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Donald Trump’s Second Indictment
‘Me, who did nothing wrong, when no other presidents were charged’
Today, the former U.S. president was indicted for the second time, including on a charge of violating the Espionage Act. The charges relate to material found during last summer’s search of Mar-a-Lago. Special counsel Jack Smith has been investigating this matter alongside the attack on the Capitol.
The general allegation here is that Trump stole thousands of government documents, including hundreds with classification markings, when he left office. He bragged on tape that he had classified information about a possible strike on Iran. (He had withdrawn the US from a nuclear treaty with Iran during his presidency.) He voluntarily surrendered some documents in January of last year, gave up a few more under subpoena in June but deliberately hid most of them in the basement of his social club to avoid the subpoena even though his lawyer told him repeatedly he had to comply, and the FBI found them when they searched the property with a warrant in August. Trump knew about declassification procedures from his time in the White House, yet, when caught, he insisted that any document a president steals is automatically declassified, a piece of nonsense on which no one from his former administration backed him up.
