Former president Donald Trump is facing 37 criminal counts in connection with his alleged mishandling of classified documents, according to an historic indictment unsealed on Friday that sends the nation into uncharted territory and could upend the Republican presidential race.
Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, is the first former president to face federal charges. He could face years in prison if convicted.
Republicans, including most of Trump’s fellow candidates for the 2024 presidential nomination, have generally circled the wagons around the former president, decrying what they see as the weaponization of federal law enforcement. They have also questioned the optics of Joe Biden’s justice department prosecuting the president’s rival for the White House.
According to the 49-page document, Trump is being charged with 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information, and one count each of conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and making false statements and representations.
The indictment includes evidence – including an interview transcript – that Trump knew he had possession of “secret” and “highly confidential” documents that he had not declassified.
Trump’s aide, Waltine Nauta, is also facing six charges for assisting Trump in the alleged scheme to move and conceal the classified documents, according to the indictment.
You can read the indictment here.
Among the materials that Trump had in dozens of boxes at his Mar-a-Lago residence were documents about the defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries, U.S. nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the U.S. and its allies, and plans for a possible retaliation in case of a foreign attack, according to the indictment.
“Our laws that protect national defense information are critical for the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced,” special counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting Trump, said at a press conference on Friday. “Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”
“We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone,” he said. “Applying those laws, collecting facts, that’s what determines the outcome of an investigation, nothing more, and nothing less.”
The indictment accuses Trump of attempting to obstruct the FBI and grand jury investigations in several ways, including “suggesting that his attorney hide or destroy documents,” directing Nauta to move boxes to conceal them from his attorney, and lying by stating he was cooperating fully with federal authorities when he knew that he was not.
According to the indictment, Trump had documents originating from or involving the CIA, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Energy, among other agencies. “After his presidency, Trump was not authorized to possess or retain classified documents,” the indictment states.
According to the indictment, on two separate occasions 2021, when he was no longer president, Trump discussed classified military information at The Bedminister Club with individuals who were not authorized to receive it.
In July of that year, Trump shared a senior military official’s “plan of attack” on an unnamed country during an interview with a writer, publisher, and two members of his staff – none of whom had security clearance or permission to know about the information.
“This is secret information,” Trump said in the interview, calling the documents he shared “highly confidential.”
He noted that he hadn’t declassified the information when he was president. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” he said, according to a transcript included in the indictment.
Then in August or September of 2021, Trump revealed to a representative of his political action committee that an ongoing military operation in a certain country was going poorly, showing him a classified map of the country.
The indictment notes that Trump contradicted his own statement in February 2017, when he condemned those who shared classified information to the press, jeopardizing national security.
“The first thing I thought of when I heard about it is, how does the press get information that’s classified?” Trump said at the time. “How do they do it? You know why? Because it’s an illegal process, and the press should be ashamed of themselves. But more importantly, the people that gave out the information to the press should be ashamed of themselves. Really ashamed.”
In addition to disclosing information that was not his to disclose to parties who were also not approved to receive it, Trump haphazardly stored many boxes of classified documents he moved to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida after his presidency, according to the indictment.
Between January and May of 2021, at Trump’s direction, some boxes containing classified documents traveled from the stage of the Mar-a-Lago ballroom to a business center, to a bathroom and shower area, and to a storage room near a liquor supply closet. At one point, several boxes fell and their contents spilled on the floor of the closet. A Trump staffer photographed the spilled contents.
Trump later had some of the boxes brought to his Bedminster Club in New Jersey.
Nauta, a Navy veteran and Trump’s aide, was accused of making false and misleading statements regarding the logistical movements of some of the boxes containing classified information between Trump’s Florida residence and the National Archives and Records Administration.
Beginning in May 2021, NARA demanded Trump turn over presidential records he had kept after his presidency. NARA was met with some compliance but also some resistance on Trump’s part that eventually culminated in the FBI raid on the Mar-a-Lago property in August 2022, when many more documents were retrieved, the indictment states.
Trump only provided 15 boxes to NARA in January 2022, 14 of which contained classified materials, the indictment states. Many documents had “top secret,” “secret,” and “confidential” markings on them. “Top secret” – the highest sensitivity level – means the unauthorized disclosure of the information “reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security that the original classification authority was able to identify or describe,” the indictment states.
Between November 2021 and January 2022, Trump “tracked” with Nauta’s help the whereabouts and dispatching to NARA of certain boxes of records, even though all were requested by authorities, according to the indictment.
The indictment claims that Nauta falsely claimed that he did not know that the boxes were brought to Mar-a-Lago for Trump’s review before they were sent to NARA, nor about the storage locations of the boxes and whether they were in a secure or locked location.
Trump announced the indictment “over the Boxes Hoax” on Thursday night on Truth Social, his social media platform, He noted that Biden also has been found in possession of classified materials, including “documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is ‘secured’ by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time.”
Trump declared himself an “INNOCENT MAN” and the subject of the “Greatest Witch Hunt of all time.” The Biden administration, he claimed, is ‘TOTALLY CORRUPT.”
The former president has argued that all the documents in question were declassified when he left the White House. “You’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview last year.
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday, Representative Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote that the indictment “creates, at a minimum, a serious appearance of a double standard and a miscarriage of justice.”
Jordan noted that Biden and Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, were not indicted for their own mishandling of classified information. He did not mention former vice president Mike Pence, who also found classified documents at his Indiana home.
Other Republicans, including some of this 2024 rivals, have also come to Trump’s defense.
“Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is viewed by many as Trump’s chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, tweeted on Thursday. “The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.”
It’s unclear how the federal indictment will affect Trump’s standing in the Republican primary. Republican voters rallied to his defense in March after he was indicted in Manhattan for making alleged hush-money payments to a porn actress before the 2016 election. Trump’s lead in the polls increased and donations to his campaign surged.
Entrepreneur and GOP presidential nominee Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to pardon Trump if he is elected president. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a 2024 presidential contender who served as Trump’s United Nations ambassador, tweeted Friday that “this is not how justice should be pursued in our country.”
“The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics,” she said. “It’s time to move beyond the endless drama and distractions.”
However, Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas and 2024 candidate, called on Trump to leave the presidential race in light of the federal indictment.
“While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction,” Hutchinson wrote in a Thursday-night statement. “This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.”