Former President Donald Trump indicted again, sources say
NEW YORK (ABC News) — Former President Donald Trump has been indicted for a second time, this time on federal charges in relation to his handling of classified information while out of office, sources familiar confirm to ABC News.
He has been issued a summons to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday at 3 p.m. Eastern, sources said.
“We’re learning from our sources that there appears to be at least seven counts here,” ABC News’ Katherine Faulders said on a special report on the network. “This ranges from everything from the willful retention of national defense information to conspiracy to a scheme to conceal to false statements and representations.”
In a statement on social media, Trump wrote that he had been told of the indictment and insisted that the case was a “hoax.” He has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.
He wrote that he is “INNOCENT.”
ABC News’ Katherine Faulders reported on during a special report on the network.
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 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.
As ABC News previously reported, prosecutors in the special counsel’s office have presented preliminary evidence that Trump knowingly and deliberately misled his own attorneys about his retention of classified material after leaving office in early 2021, according to sources who described the contents of a sealed filing from a top federal judge.
In early 2022, sources told ABC News, National Archives officials asked the Justice Department to investigate Trump’s handling of White House records after it retrieved 15 boxes of records from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida that had been improperly taken in violation of the Presidential Records Act.
The DOJ probe hit a critical point on Aug. 8, 2022, when Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida was searched by FBI agents.
Federal investigators seized more than 100 documents with classified markings during the search, according to an unsealed detailed inventory list. From Trump‘s office alone, there were 43 empty folders seized with classified banners.
The property inventory list also showed that agents gathered more than 11,000 documents or photographs without classification markings, all of which were described as property of the U.S. government.
