Donald Trump to make 1st court appearance in historic criminal case over classified documents

Former U.S. president Donald Trump was due to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday to face criminal charges that he unlawfully kept national-security documents when he left office and lied to officials who sought to recover them.

The 3 p.m. ET appearance at Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. Courthouse will be the second courtroom visit for Trump since April, when he pleaded not guilty to charges of falsifying business records in New York stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star.

Trump, who announced his campaign for president after officials used a subpoena and then a search warrant to retrieve hundreds of documents, has maintained his innocence in the documents case. He called on supporters to descend on Miami to protest his indictment.

U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the prosecution, accuses Trump of taking thousands of papers containing some of the nation's most sensitive national-security secrets when he left the White House in January 2021 and storing them in a haphazard manner at his Mar-a-Lago Florida estate, according to a grand jury indictment released last week.

The 37-count indictment includes violations of the Espionage Act, which criminalizes unauthorized possession of defence information, and conspiracy to obstruct justice, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The charges include references to 31 top secret or secret documents.

Trump has argued that he declassified the records in question and that his broad presidential powers gave him the authority to disclose or declassify materials. However, the Espionage Act itself does not explicitly require prosecutors to prove that the records themselves were classified.

Many of Trump's Republican rivals for the 2024 nomination have seemingly been more critical of the indictment than Trump's behaviour, with the exceptions of Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie. 

It's not a view held by some high-profile former members of Trump's administration, according to interviews in recent days.

"This is a devastating indictment," said John Bolton, Trump's onetime national adviser, in an interview Monday with CNN. "I speak here as an alumnus of the Justice Department myself, because not only is it powerful, it's very narrowly tailored. They didn't throw everything up against the wall to see what would stick. This really is a rifle shot and I think it should be the end of Donald Trump's political career."

Mick Mulvaney, former Trump chief of staff, told GB News in Britain on Monday that "the chances of a guilty verdict are fairly high, and the chances of real jail time are pretty high."

William Barr, Trump's attorney general, told Fox News on Sunday that while he thinks the New York case is a "politicized hit job," the documents case seems well predicated in his view, with archives officials patient with Trump in trying to get the documents back.

"This idea that the president has complete authority to declare any document personal is facially ridiculous," Barr added.

All three of the former officials stressed that the government still has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and that Trump is presumed innocent until then.

In the absence of a potential plea deal, something Trump has appeared to rule out in recent days, the documents case could drag through the courts.