Donald Trump, a former US president, has been charged with a crime for the second time in the past three months.
The topic at hand this time is his handling of sensitive documents after leaving the White House. Thousands of documents, including about 100 marked as classified, were seized during an FBI search of his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago last year.
If found guilty of mishandling the documents or of obstructing the investigation into whether he did, Mr. Trump, who is running for president again in 2024, could go to prison, according to legal experts.
He has categorically denied all accusations of wrongdoing and stated that he "never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former president of the United States.".
Here is what you need to know and what to anticipate.
On Tuesday, June 13, Mr. Trump was asked to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami, according to a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
The US Secret Service will meet with the former president's staff and the Secret Service agents tasked with looking after him on Friday, a law enforcement official told the US affiliate of the BBC, CBS News.
They will arrange for Trump to travel to the Florida court and appear there to be charged.
Prior to the hearing, US Secret Service agents will conduct threat analyses of the Miami federal courthouse and its surroundings and collaborate with court staff to create a security plan.
Before the indictment became public, Carl Tobias, a Virginia law professor at the University of Richmond, told the BBC that Mr. Trump's arrest would probably proceed in a manner similar to that of his April arrest on suspicion of falsifying business records in connection with alleged payments made to Stormy Daniels.
Mr. Trump turned himself in to New York police at the time, and he then showed up in court to enter a not guilty plea. He did not receive a mugshot or be placed in handcuffs, but he did have his fingerprints taken.
Mr. Tobias asserted that it was unlikely that Mr. Trump would be placed in handcuffs or have his picture taken this time.
Given his prominence as a former president and the remote possibility that he poses a flight risk, Mr. Tobias argued that this was unlikely. He will appear, at the very least to bargain or engage in combat. However, I don't believe they should employ those particular methods. " .
Mr. Trump will be treated as having been arrested and taken into custody once the necessary paperwork has been filed. He would be arraigned after the paperwork was processed, which would involve hearing the accusations against him and entering a plea in court.
All presidential records, which are regarded as federal property, were expected to be turned over by Mr. Trump when he left office in January 2021.
The removal or storage of classified documents in an unauthorized or unsafe location is prohibited for all public officials, including former presidents.
The US National Archives, however, only became aware that some records were missing a few months after Mr. Trump left the White House.
These included some of Mr. Trump's emails to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as well as a letter former president Barack Obama left for Mr. Trump after he left office.
Some of the records that were requested by the agency were provided.
The Justice Department searched Mr. Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022 and seized an additional 11,000 documents, some of which were marked as classified or top secret and others with the designation "TS/SCI," which stands for material that could cause "exceptionally grave" harm to US national security.
Other items in the search included a photo binder, a handwritten note, unidentified information about the French president, and a clemency letter composed on behalf of Roger Stone, a steadfast Trump supporter.
Authorities have not yet confirmed the precise charges that Mr. Trump is up for. According to his attorney Jim Trusty, the former president was served with a summons that included information about the charges.
The Espionage Act violations, according to him, included conspiring, making false statements, impeding the course of justice, and illegally holding onto classified documents.
Several of these are thought to be serious offenses.
Espionage Act violations are punishable by up to 10 years in prison, while obstruction of justice, which is also a felony, has a 20-year maximum sentence.
The likelihood of Mr. Trump being found guilty is by no means guaranteed. It might be challenging to establish that he committed a crime, according to some legal experts.
According to the law, in order to prove Mr. Trump or members of his team committed an act of obstruction of justice, they would need to have "knowingly" handled materials improperly in order to "hinder, obstruct, or influence" the investigation.
In the end, it might be challenging to demonstrate Mr. Trump's knowledge of the situation. He might also claim that his employees handled the documents improperly without his knowledge.
On Thursday night, Mr. Trump posted on social media that he was going to be charged. Justice Department has not yet offered a statement.
Mr. Trump repeatedly asserted his innocence and called the charges against him "political warfare" in a series of Truth Social posts and a video before the 2024 election.
He has a number of justifications for how he handled the documents, including the fact that he declassified them before they were found. While presidents have in the past directly declassified documents, Mr. Trump is not known to have done so or to have adhered to any established protocol.
Additionally, Mr. Trump has claimed that some of the documents were private and shielded by executive privilege. This would imply that the case's central argument—that there was no obligation to turn them over to the national archives when he left office—was false. Legal authorities have largely rejected the contention.
Professor David Super of Georgetown University Law Center told the BBC that he anticipates Mr. Trump's attorneys will claim that the former president was simply a "really bad file clerk.".
An audio recording in which Mr. Trump allegedly admitted to keeping documents with knowledge and acknowledged having limited authority to declassify them may be crucial to the case.
In the event that this is accurate, Mr. Super claimed that "it pretty much sinks him because that shows that he knows the things he's been saying in public are not true.".
What effect the new allegations may have on Mr. Trump's popularity among his supporters is unknown.
His New York arrest had little effect on his popularity, and he continued to be the undisputed favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination for the 2024 general election.
According to legal experts, the indictment or even a potential conviction would not present a barrier to his campaign for reelection as president.
Nothing in US law prevents someone from running for office even if they are under investigation for a crime.
If he is charged and subsequently found guilty, it could pose a political issue for him. People might reconsider whether they want to vote for him, according to Mr. Tobias. "However, I don't believe that will automatically bar his participation. ".
At least two candidates for president have run before and had criminal records. Despite having been found guilty of violating the Espionage Act in connection with a 1918 anti-war speech, socialist candidate Eugene Debs ran for president in 1920.
Despite having been found guilty of fraud in 1988, conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche also made several runs for the presidency. While he was incarcerated in a Minnesota federal prison, he ran for president in 1992.
The election was lost by both.
