Donald Trump appeared in a Washington courthouse to surrender to federal authorities on Thursday afternoon. He was expected to plead not guilty to charges that he conspired to defraud the United States among other crimes in his quest to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The twice-impeached former president, who has now been indicted three times since leaving the White House, was expected to be booked and fingerprinted in the federal district court before being escorted to his arraignment, which has been set for 4pm.
Trump left his Bedminster gold club in New Jersey on Thursday afternoon to make his way to Newark Liberty international airport, where he boarded a plane bound for DC. He arrived at the E Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse in Washington shortly before his scheduled arraignment.
Some of his supporters gathered outside the courthouse to welcome the former president. Anti-Trump protesters also congregated outside the courthouse, holding signs that read, “Save our democracy!” and “Lock him up”.
In a post shared to his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said he viewed the indictment as “a great honor because I am being arrested for you”, speculating that the criminal charges would actually bolster his presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, who is currently on vacation in Delaware, maintained his silence on the arraignment, ignoring reporters’ questions about the case.
The initial appearance from Trump to enter a plea formally starts the months-long pre-trial process that will run into the timetable for his other criminal trials next year and the 2024 presidential race, where Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
Thursday’s arraignment follows the release of a 45-page indictment alleging fundamentally that Trump convened fake slates of electors and sought “sham election investigations” from the justice department in order to obstruct the certification of the election result in an attempt to remain president.
The indictment also listed six co-conspirators who were not charged in the indictment. While they were unnamed, the descriptions of five of the six matched those of the Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro as well as the former US justice department official Jeff Clark.
Thursday’s hearing in the courthouse – just blocks from the Capitol building, where Trump’s efforts to reverse his election defeat to Biden culminated in the January 6 riot – was expected to be overseen by US magistrate judge Moxila Upadhyaya.
Magistrate judges typically handle the more routine or procedural aspects of court cases, such as arraignments, but the case itself has been assigned to US district court judge Tanya Chutkan, a former assistant public defender who was nominated to the bench by Barack Obama.
In 2021, Chutkan was the judge who rejected Trump’s attempt to block the House January 6 select committee investigating the Capitol riot from gaining access to presidential records. “Presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president,” she wrote at the time.
The charges in Washington came in the second indictment brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, who previously charged Trump in June with retaining national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them.
Trump has also been indicted in an unrelated case by the Manhattan district attorney, who charged him over hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. He is expected to be indicted a fourth time over 2020 election-related charges in Georgia.
