Secret Service agents are reportedly set to testify about former President Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents at his Florida resort home.
An “unknown number of agents” are expected to appear Friday before a federal grand jury probing the documents case under the direction of special counsel Jack Smith, Fox News reported Monday.
The protective agents may have seen Trump handling the documents or may have heard him ordering aides to move or hide them after getting a subpoena to return them to the government.
A separate report said federal prosecutors have evidence that Trump personally rummaged through the classified documents after receiving the subpoena.
The former president is believed to have looked through boxes containing the document in a suspected illegal bid to keep some of them, the Washington Post reported late Sunday.
Smith is aggressively pursuing the Mar-a-Lago case and has already roped in many of Trump’s aides and Mar-a-Lago workers to tell the panel what they know about the documents and efforts to defy the subpoena.
Trump’s aides and lawyers have lost a string of attempts to avoid testifying to the grand jury. A federal judge has ruled that investigating suspected criminal activity takes precedence over various claims by Trump including even attorney-client privilege.
Secret Service agents have never testified in a criminal probe against a former president. But Trump is also the first former president to face criminal charges.
Trump improperly took hundreds of classified government documents with him when he left office and has falsely claimed that they belong to him.
He returned some of them but kept others even after getting the subpoena to return all the rest of them.
The FBI found more than 100 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after a judge approved a search of the resort club last summer.
The documents case is unrelated to Trump’s indictment in the Manhattan case related to hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels. He is expected to be arraigned in that case Tuesday.
Besides the documents and hush money cases, Trump faces at least two other serious ongoing criminal investigations.
A Georgia prosecutor is investigating alleged election interference in that state and Smith has mounted a broader probe into Trump’s effort to overturn his loss in the 2020 elections that culminated with the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
