Trump Doubles Previous Record for Presidential Arrests

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Trump Arrested for Second Time in Mar-a-Lago Probe

Ryan Bort

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Trump Doubles Previous Record for Presidential Arrests

The former president turned himself over to authorities in Miami on Tuesday after being charged with 37 counts related to his handling of classified information

Donald Trump arrives at the Miami International Airport, on June 12, 2023 in Miami, Florida. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Donald Trump has been arrested again.

The former president turned himself over to authorities in Miami on Tuesday, to be arraigned after being charged last week with 37 federal counts related to his handling of classified material. Trump stayed at his nearby Doral resort on Monday night, and left for the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. federal courthouse a little after 1:30 p.m. local time.

The court prohibited journalists from bringing any phones or electronic devices into the courthouse, although a transcript of the proceedings will be provided. Trump reportedly was not be handcuffed and did not have his mugshot taken, although his fingerprints were taken with a digital scanner. His arraignment began at around 3 p.m. local time. He pleaded not guilty through his attorney Todd Blanche.

Rolling Stone reported Monday night on the chaos within Trump’s legal team ahead of his second indictment and arrest, and the situation unraveled to the point that the former president was forced to spend Monday scrambling to find attorneys to represent him during the arraignment on Tuesday. He ultimately tapped Blanche and Chris Kise.

Trump spent most of Tuesday ranting on Truth Social. “ONE OF THE SADDEST DAYS IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE!!!” he wrote shortly before leaving for the courthouse. “ON MY WAY TO COURTHOUSE,” he added a few minutes later. “WITCH HUNT!!! MAGA.”

Trump headed to Versailles, a well-known Cuban restaurant in Miami, after pleading not guilty. “Food for everyone!” he reportedly yelled as he was swarmed by people. Walt Nauta, a Trump aide who was indicted last week and arrested Tuesday along with the former president, was there with him. A group of people appeared to be praying for him.

 

City officials had been bracing for the possibility of large crowds outside the courthouse ahead of the historic arraignment. “We are taking this very seriously,” Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez said Monday at a press conference, citing plans for stepped-up security measures. Security was noticeably more lax that it was when Trump was arrested in Manhattan in April, although plenty of supporters and opponents of the former president congregated outside the glass-coated, two-tower downtown Miami courthouse, which has a ground-level outdoor plaza. The circus-like cast of characters who showed up included a pro-Trump demonstrator dressed up as Uncle Sam and singing a “Rocket Man” parody, and an anti-Trump demonstrator walking around with a pig’s head on a stick.

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Trump had encouraged his supporters to gather around the courthouse in Miami and protest the federal charges against him. “They have to go out and they have to protest peacefully,” he said during a radio interview with his ally Roger Stone. The former president clearly wants to turn the indictment into a rallying point for his supporters. He’s also been fundraising off the indictment, and he is expected to fly to New Jersey after the arraignment to speak at his club in Bedminster.

Trump faces a 37-count grand jury indictment on charges including conspiracy to obstruct justice, corruptly concealing a record or document, and concealing a document in a federal investigation. The charges stem from his alleged refusal to cooperate with a prolonged government effort to retrieve scores of classified material Trump took to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving the White House in 2021. Trump’s residence is about a two-hour drive from the federal courthouse in downtown Miami, where he became the first former president to be arrested on federal charges. Trump became the first former president to be arrested, period, in April when he was taken into custody in Manhattan on dozens of charges of falsifying business records.

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Demonstrators flooded the area outside the courthouse in Manhattan ahead of the arrest, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene trying — and failing — to hold a rally amid the chaos. The former president and his boosters have portrayed both indictments as a gross miscarriage of justice that must be protested, and the MAGA contingent is clearly determined to demonstrate. Greene is in Washington on Tuesday, but Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, a man who is ostensibly competing against Trump for the nomination, showed up to reiterate his commitment to pardon Trump should he become president.

 

It’s unclear what kind of impact Trump’s second arrest will have on the 2024 presidential race, but he might not have too tough of a time making it through the Republican primary if his opponents are unable to criticize him for his myriad, and potentially criminal, legal troubles.

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Trump sits silently in Miami courtroom, pleads not guilty in historic case

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Jay Weaver, Grethel Aguila, Aaron Leibowitz, Michael Wilner

Tue, June 13, 2023 at 2:04 PM CDT

 

 

Former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty Tuesday in Miami federal court to a 37-count indictment accusing him of deliberately keeping at his Palm Beach estate government documents that contained highly sensitive defense, weapons and nuclear information and of obstructing efforts by U.S. authorities to reclaim them.

In a packed courtroom, Trump entered his plea in a historic case marking the first federal prosecution of a former president and a potential hurdle in his renewed quest for the presidency in the 2024 election.

“We most certainly enter a plea of not guilty,” said attorney Todd Blanche, who was representing Trump in court alongside Chris Kise, a Florida-based attorney to the former president since last fall.

Trump was arraigned a day before his 77th birthday, appearing before Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman on the 13th floor of the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. Courthouse in downtown Miami. Trump was released on his own recognizance with no monetary bond and no travel restrictions. There were conditions that he not have any communications about the case with any witnesses. Prosecutor David Harbach told the judge that his team would prepare a list of witnesses with whom Trump cannot communicate about the case before trial.

 

Trump did not say anything during the 45-minute proceeding. Much of the time he was seated, hunched over with his hands clasped in front of him, with a stern and serious expression.

A heavy presence of security was seen inside the courtroom, with two rows of security personnel including Secret Service agents seated behind the former president. U.S. Marshals deputies were also in the courtroom.

Before the hearing started the courtroom was silent. At the end of the hearing, Trump got up and was escorted out a side door.

The indictment, returned by a Miami federal grand jury last Thursday, accuses Trump of willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

A former presidential aide, Walt Nauta, who continued to work for Trump after he left the White House, was also charged in the indictment. Nauta is accused of conspiring with Trump to obstruct justice, including hiding classified documents at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate and club as well as lying to FBI agents about concealing them.

Nauta didn’t enter a plea and his arraignment was postponed until June 27 because he did not have local counsel. He was granted the same bond as Trump and released on his own recognizance.

Shortly after 2 p.m. a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed that both Trump and Nauta had been booked. There was no mugshot taken of Trump and a public photo was used for the procedure, a U.S. Marshals official said.

 

Federal agents walk by the entrance to the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S. Courthouse, Tuesday, June 13, 2023, in Miami. Former President Donald Trump is making a federal court appearance on dozens of felony charges accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents.

The special counsel, Jack Smith, was in the courtroom but did not speak. The courtroom was full of members of the public, media, the prosecution team, Secret Service and other security officers.

In the indictment, Trump is charged with deliberately keeping documents with classified markings at his Palm Beach estate. It also cites two occasions during the summer of 2021 when the former president allegedly shared classified information about a Defense Department plan to attack a foreign country with a writer, publisher and two staffers at his Bedminster Club in New Jersey. He is also accused of showing a classified map about a U.S. military operation to a representative of his political action committee.

“The classified documents Trump stored in the boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the U.S. and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation to a foreign attack,” according to the indictment. It noted that the former president stored them in various locations at Mar-a-Lago, including a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office, his bedroom and a storage room.

For Trump, who is running in the 2024 presidential election, the new indictment marks the first time that he has been charged in federal court but the second time he has been charged with a crime. In April, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office charged the former president with a series of fraud-related offenses stemming from paying hush money totaling $130,000 to a porn actress at the height of the 2016 election to prevent her from going public about their alleged sexual encounter.

‘Twists and turns’ ahead

Ryan Goodman, former special counsel to the general counsel of the Department of Defense and a law professor at New York University, said there were no surprises in the developments today — “but the road ahead will have its twists and turns.”

“The most important variable now is whether Judge Aileen Cannon continues to be assigned to the case, or whether the damage to the public confidence in the courts will require her to step aside,” Goodman said.

Trump’s case, unsealed on Friday, was randomly assigned to U.S. District Judge Cannon. She was nominated by Trump and joined the federal bench just days after he lost the November 2020 election. Last year, she was widely criticized for her handling of his civil case challenging the FBI’s seizure of classified documents at Trump’s private residence. Cannon’s favorable decisions for Trump, including appointing a special master to review more than 100 classified materials found at Mar-a-Lago, were condemned by an appeals court in Atlanta that included two Trump-nominated judges.

“This prosecution will require a delicate balancing between the needs of the intelligence community to keep U.S. national security secrets safe during the discovery and trial proceedings and, on the other hand, the rights of the defendants not to be tried with secret evidence,” Goodman added. “It will require a judge of the utmost skill and integrity to maintain public confidence in the proceedings and to know where to draw the lines that the law requires.”

Robert Ray, a member of Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment trial, said that the former president’s attorneys are likely to delay proceedings in the case by raising constitutional issues.

“The government doesn’t have to prove damage to the interests of the United States — but as far as a jury is concerned, if this is just a mishandling of documents, I don’t find that to particularly warrant the heavy hand of the government returning felony charges against a former president. If harm did come to the United States, that’s a different story. And that has yet to be determined,” he said.

Other legal experts said the government’s case won’t rise or fall on Trump’s mere possession of the classified records, but rather his “willful retention of national defense information” in violation of the Espionage Act, with each count carrying up to 10 years in prison.

“That makes it very difficult to defend,” said veteran Miami criminal defense attorney Mark Schnapp, a former federal prosecutor in South Florida.

Schnapp added that the reason the case was returned by the grand jury in Miami instead of Washington, D.C., “is because Trump retained the documents here, not there.”

While Trump was inside the courtroom Tuesday, a group of protesters and supporters gathered outside the courthouse carrying signs and some wearing costumes.

Miami attorney Alan Weisberg, one of nine people from the public who got to see Trump’s first appearance, said he was struck by the eerily quiet courtroom atmosphere before the hearing began compared with the circus-like activities outside the courthouse.

“It was a routine hearing, but then you have to remind yourself that this is a man who was the former president of the United States charged with a very serious crime,” said Weisberg, a former federal prosecutor who went to law school during the Watergate era.

“He was a very different person in that courtroom,” Weisberg said. “He was not the bombastic politician you see at all his rallies.”

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Where things stand

• Former President Donald Trump was arraigned in federal court in Miami Tuesday on 37 counts stemming from the Justice Department's investigation into his handling of classified documents.

• Trump pleaded not guilty to all of the charges and was released from federal custody.

• He is the first former U.S. president ever to face federal charges.

• Miami police had been bracing for up to 50,000 protesters, but the demonstrations outside the courthouse were largely peaceful.

• After the arraignment, the former president flew from Florida to New Jersey, where he is expected to address his indictment in a speech at his golf resort in Bedminster at 8:45 p.m. ET.

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