Former President Donald Trump said Thursday evening that he has been indicted in the federal criminal investigation into his handling of classified material.
“The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is ‘secured’ by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time,” Trump wrote on social media.
The former president, who turns 77 next week, added that he has been “summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.”
ABC News’ Katherine Faulders said during a special report on the network that Trump appears to have been hit with seven charges ranging from willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy, a scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.
A source told NBC News that seven charges doesn’t necessarily equate to seven counts because there can be multiple counts with each charge.
Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the case and has demanded that the investigation be stopped because of allegations of supposed bias from prosecutors.
The former president has claimed that the investigation into him was initiated to stop his presidential campaign, which he launched on November 15, 2022. Trump currently sits at the top of the Republican Party presidential primary race along with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — all the other candidates are polling in the low single digits.
On May 6, 2021, the National Archives first alerted Trump that it was seeking approximately two dozen boxes of records be returned to it as required by the Presidential Records Act. The National Archives warned Trump in late 2021 that they could escalate the issue to prosecutors or Congress if he continued to refuse to hand over the documents. He was also warned by former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann that he could face serious legal jeopardy if he did not comply.
In January 2022, about 15 of the boxes were returned, at which time officials discovered there were hundreds of pages of classified material in the boxes. Federal law enforcement was notified of the discovery and later came to believe that there were more materials that had not been turned over, and a criminal investigation was subsequently launched.
In May 2022, a federal grand jury issued a subpoena seeking additional classified documents and, a few weeks later, the DOJ visited Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s legal team signed a written statement claiming that all the classified material had been returned. Over the course of the summer, investigators interviewed members of Trump’s staff and subpoenaed surveillance footage from the property.
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On August 8, the FBI executed a search warrant on the property and recovered eleven additional sets of classified material.