Donald Trump pleads not guilty to all 37 criminal charges over classified documents

Donald Trump has pleaded not guilty to all 37 charges accusing him of mishandling classified documents and obstructing efforts to get them back, at a federal courthouse in Miami Tuesday afternoon.

Mr. Trump, who spent the night at his golf club in nearby Doral, took a 20-vehicle motorcade to the court with an entourage of political aides, secret service agents and lawyers, over expressways and city streets blocked off by police. He surrendered to be arrested shortly before 2 p.m. ET, becoming the first former U.S. president to face a federal criminal indictment, ahead of a 3 p.m. ET arraignment. A few hundred pro- and anti-Trump protesters gathered near the court but the scene was largely peaceful.

The former president didn’t speak during the nearly hour-long appearance, leaving his lawyer, Todd Blanche, to enter pleas on his behalf. Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman did not impose any conditions on Mr. Trump, allowing him to travel around the U.S. and internationally, before releasing him.

Mr. Trump left the courthouse around 4 p.m. ET, waving and giving thumb-up gestures to supporters from behind the tinted windows of an SUV. One protester, wearing a black-and-white striped prison outfit and carrying a “Trump for prison” sign, ran in front of the motorcade but was swiftly pulled away by the secret service. The former president is expected to head back to his estate in Bedminster, NJ, where he plans an evening speech.

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The charges mark a major escalation of Mr. Trump’s legal peril, which already includes a state-level criminal indictment in New York over hush-money payments to a porn star. Two other investigations, meanwhile, are mulling further charges over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

The case puts the country into uncharted legal and political territory, with Mr. Trump vowing to continue his quest to retake the White House regardless of the outcome and much of the Republican base rallying behind him in attacking the independence of the judicial system.

In a string of posts on his Truth Social platform, Mr. Trump labelled the special counsel who had him charged, Jack Smith, a “Thug” and “Radical Right Lunatic” and threatened to prosecute a long list of people if he returns to the presidency.

“I WILL APPOINT A REAL SPECIAL ‘PROSECUTOR’ TO GO AFTER THE MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE USA, JOE BIDEN, THE ENTIRE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY, & ALL OTHERS INVOLVED WITH THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR ELECTIONS, BORDERS & COUNTRY ITSELF!” he wrote.

Mr. Smith’s detailed indictment, released on Friday, contains 37 counts against Mr. Trump, including willful retention of national defence information and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Mr. Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, also faces charges of helping Mr. Trump hold onto the documents and lying to the FBI about it.

The former president is accused of taking 337 classified documents, including highly sensitive military records on the U.S. nuclear program and the country’s vulnerabilities to foreign attacks, from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, after he left office in 2021. Mr. Trump allegedly showed some of the documents, including U.S. battle plans in case of war with Iran, to several people without security clearances.

The indictment, which contains photographs of boxes full of classified documents piled up in various Mar-a-Lago locations including a bathroom, alleges that Mr. Trump repeatedly thwarted federal government efforts to get the documents back. Many of them were only recovered after the FBI executed a search warrant last August.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump made political hay out of his rival, Hillary Clinton, using a private email server while working as secretary of state. “We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word ‘confidential’ or ‘classified,’” he said on the campaign trail. His supporters frequently chanted “lock her up” of Ms. Clinton. After becoming president, Mr. Trump upgraded federal laws to make it a more serious offence to mishandle classified documents.

Ahead of Mr. Trump’s court appearance, Miami police kept groups of protesters back from the court. At one point, they ordered the evacuation of a media area in response to a potential threat.

The former president was digitally fingerprinted on his arrest, but did not have a mugshot taken and wasn’t handcuffed, both procedures common for prisoners in the U.S.

Although Mr. Goodman, the magistrate, presided over the arraignment, the case itself will be overseen by Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge who last year made rulings that briefly blocked Mr. Smith’s investigation from proceeding. An appeals court later overturned those decisions.

The former president urged supporters to appear outside the court, raising fears of a repeat of the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol, which took place after Mr. Trump rallied his voters in Washington and then told them to march on Congress. Ahead of the court appearance, some of Mr. Trump’s supporters posted violent threats online and a few politicians fanned the flames.

“If you want to get to president Trump, you’re going to have to go through me and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the National Rifle Association,” Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor in last year’s elections, told a rally.

There is nothing stopping Mr. Trump from running for or serving as president in the face of an indictment or imprisonment, and he has vowed to stay in the race even in the event of a conviction. So far, Mr. Trump has remained the heavy favourite for the Republican nomination and is tied with Mr. Biden in polls of a potential rematch.

This has raised the prospect of several surreal scenarios more reminiscent of a developing country than a 250-year-old republic, including the possibility of Mr. Trump being elected president while in prison and attempting to pardon himself. There is also the possibility of constitutional litigation if the former president tries to challenge the legality of his indictment.

Most Republican leaders, including Mr. Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination, have repeated his claims that the prosecution is politically-motivated, raising the prospect of partisan division over the neutrality of the judicial system.

Attorney-General Merrick Garland appointed Mr. Smith in a bid to give the investigation some distance from the Biden administration. A career prosecutor, Mr. Smith has previously worked on corruptions cases involving Democratic senator Bob Menendez, Virginia Republican governor Bob McDonnell and war crimes at the international Kosovo tribunal.

Mr. Trump has had a long history of legal troubles. He is the only U.S. president to have been impeached twice, though on both occasions he escaped being convicted and removed from office by the Senate. Last month, a civil court found him liable for sexually abusing a former magazine writer and ordered him to pay US$5-million.

Both Mr. Smith and prosecutors in Atlanta are considering charges related to Mr. Trump’s attempt to reverse his 2020 election loss to Mr. Biden, which could be even more serious than the documents-related accusations.

Mr. Trump has not so far contested the facts of the case, but has suggested that either he declassified the documents or they were covered by executive privilege.

Previous high-profile document cases suggest that much of the prosecution will turn on Mr. Trump’s intentions. In the cases of people who have been convicted of mishandling documents, such as former CIA director David Petraeus and former national security adviser Sandy Berger, the accused clearly acted deliberately.

In the cases of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who had a private e-mail server, or former vice president Mike Pence, who had classified documents at his private home, both turned over the documents to the government and neither was charged.

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