8th June 2023 – (Washington) Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s attorneys have been notified that he is the target of an investigation into his handling of classified materials, according to a person familiar with the matter. The notification from the Justice Department does not necessarily mean Trump will be charged, but it does give him an opportunity to present his own evidence before a grand jury. The news comes just two days after Trump’s attorneys met with Justice Department officials to discuss the case. Trump is the first current or former US president to face criminal charges and his legal troubles are growing as he campaigns for the White House in 2024.
The federal grand jury has been investigating Trump’s retention of classified materials since leaving the White House in 2021. Investigators seized roughly 13,000 documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in August 2022, with 100 marked as classified. Trump has defended his retention of documents, suggesting that he declassified them while he was president. However, he has not provided evidence of this, and his attorneys have not made that argument in court filings.
Trump has repeatedly described multiple investigations as politically motivated, and a second criminal investigation is looking into his alleged efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump’s legal team turned over 38 pages marked as classified to FBI and Justice Department officials and showed them a storage room at Mar-a-Lago. However, they did not permit the agents to open any of the boxes, and one of Trump’s lawyers signed a document attesting that all records with classified markings had been returned to the government, which was later proven false after the FBI searched his home.
In May, a jury in federal court in Manhattan decided in a civil lawsuit that Trump must pay $5 million in damages for sexually abusing former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll and then defaming her by branding her a liar. Trump also faces a criminal investigation by a county prosecutor in Georgia relating to his efforts to undo his 2020 election loss in that state. The notification to Trump’s legal team comes amid growing legal woes for the former president.