Former US President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he had been charged as part of an investigation into his handling of classified documents from the White House archives after leaving office.
Trump wrote on his private network, “Truth Social,” that “the corrupt Biden administration has informed my attorneys that I have been charged, apparently in the case of the bogus funds.”
There was no immediate confirmation from the Justice Ministry.
Trump is accused of having taken with him when he left the White House in early 2021 full boxes of official documents, including defense documents classified as “top secret” and that he refused to return them for safekeeping as required by law when those in charge of the archives asked him to do so, in violation of federal laws.
Trump, seeking to win a new presidential term, added that he was summoned to a federal court in Miami on Tuesday, after his conviction in March in a case related to the purchase of the silence of a pornographic actress in 2016.
According to a number of American media outlets, he will face a list of seven charges that have not yet been announced.
“I never thought something similar could happen to a former president of the United States,” Trump wrote Thursday, speaking of a “black day” in the country’s history.
Trump’s announcement comes in the wake of reports in the US media that federal prosecutors have informed the former Republican president’s lawyer that the investigation is no longer limited to those close to him, but is now affecting him personally.
The American media did not mention when the former president was informed of this, but his lawyers met with the two officials in the Ministry of Justice, especially the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, who is assigned to independently oversee the investigation.
In the United States, a 1978 law requires all US presidents to send their letters, emails, and other business documents to the National Archives. Another law relating to spying on a person prohibits keeping secret documents in unauthorized and unsecured places.
However, upon leaving the presidency to settle in his lavish home in Mar-a-Lago, Trump moved boxes full of files.
In January 2022, after several memorandums, he agreed to return 15 boxes containing more than two hundred confidential documents. His lawyers confirmed in a letter afterwards that there were no other papers.
After examining what was received, the FBI assessed that Trump had not returned everything and that he still had many documents at his club in Palm Beach.
FBI agents went to the place on the eighth of August and confiscated about thirty other boxes that contained 11,000 documents, some of which were very sensitive about Iran or China.
Trump’s lawyers strongly condemned the operation and criticized the FBI for publishing a photograph of seized documents stamped “TOP SECRET” scattered on a floral carpet.
With the aim of ending the conspiracy charges, Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned Special Prosecutor Jack Smith to oversee this investigation and another investigation into Trump’s role in the Capitol attack.
