ballroom, bedroom, bathroom and storage room, according to the indictment.
The former president, who turns 77 on Wednesday, flew to Florida on Monday from New Jersey on Trump Force One. He will return to his Bedminster golf resort in the Garden State to give remarks at 8:15 p.m.
Trump took to his Truth Social account earlier Tuesday before his court appearance to denounce Smith and request political contributions for his 2024 campaign.
“This is the Thug, over turned consistently and unanimously in big cases, that Biden and his CORRUPT Injustice Department stuck on me,” he wrote. “He’s a Radical Right Lunatic and Trump Hater, as are all his friends and family, who probably ‘planted’ information in the ‘boxes’ given to them. They taint everything that they touch, including our Country, which is rapidly going to HELL!”
The former president also drew attention to another special investigation involving President Biden’s alleged improper retention of classified documents from his days in the Senate and in the Obama White House.
“Will Deranged Jack Smith be looking at the thousands of pages of documents that Biden had in Chinatown then, when caught, quickly sent up to Boston? What about the 1,850 Boxes that Biden is fighting to keep secret,” Trump went on. “How about Hillary’s 33,000 emails that she deleted and acid washed? Will he be looking at the $5,000,000 bribe that was paid to Biden but that the Justice Department is trying to hide? Much more coming on that! We are living in a Third World Country. No Borders, Rigged Elections!”
Special counsel Robert Hur is leading the Biden classified documents probe after the president’s lawyers found some of the material stashed at his former office in Washington, DC, and his Delaware home.
FBI agents later seized other classified material after a search was conducted at the president’s residence in Wilmington, Del.
The FBI also combed through Biden’s Senate records now housed at the University of Delaware Library, but has not announced whether any of the 1,850 boxes of material had classified markings.
Trump and his Republican allies have pointed to the Biden case and another case of classified documents being mishandled by Hillary Clinton as proof of politically motivated prosecution at the Justice Department.
The FBI did not charge the former secretary of state in 2016 for having stored tens of thousands of emails from her time at the State Department on a private server, despite having found 113 that contained classified information.
In a separate post on his social media network, Trump also said the grand jury that voted to indict him was not aware of the authority granted to him by the Presidential Records Act — and suggested that former President Bill Clinton had also improperly kept records after leaving office by storing in a sock drawer audio recordings of interviews he gave.
“THE GRAND JURY WAS NEVER TOLD ABOUT THE PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT OR THE CLINTON SOCKS CASE, BOTH EXONERATING!” Trump said.
He is the front-runner for the GOP nomination with 52.7% support, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (22%), former Vice President Mike Pence (4.7%) and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley (3.3%), according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.