June 9, 2023 Latest on federal indictment against Donald Trump

Special counsel Jack Smith speaks to reporters on June 9 in Washington, DC.

Former President Donald Trump is attacking special counsel Jack Smith in a series of posts on Truth Social following his indictment, despite repeated warnings from his legal team that everything he says publicly could be used against him.

Trump has claimed Smith is “deranged,” a “Trump hater” and labeled him “a thug” after the special counsel made a brief statement about the former president’s indictment Friday.

While, unsurprising, given his attacks on the last special counsel who investigated him, Trump’s latest diatribe comes as he is still finalizing what his legal team will look like when he arrives in Miami on Tuesday. Todd Blanche has taken the lead on the team but is trying to add another Florida-based attorney before Trump is due in court after two attorneys also handling the case departed abruptly. 

Whether the client’s repeated attacks on Smith hurt those efforts remains to be seen. But Trump’s legal team has cautioned him in recent days not to attack Smith — advice he has clearly ignored. 

Critics of former President Donald Trump in Republican fund-raising circles fear that even with his looming legal troubles, the 2024 contest is shaping up as a repeat of 2016 when the brash then-celebrity real-estate developer seized on GOP divisions to bulldoze a path to the nomination and then the White House.

As it was in 2016, there are again many candidates to choose from. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Vice President Mike Pence and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum all kicked off campaigns for the GOP nomination this week.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and talk radio host Larry Elder all have previously announced their candidacies for the nomination.

Some deep-pocketed groups, including one aligned with billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, have pledged to elevate a Trump rival, although it’s not clear at this stage whether all the outside organizations that oppose Trump will coalesce around a single candidate.

Asked for comment Thursday before the indictment news broke, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung did not directly address the actions of the groups opposed to the former president but said that Trump was “dominating in poll after poll – both nationally and statewide – because voters want someone who can beat Joe Biden and retake the White House.”

Trump has denied any wrongdoing, and has cast the federal investigation and indictment as “election interference.” His campaign – which saw a surge in donations after his March indictment in a separate New York case connected to an alleged hush-money scheme – also quickly sought to raise political donations off the latest indictment news.

A CNN poll in May underscores the challenges Trump’s rivals face. He was the first choice of 53% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters in the primary, even after his earlier indictment. Trump’s support was roughly double the 26% who backed DeSantis as their first choice.

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The Justice Department believes it will take prosecutors in the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump 21 business days, or about a month, in court to present their case to a jury at trial, according to a document that prosecutors filed with the court alongside the indictment.

The estimate does not include how long the defense might take to present its case, which includes the possibility that Trump could choose to testify in his own defense.

Trump seen on January 6, 2018.

The federal indictment against Donald Trump and his aide, Walt Nauta, was unsealed Friday, providing more details about the special counsel’s investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents.

Trump faces a total of 37 counts, including 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information, according to the indictment.

The former president, who has denied any wrongdoing, is expected to appear in a Miami courthouse on Tuesday afternoon.

Here’s what else we learned:

Some Republican members of Congress have quick to condemn the historic federal indictment against former President Donald Trump and come to his defense in the hours since the document was unsealed on Friday.

Others, most notably the top two Senate Republicans, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Whip John Thune, have remained conspicuously silent thus far.

Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, meanwhile, proved to be a rare member of his party willing to criticize Trump over the probe and defend the Department of Justice’s investigation, saying he’s “shocked” at Trump’s “alleged callousness” and calling the obstruction allegations in the newly unsealed indictment “inexcusable.”

Here are some of the other remarks from members of the GOP since the document became public:

Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming said that although she does have “serious concerns with the classified documents being handled improperly in this case,” she questions the prosecutors’ motivations.

“The Department of Justice should never be weaponized to target President Biden’s political opponent,” she said.

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi said in a statement: “The Justice Department shouldn’t be weaponized against the President’s political opponents, regardless of party. It’s an affront to our faith in the American legal and justice system when they are used for political purposes, whether real or perceived.”

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah called the indictment an “affront to our country’s glorious 246-year legacy of independence from tyranny.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee accused the DOJ of pursuing “its political agenda to take down a former president.”

Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana said the “Biden administration is arresting their top political adversary for something Biden himself admitted to doing just this year. President Biden’s weaponization of our justice system against his enemies will do lasting damage to the rule of law.”

Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah said the charges “are equally unprecedented and unconscionable. This is a sad day for any American who believes in the rule of law. The National Archives have confirmed that every single president since Ronald Reagan has mishandled classified materials.”

In the weeks before Donald Trump was indicted over his alleged mishandling of classified defense documents and alleged attempt to cover it up, the former president kept arguing that it would be unfair to prosecute him given that President Joe Biden took “1,850 boxes” of documents to the University of Delaware.

Trump made similar comments on Thursday after learning he was being indicted by a federal grand jury, posting on social media that “Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware.”

But Trump’s vague insinuations that there is something improper about the existence of the Biden collection at the University of Delaware are baseless. The collection of donated documents is from Biden’s 36-year tenure as a US senator for Delaware. Unlike presidents, who are subject to the Presidential Records Act, senators own their offices’ documents and can do whatever they want with them – donate them to colleges, keep them at their homes, give them to journalists, even throw them in the trash.

It has been public knowledge for more than a decade that Biden donated his Senate documents to the University of Delaware, from which he graduated in 1965. Biden announced the donation in a public appearance at the school in 2011, generating media coverage.

Biden did impose conditions on public access to the collection. According to the university website, the papers will only be made widely accessible two years after Biden retires from public life. Until then, they can only be accessed with Biden’s express consent.

That restriction has frustrated Biden critics who want the documents to be made available publicly much sooner, but it is common for senators to place timing conditions on the documents they have donated to universities.

Trump’s claim in late April that Biden has “been totally uncooperative – won’t show the documents under any circumstances” is not true. Reid reported in February that the FBI had conducted two searches at the university, with the consent and cooperation of Biden’s legal team, in connection with the federal investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.

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Clockwise, from top left: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy

Donald Trump’s rivals in the race to be the Republican nominee for president are reacting to the former president’s indictment.

Here’s what some of them have said:

Ron DeSantis: People close to DeSantis’ political operation told CNN after the indictment was unsealed Friday that they do not expect him to deviate from the statement he made the day prior.

The Florida governor tweeted Thursday, “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.”

“Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all,” he added.

A Republican fundraiser close to the campaign said Friday that within the governor’s close circle of confidants, there is not a push for him to change his posture toward Trump’s alleged actions. They have been satisfied with the tack he has taken since Trump’s first indictment in March, according to the fundraiser.

Nikki Haley: The former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations released a statement Friday that characterized the indictment as “prosecutorial overreach,” adding that it was time to “beyond the endless drama and distractions.”

“This is not how justice should be pursued in our country,” Haley said.

Chris Christie: On the heels of the indictment, Christie’s super PAC “Tell It Like It Is” is launching its first TV ad of the 2024 cycle this weekend. The spot takes a direct shot at the former president’s qualifications to run.

“The latest round of indictments serve as another reminder that the Republican Party needs a new direction,” Colin Reed, senior adviser for Tell It Like It Is PAC, said Friday.

The former New Jersey governor tweeted Thursday that “no one is above the law.”

“Let’s see what the facts are when any possible indictment is released. As I have said before, no one is above the law, no matter how much they wish they were. We will have more to say when the facts are revealed,” he wrote.

Asa Hutchinson: The former Arkansas governor – who said he read through the indictment against Trump after it was unsealed Friday – called the charges against the former president “serious” and argued that Republicans should not lightly dismiss the indictment.

On Thursday night, Hutchinson had called for Trump to drop out of the 2024 race after the former president said he has been indicted.

He doubled down in an interview with CNN on Friday, arguing that Trump should end his campaign “for the good of the country and for the good of the office of presidency.”

Mike Pence: Before the indictment was unsealed Friday, the former vice president called on US Attorney General Merrick Garland to release the document so Americans can “judge for themselves whether this is just the latest incident of weaponization and politicization at the Justice Department or it’s something different.”

Pence had also said he thought any demands for Trump to suspend his campaign had been “premature,” saying “everyone is innocent until proven guilty” and that Trump has a right to make his defense.

Pence did not acknowledge a question about his reaction to the indictment’s unsealing later Friday as he met with New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu.

Vivek Ramaswamy: The entrepreneur released a statement Thursday saying, “This is an affront to every citizen: we cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents.”

Ramaswamy also repeated his pledge to pardon Trump should he be elected.

CNN’s Kit Maher, Omar Jimenez and Brian Rokus contributed to this reporting.

The National Archives is pushing back on claims made by former President Donald Trump, his lawyers and his allies over his retention of classified documents, for which he now faces a federal indictment. 

On Friday, the Archives took the rare step of releasing a public statement rebuking claims suggesting that Trump was allowed to keep classified materials under the Presidential Records Act.  

Former Trump attorney Tim Parlatore, who worked on the classified documents case before leaving the former president’s legal team in recent weeks, mischaracterized the Presidential Records Act repeatedly during media appearances this week, including on CNN on Thursday night.

Parlatore said that a president “is supposed to take the next two years after they leave office to go through all these documents to figure out what’s personal and what’s presidential.”

In its statement Friday, the National Archives flatly disputed that claim, stating, “There is no history, practice, or provision in law for presidents to take official records with them when they leave office to sort through, such as for a two-year period as described in some reports.”

Parlatore also suggested Thursday that the National Archives was somehow delinquent in its duty to set up a separate government facility for Trump after he left office in 2021. 

In the past, this has been true for presidents who notified NARA before leaving office that they intended to build a presidential library — something Trump did not do.

“Prior to the end of his administration, President Trump did not communicate any intent to NARA with regard to funding, building, endowing, and donating a Presidential Library to NARA under the Presidential Libraries Act,” the Archives said in its statement. 

“Accordingly, the Trump Presidential records have been and continue to be maintained by NARA in the Washington, DC, area, and there was no reason for NARA to consider a temporary facility in Florida or elsewhere,” the statement added.

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Prosecutors allege former President Donald Trump took several steps to obstruct the investigation into his handling of classified documents, according to the federal indictment unsealed Friday.

Trump told his attorney to tell the Justice Department that he didn’t have the documents sought by the subpoena, prosecutors say in the indictment.

In addition, it alleges, Trump directed his aide Walt Nauta to move documents to hide them from Trump’s own attorneys and FBI agents, and even suggested to his lawyer to “hide or destroy documents” sought by the subpoena. 

The charge: Trump and Nauta both face a count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, according to the federal indictment.

“The purpose of the conspiracy was for TRUMP to keep classified documents he has taken with him from the White House and to hide and conceal them from a federal grand jury,” the indictment read.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe appears on CNN on Friday, June 9.

Thirty-one classified documents lie at the center of special counsel Jack Smith’s federal case against Donald Trump and his aide, Walt Nauta, despite investigators having recovered hundreds of classified documents from the former president’s Florida estate. 

They are behind the 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information for which Trump has been charged.  

The reason why Smith’s team zeroed in on that batch of documents, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said on CNN, is because the classified documents will have to be entered into court for the criminal case and possibly a trial, and the US intelligence community had to agree that exposing them to people without the necessary clearances would not present a risk to national security.  

“Many Espionage Act cases never go to court because you can’t get that agreement. People aren’t willing to essentially sacrifice the secret or sensitive nature of the documents,” said McCabe, who is a CNN contributor. 

What’s on the documents? The indictment unsealed Friday said that over the course of 2022, the government recovered a total of 337 documents from Trump. Of the 31 at the center of the case, the indictment said 21 of them were marked “Top Secret,” nine were marked “Secret,” and one contained “no marking.” One 2020 document concerned the “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” according to the indictment.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a joint statement.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the top two Democrats in Congress, have weighed in for the first time on former President Donald Trump’s indictment.

For its part, the White House has avoided making any comment on the matter, insisting it is the Justice Department’s purview and will play out independently from President Joe Biden’s influence. It’s a delicate balance aimed at avoiding adding any fuel to the fire of Trump and his allies’ claims that he is being politically persecuted.

Many Republicans, meanwhile, have met the indictment’s unsealing Friday with fierce condemnation.

As the Department of Justice unsealed the charges against Donald Trump on Friday concern started to settle in among some of his allies, a source familiar with the mood around the former president in Bedminster, New Jersey, told CNN.

This tone was different from what was happening within Trump’s team on Thursday evening. Advisers spent the hours after learning Trump had been indicted by the Justice Department focusing on the political implications, sources said.

One ally said that the indictment would only help him in the polls and another adviser indicated they were glad that the indictment had happened before the end of the fundraising quarter to help boost what they described as lagging fundraising numbers.

At this point, they were also feeling emboldened by the statements of support from Republican lawmakers and conservative allies, sources who were with Trump told CNN.

But by Friday, the former president’s aides began to acknowledge the legal implications of the indictment, the source said.

His team still thinks Trump will likely benefit politically — at least in the short term — the source added, but they’ve grown more wary of how the indictment will play out legally.

Former President Donald Trump and his advisers are still determining how to best respond to the indictment after it was unsealed Friday afternoon, sources close to Trump told CNN.

Trump spent the morning playing golf with Florida Rep. Carlos Gimenez at his New Jersey club as his allies made rounds of phone calls shoring up support for the former President after his indictment the day before. 

Trump’s team maintains that it was business as usual – and that the former president would still be attending both of his campaign events this weekend in Georgia and North Carolina. 

Trump has repeatedly said that he will continue running for president even if indicted.

Trump advisers insisted there was no plan for the former president to make live remarks Friday. Instead, Trump spent the afternoon lashing out on Truth Social, attacking Special Counsel Jack Smith and his wife and indicating he was being treated unfairly.

Boxes are stacked in the storage room, in this photo included in Donald Trump’s federal indictment.

A newly unsealed federal indictment lays out, at some points in detail by the minute, how former President Donald Trump allegedly directed an aide to move documents to and from a Mar-a-Lago storage room in the days before Trump’s attorney searched the room for classified documents sought in a subpoena.

Trump and the aide, Walt Nauta, face several obstruction and concealment related charges stemming from the alleged conduct.

All told, in the days leading up to the attorney’s search for the documents, Nauta moved 64 boxes from the storage room to the residence, according to prosecutors. He returned only 30, the indictment says. 

“Neither TRUMP nor NAUTA informed Trump Attorney 1 of this information,” the indictment said. 

Attorney 1, who is not named in the indictment, tracks with the role Evan Corcoran played in searching for Mar-a-Lago for documents responsive to the May 2022 subpoena.

Here’s how things played out, according to the indictment’s detailed narrative:

Trump’s exchange with his attorney after the search: After the attorney had done the search for the documents, according to the indictment, Trump discussed with the attorney what to do with 38 documents marked as classified the attorney had found and placed in a folder.  

“Did you find anything? … Is it bad? Good?” Trump allegedly said, and they discussed whether the attorney should bring the documents to his hotel room to keep them safe.

Trump allegedly made a “plucking motion” during the conversation, which the attorney memorialized as meaning: “Okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.” 

Former President Donald Trump argued his innocence and criticized special counsel Jack Smith in posts on his social media site on Friday. In one post, he claimed, “Under the Presidential Records Act, I’m allowed to do all this.”

Trump didn’t specify what he meant by “all this.” Regardless, nothing in the Presidential Records Act permits the conduct Trump is accused of — keeping classified national defense documents after leaving office, showing some of them to people, and scheming to conceal them from investigators.

In reality, the Presidential Records Act says that all presidential documents are to be in the custody and control of the federal National Archives and Records Administration the moment a president leaves office.

In other words, even if a government document was not classified and not even sensitive, the law says Trump should not have had it at his Mar-a-Lago resort after leaving office.

Trump has for months made false claims about the Presidential Records Act, claiming repeatedly that the law says he was supposed to “negotiate,” “deal” or “talk” with the National Archives and Records Administration about returning documents. As CNN has explained in previous fact checks, the law does not say that either.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy reacts to the indictment against former President Donald Trump in an interview with Fox News on Friday, June 9.

House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland seeking to paint former President Donald Trump’s indictment as politically motivated and asking for more information about the FBI’s search of Trump’s home in Florida.

The letter is the latest defense by House Republicans of Trump, with Speaker Kevin McCarthy leading the charge, vowing to work with Jordan and other lawmakers to defend Trump and undermine the Department of Justice’s case.

The letter, which raises several procedural questions, reveals that House Republicans on the judiciary panel interviewed a former FBI official who had issues with how the agency conducted the search of Trump’s home – an example Jordan is using to show why he needs to see the documents he is requesting.

Through the letter, Jordan re-ups his request for all documents and communications between the FBI and DOJ ahead of the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, along with other information on law enforcement communication and coordination before the raid.

Jordan has asked for information about the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home before, but this time he narrows in on some key DOJ individuals, including Jay Bratt, the Justice Department’s chief of counterintelligence, who is central to the DOJ’s classified documents case.

McCarthy, meanwhile, blasted the 37-count indictment against former president Donald Trump in an interview with Fox News on Friday. 

McCarthy said he’s been in touch with Jordan and Oversight Committee Chairman Jim Comer about “things that we can do to ensure equal justice” is applied to Biden as it is to Trump.

“I think Jim Jordan is going to bring it out tonight, when you learn of some of the things that he had said of how this investigation was carried out, you’ll see then that this judgment is wrong by this DOJ, that they treated President Trump differently than they treat others, and it didn’t have to be this way,” he said. 

The US Secret Service “will not seek any special accommodations outside of what would be required” to ensure the continued safety of former President Donald Trump when he travels to Miami for a court appearance next Tuesday, the agency’s spokesperson said Friday.  

“We have the utmost confidence in the professionalism and commitment to security shared by our law enforcement partners in Florida,” he said.

CNN reported earlier Friday that law enforcement officials from various agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, were meeting in Miami to discuss security preparations ahead of Trump’s expected court appearance.

A threat assessment of the building has already been completed and found no credible threats, a law enforcement source told CNN.  

However, FBI special agents are actively working to identify any possible threats associated with the upcoming court appearance, four law enforcement sources told CNN.

So far, the FBI is aware of various groups like the Proud Boys discussing traveling to south Florida to publicly show support for Trump, sources said, but there is currently no indication of any specific and credible threat.

In addition to working their informant networks, FBI agents and analysts are reviewing publicly available online platforms frequented by domestic extremists for any indication of plans for violence.  

“We do not want a repeat of [the January 6th] violence,” one senior FBI source said.  

In the federal indictment against former President Donald Trump that was unsealed Friday, the Justice Department outlines audio recordings of two occasions after he had left the White House where he touted the classified documents.

This expands upon CNN’s previous exclusive reporting published before the indictment was unsealed.

In July 2021, Trump was allegedly recorded acknowledging that he had retained “secret” military information that he had not declassified as president. During the interaction, Trump showed and described a “plan of attack” that the former president said was prepared for him by the Department of Defense, prosecutors allege.  

In a second interaction, which prosecutors said happened in August or September of 2021, Trump showed a representative of his political action committee a “classified map related to a military operation,” prosecutors say, and said that he “should not be showing it to the representative” and that the representative “should not get too close.” 

The federal indictment of Trump alleges that he disclosed classified information to several people without security clearances. 

The audio was “recorded with Trump’s knowledge and consent,” the indictment said.

Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger said the documents that former President Donald Trump is accused of mishandling were not over-classified.

He told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Friday that he foresees the topic of “over-classification” becoming a talking point in defense of the former president following the special counsel’s indictment.

While Kinzinger acknowledged that “we do have an over-classification problem” in the country, he added that “these are not documents that are over-classified” in regard to the Mar-a-Lago probe.

Photos included in the unsealed indictment of Donald Trump show that the former president allegedly stored boxes of documents stored in places like a ballroom and a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago — many of those places are not locked, according to one Mar-a-Lago member.

“Once you are on property, you can really go anywhere. I do,” the member said when asked about security in various parts of the club. “Being a private club, they really can’t stop you from going into the public spaces.”

In order to go onto the property, you must be a member or a guest of a member. Members have been known to use proximity to the former president as a draw to entertain clients and guests at the club, multiple sources told CNN. 

This member said that the White and Gold ballroom — one of the rooms some of the boxes were kept, according to the indictment — is easily accessible to any guest.

Why this matters: The indictment alleges that Trump retained documents related to national defense that were classified at the highest levels — and some were so sensitive, they required special handling.

It includes one document found at Mar-a-Lago, which was classified as top secret and dated June 2020, “concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” according to the indictment.