US prosecutors have unsealed an indictment against Donald Trump accusing the former president of risking some of the country’s most sensitive security secrets with his handling of unclassified documents after leaving the White House in 2021.
The Justice Department made the criminal charges public on a tumultuous day in which two of Trump’s lawyers quit the case.
The indictment charges Trump with 37 counts.
A former aide, Walt Nauta, faces charges in the case as well.
Trump is due to make a first court appearance in the case in a Miami court on Tuesday, a day before his 77th birthday.
According to the indictment, the documents include some of the most sensitive US military secrets, including information on the US nuclear program and potential domestic vulnerabilities in the event of an attack.
One document concerned another country’s support of terrorism against US interests.
Materials came from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies, the indictment said.
Prosecutors said Trump showed another person a US Defense Department document described as a “plan of attack” against another country.
They said Trump conspired with Nauta to keep classified documents he had taken from the White House and hide them from a federal grand jury.
Nauta, who worked for Trump at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, faces six counts in the case.
During an interview with the FBI on May 26, 2022, Nauta falsely told the FBI he did not know how some of the documents ended up in Trump’s suite at Mar-a-Lago, when in fact he had been involved in moving them there from a storage room, according to the indictment.
The indictment includes photographs of Trump’s boxes on a ballroom stage, in a club bathroom and in a storage room, where some were laying on the floor.
Trump kept the documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and his golf club in New Jersey.
Mar-a-Lago hosted tens of thousands of guests at more than 150 events during the time they were there, the indictment alleges.
Prosecutors said the unauthorised disclosure of the classified documents could risk US national security, foreign relations and intelligence gathering.
The indictment of a former US president on federal charges is unprecedented in the country’s history and emerges at a time when Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination next year.
Investigators seized roughly 13,000 documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, nearly a year ago.
One hundred were marked as classified, even though one of Trump’s lawyers had previously said all records with classified markings had been returned to the government.
“I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Thursday after announcing he had been indicted.
Trump has previously said he declassified those documents while president but his lawyers have declined to make that argument in court filings.
CNN reported on Friday that Trump said after leaving office that he had retained military information that he had not declassified.
Those comments, captured on audio, could be a key piece of evidence in the case.
In an earlier post, Trump said he would be represented in the case by white collar defence lawyer Todd Blanche, who is representing him in a separate criminal case in Manhattan.
Trump made that announcement after his lawyers John Rowley and Jim Trusty quit the case for reasons that were not immediately clear.
“It has been an honour to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated,” the two lawyers said.
Trump and his allies have portrayed the case as political retaliation by Democratic President Joe Biden but Biden has kept his distance.
The case does not prevent Trump from campaigning or taking office if he were to win the November 2024 presidential election.
Legal experts say there would be no basis to block his swearing-in even if he were convicted and sent to prison.