The former president of the United States Donald Trump repeated this Saturday his theories about a “witch hunt” at his first electoral rally after being accused of taking dozens of boxes of classified material to his Florida mansion. Trump, who remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he portrayed himself as a victim before hundreds of his followers at a rally in the state of Georgia.
“This ridiculous and baseless accusation leveled against me by Joe Biden’s Justice Department will come to be remembered as the worst abuse of power in the history of our country“said the former president in a speech full of false statements. The attendees, many decked out in Trump’s signature red hats, they reacted with applause to the words of the former president and did not hesitate to boo when the Republican referred to the US president, the Democrat Joe Biden.
Biden, who has already announced that he will run for reelection in 2024, has not yet positioned himself on Trump’s new indictment, the second after he was already indicted in March of this year in New York for a case of tax fraud.
Trump’s appearance this Saturday was the first since the indictment of the Attorney for the Southern District of Florida was made public on Friday, detailing the 37 charges for the alleged commission of seven federal crimes of which he is The former president is accused of his mishandling of classified material. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, after leaving power in 2021, Trump ordered the transfer from the White House to his mansion in Mar-a-Lago (Florida) dozens of boxes with newspaper clippings, letters, photos and also hundreds of classified documents, including information about nuclear secrets and plans to attack other countries.
Those documents were not stored securely, but instead ended up in different corners of the Trump mansion, including a bedroom, a ballroom and a bathroom, photos included in the indictment show. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, all of a president’s documents are the public property of the US Government and not private, which is why Trump upon leaving the White House I should have handed over the classified documents to the National Archives, in charge of its custody.
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A few months after Trump left the White House, the National Archives discovered that they had not been given all of the classified documents from his Presidency, and when the former president would not return them, they ended up going to the FBI, which resulted in the opening of an investigation. judicial investigation. In August 2022, the FBI ended up searching the former president’s mansion to seize the boxes of classified documents that were still in his custody.
Despite FBI intervention, according to the indictment, Trump could have jeopardized US security. not only because the documents were not stored securely, but also because the former president showed them to unauthorized people to see them. Specifically, in 2021, Trump gave an interview to an author who was writing a book and allegedly showed him an “attack plan” against a country and also showed an individual linked to his electoral campaign a map related to a military operation. . Due to these facts, the ex-president is summoned to testify on Tuesday in a federal court in Miami.