federal prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling of classified documents

Background

Under the Presidential Records Act (PRA), presidential documents must be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) by the end of a president's term. Trump's term ended in January 2021. In May 2021, NARA became aware of missing documents from the Trump administration, and began an effort to retrieve documents improperly taken to Trump's residences at Mar-a-Lago and The Bedminster Club. Later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) obtained evidence that Trump was personally involved in causing the documents to be taken. Some of the stolen documents were, as Representative Jamie Raskin wrote, "so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them" and furthermore "pertained to his [Trump's] business interests".

After repeatedly demanding the return of documents from Trump's team and warning them of a possible referral to the Justice Department, NARA retrieved 15 boxes of documents in January 2022. NARA discovered that the boxes contained classified material, and notified the Justice Department on February 9. This led the FBI to launch an investigation into Trump's handling of government documents on March 30. In May, a grand jury issued a subpoena for any remaining documents in Trump's possession. Trump certified that he was returning all the remaining documents on June 3, but the FBI later obtained evidence that he had intentionally moved documents to hide them from his lawyers and the FBI and thus had not fulfilled the subpoena.

This led to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022, in which the FBI recovered over 13,000 government documents, over 300 of which were classified, with some relating to national defense secrets covered under the Espionage Act. The civil lawsuit Trump v. United States arose from the search, which briefly led to the appointment of a special master by District Judge Aileen Cannon to review seized materials. Cannon's ruling was later overturned.

In a November 2, 2022 interview with the FBI, a former Trump White House employee said that Nauta had been promised a pardon, "even if he gets charged with lying to the FBI", should Trump regain the presidency.

In November 2022, the FBI investigation was taken over by a special counsel investigation, under the direction of Jack Smith who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. A second civil case allowed the Smith investigation to make use of the crime-fraud exception to attorney–client privilege to access certain evidence in the case.

Indictments and arraignments

Original indictment

The grand jury handed up the indictment under seal on June 8, 2023. The indictment was unsealed the following day, and special counsel Jack Smith gave a brief statement emphasizing the seriousness of the charges and stating that his office would seek a speedy trial. In the court where the defendants were arraigned, scheduling trial within 70 days of a criminal indictment would normally be considered "speedy", but the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) applies, and those required procedures may take additional time. As the Guardian explains, "the seven-stage Cipa process is sequential, meaning each previous section has to be completed before the case can proceed to the next section."

Its 37 counts against Trump and six against Walt Nauta include willfully retaining national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. The conspiracy to obstruct justice charge carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison; violations of the Espionage Act carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. There are no mandatory minimum penalties.

Trump (37 counts):

31 counts of retaining and failing to deliver national defense documents under the Espionage Act.

Each of these charges is for possession of a separate, specific document. Ten of these documents were handed over to the government in June 2022, and the other 21 were recovered in the August 2022 search. According to the indictment, the 31 documents describe U.S. nuclear weapons; foreign military attacks, plans, capabilities, and effects on U.S. interests; foreign nuclear capabilities; foreign support for terrorist activity; communications with foreign leaders; U.S. military activities; White House daily foreign intelligence briefings; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

5 counts relating to conspiracy to obstruct justice and withholding documents and records

1 count of making false statements.

Superseding indictment

Shortly after Trump and Nauta's original indictment in June, a target letter was sent to Yuscil Taveras, the director of information technology at Mar-a-Lago who oversees the surveillance cameras. At first, Taveras was represented by attorney Stanley Woodward, whose legal fees were paid for by Trump's Save America PAC to represent Taveras and a number of Trump allies. While represented by Woodward, Taveras provided testimony to the grand jury. On July 5, after being told that Woodward might have a conflict of interest, Taveras notified the court he wished to drop Woodward as his attorney and to switch to a public defender. Taveras then retracted his previous testimony and provided new information regarding a plot to delete surveillance video at the Florida property that implicated Trump and others. This led to a superseding indictment in which Taveras was not charged. He agreed to testify for the prosecution.

On July 27, a superseding indictment was filed, charging an additional defendant, Carlos De Oliveira, the maintenance chief at Mar-a-Lago, and adding new counts for Trump and Nauta. In the new indictment, all three defendants face two counts related to the attempt to delete the surveillance footage:

"Altering, destroying, mutilating, or concealing an object" (Title 18 USC Sections 1512(b)(2)(B) and 2)

"Corruptly altering, destroy, mutilating or concealing a document, record, or other object" (Title 18 USC Section 1512(c)(1))

In the new indictment, Trump also faces an additional count of willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act. The 32nd document is the Iran document he referenced in the July 2021 conversation. The indictment says that he possessed it until January 17, 2022, so it may have been inside the 15 boxes of material he voluntarily surrendered to NARA that month (before the subpoenas and search).

Charging Trump with these three new counts brings his total number of counts to 40.

Assignment of district judge

Federal judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2020, was randomly assigned to preside over the case. Shortly after her assignment in June 2023, two federal judges urged her to step down, but she did not.

Cannon had previously made unprecedented rulings favorable to Trump in 2022, particularly in appointing a special master to review seized documents, which temporarily stymied the FBI and special counsel investigations. The rulings were criticized by legal scholars, and a panel of the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit unanimously overruled them, writing, "We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so."

Arraignments

Trump arrived in Miami the day before his arraignment at the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S. Courthouse and had dinner at his golf club in Doral with his lawyer Christopher Kise; Nauta; Nauta's Washington DC lawyer Stanley Woodward; right-wing activist and President of Judicial Watch Tom Fitton; and other advisers.

At his June 13 arraignment, Trump pleaded not guilty to all 37 counts. Trump and Nauta were both released. Trump was instructed not to speak about the case to any of the 84 witnesses, including Nauta, who continues to be Trump's personal assistant. Trump was represented by Todd Blanche, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Manhattan federal prosecutor's office who is also representing him in his prosecution by the Manhattan district attorney. (Trump attorneys Jim Trusty [wd] and John Rowley [wd] had resigned the day after the indictment.) At the arraignment, Blanche entered the plea on Trump's behalf. At Trump's arraignment, Miami police had prepared for up to 50,000 protestors, though only 500 protestors came.

Trump is also represented in the matter by Lindsey Halligan. Halligan is the local counsel for the case and filed the Motions to Appear Pro Hac Vice for Evan Corcoran and James Trusty, initially on August 22, 2022. She was one of the few lawyers working for Trump who was on site during the FBI search, which she said was a "huge surprise". She said Trump's subsequent indictment goes "for the jugular".

On August 4, in a court filing, Trump pleaded not guilty to the three new counts. He told the court he would not appear in person for the arraignment. At the August 10 arraignment, the judge formally accepted the plea he had submitted.

On June 13, Nauta appeared in court, but he could not be arraigned because his lawyer was not eligible to represent him in Florida. On July 6, Nauta, having hired a Florida lawyer, Sasha Dadan, pleaded not guilty. On August 10, he appeared in court again and pleaded not guilty to the added charges.

On July 31, De Oliveira appeared in court and was released on $100,000 bond. He was represented by John Irving, whose firm had been paid nearly $200,000 by Trump's Save America PAC. His arraignment was delayed because he did not have a Florida lawyer. He was arraigned on August 15 and pleaded not guilty.

Pretrial proceedings

The trial will involve procedures under the Classified Information Procedures Act. Under that act, the government plans to share classified documents relevant to the case with the defense as part of discovery. On June 19, a judge issued a protective order that restricted Trump to viewing the relevant documents under his attorneys' supervision and explicitly prohibited him from publicly discussing the evidence, as DOJ had requested three days earlier.

2023

By the third week of June, the government began disclosing unclassified evidence to the defense as part of the discovery process. That includes documents obtained via warrants and subpoenas; transcripts of witness testimony before the grand jury; witness interviews; and copies of the videorecordings from Mar-a-Lago. The government's first discovery disclosure to the defense included at least 833,450 pages of material, including emails and other documents; of this set, about 4,500 pages were designated as "key" documents, the most crucial evidence.

On July 18, lawyers for Trump and Nauta attended the first pretrial conference, while Trump went to Iowa for a televised campaign event with Sean Hannity. Several days later, the judge set another pretrial hearing for May 14, 2024.

On August 22, prosecutors made a court filing asking whether Stanley Woodward may have a conflict of interest if he has to cross-examine Taveras, who was formerly his client. At an October 12 hearing, Cannon complained that prosecutors had introduced new arguments during oral argument and said she would potentially schedule further hearings about the matter in the future.

Following a September 12 hearing (postponed from August 25), Cannon prohibited Trump from commenting on classified evidence.

Earlier in 2023, in a different case, Cannon closed jury selection to the public on the basis that the courtroom was too small, which according to some was a constitutional error. Trump's trial was scheduled for the same courtroom.

In November, it was reported that Mar-a-Lago staff, including the person who cleaned Trump's bedroom, may be called to testify.

2024

On February 6, 2024, Cannon ruled that witnesses' names could be made public, as the government had not explained its concerns related to "witness safety and intimidation". Two days later, the government asked her to reconsider. On April 9, Cannon ruled that witnesses in the case could remain private, reversing her prior decision. However, Cannon also did turn down a request seeking the sealing of substantive witness statements.

On February 12, Trump attended a hearing to determine whether prosecutors could withhold some classified evidence from the defense. The hearing was closed-door and in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF).

On February 22, Trump's lawyers made multiple court filings asking for the case to be dismissed. On March 14, Cannon heard two of these motions, and she immediately rejected Trump's request to dismiss the case based on his claim that the Espionage Act was vague, though she is open to hearing his arguments about the law's vagueness as part of the case. Trump's second claim was that a president may keep any government documents he wishes under the Presidential Records Act.

On April 4, Cannon denied Trump's motion to dismiss the indictment. Trump had claimed that a president, under the Presidential Records Act, may keep any government documents he wishes. Cannon ruled that the Presidential Records Act provides no "basis to dismiss" the charges.

On May 6, Cannon delayed a major deadline for the defendants to submit court filings (which had been set for May 9). She did this after it was revealed that prosecutors had shuffled the order of documents within each box while reviewing the boxes. As prosecutors acknowledged in writing: "The filter team took care to ensure that no documents were moved from one box to another, but it was not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box." Trump attorney Todd Blanche described this as "the spoliation of this evidence" and said that prosecutors had committed an ethical breach by not revealing it promptly.

On May 7, Cannon canceled the May 20 trial date and wrote that it would be "imprudent and inconsistent" to finalize a new trial date before resolving pretrial issues. She issued a new pretrial schedule, under which defendants' motions to dismiss will be heard May 22 and June 21, there is a CIPA deadline on June 17 (delayed from May 9), defendants’ combined speedy trial report will be due July 19, and a status conference and a CIPA hearing will be held on July 22.

Dismissal

On July 15, 2024, Cannon dismissed the case against Trump, ruling that "Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution." The rationale mirrored Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' concurrence in Trump v. United States, released two weeks prior.

In doing so, Cannon ruled a key portion of the 1974 Supreme Court case United States v. Nixon to be non-binding because the specific issue of that special prosecutor's validity had not been sufficiently contested or considered by that court.

Appeal of dismissal

On July 17, with permission from the Justice Department, Special Counsel Smith filed a notice of appeal, and on August 26 he asked the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the case. The appeals court also has the power to reassign the case to another judge, though Smith did not request it.

The filing noted the distinction in the Appointments Clause of "inferior officers" who can be appointed directly by the head of an agency without presidential appointment and Senate confirmation, as would be necessary for principal officers. Prosecutors, disputing Cannon's ruling that found no specific statute permitted Garland's appointment of Smith, asserted that at least four statutes empower an attorney general to appoint a special counsel, and such authority had been acknowledged by courts dating to the prosecution of Jefferson Davis after the Civil War. The filing added:

The Attorney General validly appointed the Special Counsel, In ruling otherwise, the district court deviated from binding Supreme Court precedent, misconstrued the statutes that authorized the Special Counsel's appointment, and took inadequate account of the longstanding history of Attorney General appointments of special counsels.

On September 3, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a brief arguing against the dismissal. “If the court reverses Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s ruling in this matter," CREW wrote, "it will be the third time in under three years" that it reverses one of her rulings in the documents case. CREW also argued that Cannon should be removed from the case.

Trump was elected to the presidency in November 2024. Two weeks before the election, ABC News reported that the Trump campaign was considering naming Cannon as U.S. Attorney General. After Cannon dismissed the documents case, Trump advisers including Boris Epshteyn placed her name second on a list of nearly a dozen candidates for Attorney General in a document called "Transition Planning: Legal Principals". Trump's lead attorney Todd Blanche was listed as a candidate for Deputy Attorney General and White House Counsel, and (according to other sources) for FBI Director. Nauta's attorney Stanley Woodward was also being considered for White House Counsel and other top positions. On October 23, CREW renewed its call to remove Cannon from the case, saying that she, as a "potential attorney general...can never be impartial in the classified documents case".

Special counsel's final report

Days before his resignation in January 2025, special counsel Jack Smith completed a final report on his investigations into Trump. The first volume on the election obstruction case was publicly released, but the second volume on the classified documents case will not be made available outside of the Department of Justice, not even to the House and Senate Judiciary committees.

On January 20, 2025, Cannon blocked the release of the classified documents report. The next day, she extended a temporary hold she had previously set, and in December, she further extended it, allowing Trump extra time to challenge its expiration. On February 23, 2026, she made the block permanent, ruling that no information in the report could be shared outside the Department of Justice.

Response

To indictment

After the indictment, Trump and his allies within the Republican Party escalated verbal attacks on the FBI, Justice Department, and federal prosecutors, whom Trump denounced in a speech to the Georgia Republican Party as "cowards", "fascists and thugs", and "sinister forces" days following his indictment. Trump has repeatedly referred to the case as the "boxes hoax".

Trump falsely asserted during the days after his indictment that under the PRA he "had every right to have these documents." Legal experts said there was no basis for his claim that the PRA superseded the Espionage Act under which he was charged. He said, "The Espionage Act has been used to go after traitors and spies. It has nothing to do with a former president legally keeping his own documents," though, despite its name, that act is not limited to espionage allegations. Trump also cited the so-called "Clinton socks case," a 2010 lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch arguing that audio recordings of interviews President Bill Clinton had given during his presidency must be turned over to NARA, though the NARA had never sought them as presidential records. A federal judge dismissed the Clinton lawsuit because Judicial Watch had no standing to bring it. Trump incorrectly insisted Clinton had won and that the court had recognized Clinton's right to the recordings.

On June 19, 2023, Trump was interviewed by Bret Baier of Fox News. When Baier asked why he hadn't simply handed over his boxes, Trump replied "Before I send boxes over, I have to take all of my things out. These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things" and that he worried they might contain "golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes". He claimed he felt at the time: "I don’t want to hand that over to NARA yet." He said he had not dealt with the request because he had been "very busy". He also maintained he had already "declassified" all documents in his possession.

On July 15, 2023, Trump gave a speech to the Turning Point Action Conference, claiming: "Whatever documents a president decides to take with him, he has the absolute and unquestioned right to do so." He falsely added: "This was a law that was passed and signed."

On September 6, 2023, again citing the Presidential Records Act, Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt: "I'm allowed to do whatever I want."

To dismissal

On July 30, 2024, Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke to Ken Dilanian on NBC Nightly News, Garland said he disagreed with Cannon's ruling that his appointment of the special counsel had been unconstitutional. He said: "For more than 20 years, I was a federal judge. Do I look like somebody who would make that basic mistake about the law? I don’t think so."

The precedent set by Judge Cannon was raised a year later in another matter involving Trump: the federal government's prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James under the second Trump presidency. On November 13, 2025, Judge Cameron McGowan Currie held a hearing applying to those two cases, regarding the validity of the appointment of the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan. Comey and James were arguing that the prosecutor's appointment was invalid, while the Justice Department maintained that it was valid. Judge Currie asked Justice Department lawyer Henry Whitaker if he believed that Cannon had incorrectly decided to dismiss the government documents case against Trump. Whitaker said the details of that case were not analogous.