Former United States (US) President Donald Trump is summoned to appear in federal court in Miami next week, after it was revealed he was charged with storing classified government documents and obstruction of justice. Will these charges land Trump in jail?
As reported by The Independent, Friday (9/6/2023), a US federal jury indicted the former president on Thursday (8/6) local time on charges stemming from the alleged unlawful safekeeping of documents containing national defense information .
The indictments add to the legal pressure Trump faces as he seeks to run as the Republican Party's presidential candidate in next year's presidential election. In April, Trump was charged with falsifying business records in relation to hushing up money from a porn star before the 2016 presidential election.
Regarding the latest charges against him, Trump first revealed it via a series of posts on his Truth Social social media. He maintains his innocence and will prove it in court.
"The corrupt (US President Joe) Biden administration has informed my lawyers that I have been indicted, apparently because of the Boxes Hoax," Trump wrote in the statement, using a term he frequently uses to describe the long-running investigation.
In the following post, Trump revealed that he was summoned to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday (13/6) next week, at around 15.00 local time.
At that point, according to The Independent, Trump is expected to be arrested and booked or legally processed, before he appears before the judge handling his case. That means Trump is likely to be arrested a second time in less than three months.
However, said The Independent, it is unlikely that Trump will be jailed after being charged with a crime.
The ongoing legal process is expected to be similar to what happened in early April, when Trump appeared in a Manhattan, New York, court to face criminal charges related to the investigation of Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg into paying hush money before the 2016 presidential election.
The latest indictment against Trump is still being kept secret from the public, and even Trump himself has not seen the indictment against him.
But The Independent's report said the latest indictments included seven separate charges, including one count of conspiracy to obstruct a judicial process, one count of providing false testimony and at least one count of unlawfully storing national defense information.
The threat of punishment related to the charges is not yet known.
The investigation into the case began early last year, after the National Records and Documents Authority (NARA) found more than 100 documents with classified labels while inventorying 15 boxes seized from Trump's luxury resort, Mar-a-Lago, in Florida. A total of about 13,000 documents were seized by US federal agents from the luxury resort.
As the investigation progresses, prosecutors and investigators fear Trump was not being honest about whether he had returned all classified documents he brought to the government, as provided for in the Presidential Documents Act (UU).
The law, which was passed in the post-Watergate era, stated that all presidential administrative documents belong to the government and must be submitted to NARA when a US President leaves office.
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