Donald Trump is now under federal indictment for violating the Espionage Act

Happy Pride, everyone! Donald Trump has been indicted! AGAIN!!! This indictment is related to Trump’s theft of a bigly amount of highly classified documents. As he left the White House in disgrace in January 2021, Trump made sure to grab all of the classified documents his little baby fists could carry as he waddled out the door. Last year, the issue came to a head as the FBI raided Trump’s Florida compound (Mar-a-Lago) because he repeatedly lied to federal law enforcement about what he took, where those highly classified documents were located and who else had seen the documents. Even after the raid, there were still documents missing! And we still don’t know how many people saw them, or if Trump sold information to America’s enemies. He reportedly stole highly classified documents about nuclear weapons too. Well, Attorney General Merrick Garland referred the issue to Special Counsel Jack Smith last year. And now it’s Christmas in June.

The Justice Department on Thursday took the legally and politically momentous step of lodging federal criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, accusing him of mishandling classified documents he kept upon leaving office and then obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them.

Mr. Trump confirmed on his social media platform that he had been indicted. The charges against him include willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and a conspiracy to obstruct justice, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The indictment, handed up by a grand jury in Federal District Court in Miami, is the first time a former president has faced federal charges. It puts the nation in an extraordinary position, given Mr. Trump’s status not only as a onetime commander in chief but also as the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to face President Biden, whose administration will now be seeking to convict his potential rival of multiple felonies.

Mr. Trump is expected to surrender to the authorities on Tuesday, according to a person close to him and his own post on his social media platform, Truth Social.

“The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been indicted,” Mr. Trump wrote, in one of several posts around 7 p.m. after he was notified of the charges. The former president added that he was scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Miami at 3 p.m. on Tuesday. In a video he released later on Truth Social, Mr. Trump declared: “I’m an innocent man. I’m an innocent person.”

[From The NY Times]

I love how selective the Times is with how they quote Trump’s Truth Social screeches. While Trump absolutely declared “I’m an innocent man” (LMAO) he also spun a conspiracy about how Biden keeps classified documents in his garage with an open door and paper-thin walls. I’m not joking. As for all of Trump’s Espionage Act crimes… well, this has been a long-ass time coming. Enjoy!

While this is the first federal indictment for Trump, he’s also still under indictment in New York on state charges – more than 30 felony charges in connection with his hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels. The photos in this post are from Trump’s arraignment in New York a few months ago, and as the Times reports, Trump will need to be in court in Miami next Tuesday for his federal arraignment.

The final few words of this – if you took GPT-4 trained on all the text on the internet and then fine tuned it on everything Trump has ever said or posted, it would still never generate a text that ends this way. In his own way Trump shows us what it means to be human pic.twitter.com/5UMejcfAvB

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) June 9, 2023

From history, here are a few of those convicted under Espionage Act of 1917: Aldrich Ames, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Jonathan Pollard, Larry Wu-tai Chin, Eugene V. Debs.

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) June 9, 2023

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images, cover courtesy of the NYT.