Former president Donald Trump has now claimed that the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago were “planted” in the boxes after they were obtained by the Department of Justice.
In a Truth Social rant, Mr Trump lashed out at Special Counsel Jack Smith on the morning of the former president’s arraignment at a Miami federal courthouse.
“This is the Thug, overturned consistently and unanimously in big cases, that Biden and his CORRUPT Injustice Department stuck on me. 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!” Mr Trump wrote on Tuesday morning.
Mr Trump will be arraigned at a federal court for the Southern District of Florida. He left Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey on Monday, staying overnight at the Trump National Doral resort in Miami, about 12 miles from the court. The arraignment has been scheduled for 3pm ET at the Wilkie D Ferguson Jr United States Courthouse.
This comes after a grand jury recommended criminal charges against Mr Trump and federal prosecutors subsequently issued an indictment outlining 37 counts against the ex-president, including obstruction and the unlawful retention of national defence information.
Mr Trump was also charged in New York state earlier this year with 34 counts of falsifying business records in relation to the hush money payments made shortly before the 2016 election to women claiming to have had affairs with Mr Trump years previously. The payments were made by former Trump fixer Michael Cohen and the National Enquirer magazine.
On the federal level, the DoJ is also looking into Mr Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. A similar investigation is taking place on the state level in Georgia.
The indictment was unsealed on Friday afternoon.
Trump aide Walt Nauta has also been charged after he was apparently spotted on surveillance footage moving boxes at the property. The ex-president stands accused of having moved classified documents from the White House at the end of his presidency despite not having the right to do so.
Mr Trump showed classified documents to others twice in 2021, the legal filing states.
According to the indictment, “In July 2021, at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey (‘The Bedminster Club’), during an audio-recorded meeting with a writer, a publisher, and two members of his staff, none of whom possessed a security clearance, TRUMP showed and described a ‘plan of attack’ that TRUMP said was prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official”.
“TRUMP told the individuals that the plan was ‘highly confidential’ and ‘secret.’ TRUMP also said, ‘as president I could have declassified it,’ and, ‘Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret’,” the filing says.
“In August or September 2021, at The Bedminster Club, TRUMP showed a representative of his political action committee who did not possess a security clearance a classified map related to a military operation and told the representative that he should not be showing it to the representative and that the representative should not get too close,” the indictment also states.
The legal filing notes that Mar-a-Lago wasn’t approved for the storage of classified documents but Mr Trump still “stored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club-including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room”.
