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WhileDonald Trumphas publicly decried the latest charges against him as a political attack, legal insiders say the former president “has to be nervous,” based purely on the strength of the case.
Trump is accused of 37 criminal offenses: 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information (a violation of the Espionage Act); one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice; one count of withholding a document or record; one count of corruptly concealing a document or record; one count of concealing a document in a federal investigation; one count of scheme to conceal; and one count of false statements and representations.
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He pleaded not guilty to each count on Tuesday, likely sending his case to trial.
According to a source, Trump is livid about the indictment and telling anyone who will listen that it’s a “witch-hunt, a partisan attack with no merit.”
But legal experts speculate that the former president may be more worried than he lets on, particularly as the indictment details how prosecutors say they have reviewed recordings of Trump bragging about classified documents and admitting that he didn’t declassify them. As laid out in the indictment, investigators also have access to notes from at least one of Trump’s own attorneys, who claimed the former president worked to hide classified documents from his own legal team, and from the FBI.
“I have said the Mar-a-Lago documents issue would present a challenge to his future freedom,” Dave Aronberg, the state attorney for Palm Beach County and former member of Florida Senate, tells PEOPLE.“It is a powerful indictment. He directed the movement of boxes of classified documents and asked people around him to move them. The evidence is damning," he adds.
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The recent indictment comes after theFBI conducted a searchat the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home on Aug. 8 as part of a criminal investigation that began after the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) revealed in February 2022 that officials had removed from the property15 boxes of documentsthat should have been handed over at the end of the Trump presidency.
But as the indictment lays out, Trump isn’t being charged for taking the documents from the White House initially — but for what he did after federal investigatorsissued a subpoenafor access to those documents.
With his indictment, Trump became the first U.S. president to be charged in a federal investigation (the former president was arraigned earlier this year in aseparate criminal investigationat the state level).
source: people.com
