It was an unprecedented day in American history.

“Not guilty,” former President Donald Trump said around 3 p.m. in answering to 37 counts leveled against him by the government he once led, before placing his immediate future into the hands of Judge Aileen Cannon in a Miami federal court. The 42-year-old has been a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida since 2020 when she was appointed by the former president.

“This is a day that will go down in infamy … and threatening me with 400 days in prison” is a “heinous abuse,” Trump said at his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ, just before 9 p.m.

“I had every right to have these documents,” he added, citing former President Bill Clinton’s legal fight to keep his personal materials. “They ought to drop this case immediately because they are destroying this country.”

Trump, now twice impeached and twice indicted, was already sitting in the court when reporters were allowed in to witness his afternoon arraignment over alleged mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice in the months after he left the White House.

After repeated demands for the classified documents, an August search of Trump’s property by the FBI turned up dozens of files stored haphazardly enough that an investigation and subsequent decision by a grand jury led the 45th president to accusations he violated the Espionage Act, a place no U.S. chief executive has ever been.

Cannon, randomly selected to oversee the case brought against Trump, suddenly wields unprecedented power to impact the pace of the 2024 election, as she will now set both the tempo and tone of the case. The former federal prosecutor was chastised for her ruling in earlier Trump-related proceedings after she appointed a special master to review the documents seized by the government only to have her order vacated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.

Trump, who was in court for less than 2 hours, was not forced to post bail nor subjected to conditions for his release, other than that he not discuss the particulars of the case with witnesses except in the presence of counsel. Trump was not made to stand for a mug shot nor were his fingers inked for prints.

Technically now under arrest by federal authorities, along with his personal valet Walt Nauta who is also facing related charges stemming from his role in the documents case, Trump will remain free on his own recognizance to campaign and carry on with business.

It is unclear when Trump will next need to appear in court, as Cannon did not immediately set a date for the next phase of the trial. Legal experts suggest she may wait for either side to begin filing motions in the case before coming up with a schedule for proceedings.

The former president was met by cheers from supporters when he arrived at the federal courthouse ahead of his 3 p.m. court appearance and waved from the back of his government SUV when he left shortly before 4 p.m.

The scene in Miami outside the courthouse was mostly peaceful. Trump had called on his supporters to protest his court appearance and hundreds answered his call, waving flags bearing the former president’s name and stylized image.

Trump stopped at a Miami cafe to meet with more supporters not far from the courthouse, before boarding his private plane and flying to Bedminster, N.J., for a scheduled evening campaign appearance.

No other U.S. president has ever been charged with a crime. At current, including felony state-level charges he is fighting in an unrelated case out of New York, Trump is facing 71 separate felony charges.

The former president is also dominating in Republican presidential polls, leading the next closest candidate by more than 30 points.

Herald wire services contributed.

MIAMI (AP) — Donald Trump became the first former president to face a judge on federal charges as he pleaded not guilty in a Miami courtroom Tuesday to dozens of felony counts accusing him of hoarding classified documents and refusing government demands to give them back.

The history-making court date, centered on charges that Trump mishandled government secrets that as commander-in-chief he was entrusted to protect, kickstarts a legal process that will unfold at the height of the 2024 presidential campaign and carry profound consequences not only for his political future but also for his own personal liberty.

Trump approached his arraignment with characteristic bravado, posting social media broadsides against the prosecution from inside his motorcade en route to the courthouse and insisting — as he has through years of legal woes — that he has done nothing wrong and was being persecuted for political purposes. But inside the courtroom, he sat silently, scowling and arms crossed, as a lawyer entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in a brief arraignment that ended without him having to surrender his passport or otherwise restrict his travel.

The arraignment, though largely procedural in nature, was the latest in an unprecedented reckoning this year for Trump, who faces charges in New York arising from hush money payments during his 2016 presidential campaign as well as ongoing investigations in Washington and Atlanta into efforts to undo the results of the 2020 race.

Always in campaign mode, he swiftly pivoted from the solemn courtroom to a festive restaurant, stopping on his way out of Miami at Versailles, an iconic Cuban spot in the city’s Little Havana neighborhood where supporters serenaded Trump, who turns 77 on Wednesday, with “Happy Birthday.” The back-to-back events highlight the tension for Trump in the months ahead as he balances the pageantry of campaigning with courtroom stops accompanying his status as a twice-indicted criminal defendant.

Yet the gravity of the moment was unmistakable.

Until last week, no former president had ever been charged by the Justice Department, let alone accused of mishandling top-secret information. The indictment unsealed last week charged Trump with 37 felony counts — many under the Espionage Act — that accuse him of illegally storing classified documents in his bedroom, bathroom, shower and other locations at Mar-a-Lago and trying to hide them from the Justice Department as investigators demanded them back. The charges carry a yearslong prison sentence in the event of a conviction.

Trump has relied on a familiar playbook of painting himself as a victim of political persecution. He attacked the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case as “a Trump hater,” pledging to remain in the race and scheduling a speech and fundraiser for Tuesday night at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club.

But Attorney General Merrick Garland, an appointee of President Joe Biden, sought to insulate the department from political attacks by handing ownership of the case last November to a special counsel, Jack Smith, who on Friday declared, “We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”

Smith attended Tuesday’s arraignment, sitting in the front row behind his team of prosecutors.

The court appearance unfolded against the backdrop of potential protests, with some high-profile backers using barbed rhetoric to voice support. Though city officials said they prepared for possible unrest, there were few signs of significant disruption.

Trump didn’t say a word during the court appearance, other than to occasionally turn and whisper to his attorneys who were seated on either side of him. He fiddled with a pen and clasped his hands on the table in front of him as the lawyers and the judge debated the conditions of his release.

While he was not required to surrender a passport — prosecutors said he was not considered a flight risk — the magistrate judge presiding over the arraignment directed Trump to not discuss the case with certain witnesses. That includes Walt Nauta, his valet who was indicted last week on charges that he moved boxes of documents at Trump’s direction and misled the FBI about it.

Nauta did not enter a plea Tuesday because he did not have a local lawyer with him.

Trump attorney Todd Blanche objected to the idea of imposing restrictions on the former president’s contact with possible witnesses, noting they include many people close to Trump, including staff and members of his protection detail.

“Many of the people he interacts with on a daily basis — including the men and women who protect him — are potential witnesses in this case,” Blanche said.

Trump, who has repeatedly insisted that he did nothing wrong, showed no emotion as he was led by law enforcement out of the courtroom through a side door.

Even for a man whose presidency and post-White House life have been defined by criminal investigations, the documents probe had long stood out both because of the volume of evidence that prosecutors had seemed to amass and the severity of the allegations.

A federal grand jury in Washington had heard testimony for months, but the Justice Department filed the case in Florida, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located and where many of the alleged acts of obstruction occurred.

Though Trump appeared Tuesday before a federal magistrate, the case has been assigned to a District Court judge he appointed, Aileen Cannon, who ruled in his favor last year in a dispute over whether an outside special master could be appointed to review the seized classified documents. A federal appeals panel ultimately overturned her ruling.

It’s unclear what defenses Trump is likely to invoke as the case moves forward. Two of his lead lawyers announced their resignation the morning after his indictment, and the notes and recollections of another attorney, M. Evan Corcoran, are cited repeatedly throughout the 49-page charging document, suggesting prosecutors envision him as a potential key witness.

In the indictment the Justice Department unsealed Friday most of the charges — 31 or the 37 felony counts — against Trump relate to the willful retention of national defense information. Other charges include conspiracy to commit obstruction and false statements.

The indictment Friday accuses Trump of illegally retaining national security documents that he took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office in January 2021. The documents he stored, prosecutors say, included material on nuclear programs, defense and weapons capabilities of the U.S. and foreign governments and a Pentagon “attack plan,” prosecutors say. He is accused of showing off some to people who didn’t have security clearances to view them.

Beyond that, according to the indictment, he repeatedly sought to obstruct government efforts to recover the documents, including by directing Nauta to move boxes and also suggesting to his own lawyer that he hide or destroy documents sought by a Justice Department subpoena.

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Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York and Terry Spencer, Kate Brumback, Curt Anderson and Joshua Goodman in Miami, contributed to this report.

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More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump

Donald Trump made a first appearance in federal court in Miami on Tuesday facing 37 counts related to the mishandling and retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Here’s a look at the charges, the special counsel’s investigation and how Trump’s case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

WHAT HAPPENED IN COURT?

Trump’s lawyer entered a not-guilty plea for him, and the former president was released on his own recognizance without no bail. He will not have to surrender his passport or have his personal travel restricted.

He scowled at times during the 50-minute hearing, but was otherwise expressionless. He folded his arms, fiddled with a pen and crossed his fingers back and forth as he listened.

Trump leaned over to whisper to his attorneys before the hearing began but did not speak during the proceedings. He remained seated while his lawyer Todd Blanche stood up and entered the plea on his behalf. “We most certainly enter a plea of not guilty,” the lawyer told the judge.

Blanche objected to barring the former president from talking to witnesses, including his co-defendant, valet Walt Nauta, saying that they work for him and he needs to be able to communicate with them. After some back and forth, Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman said Trump cannot talk to them about the case except through his lawyers, but he can talk to them about their jobs.

Nauta was granted bond with the same conditions as Trump. He did not enter a plea because he does not have a local attorney. He will be arraigned June 27 before Chief Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres, but he does not have to be present.

Unlike Trump’s arraignment in New York, no photographs were taken because cameras aren’t allowed in federal court. There were, however, sketch artists, and theirs will be the only images from the actual courtroom appearance.

Security remained tight outside the building, but there were no signs of significant disruptions despite the presence of hundreds of protesters. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said on Fox News that there were no arrests or “major incidents.”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

After the hearing, Trump was flying back to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. He planned to hold a fundraiser and give a speech later Tuesday night.

Before heading to the airport, Trump’s motorcade took a detour to Versailles Restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, where a small crowd of supporters awaited him. Posing for photos and saying “food for everyone,” Trump commented briefly on his case.

“I think it’s going great,” he said. “We have a rigged country. We have a country that’s corrupt.”

Several religious leaders at the restaurant prayed over him for a moment.

WHAT ARE THE CHARGES?

Trump faces 37 counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, including 31 counts under an Espionage Act statute pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information. The charges also include counts of obstructing justice and making false statements, among other crimes.

Trump is accused of keeping documents related to “nuclear weaponry in the United States” and the “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” along with documents from White House intelligence briefings, including some that detail the military capabilities of the U.S. and other countries, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors allege Trump showed off the documents to people who did not have security clearances to review them and later tried to conceal documents from his own lawyers as they sought to comply with federal demands to find and return documents.

The top charges carry penalties of up to 20 years in prison.

HOW DID THIS CASE COME ABOUT?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Trump in spring 2021 when they realized that important material from his time in office was missing.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the U.S. government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trump’s Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained “a lot” of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trump’s possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trump’s lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings — including some at the top secret level — have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.

DIDN’T PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN AND FORMER VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE HAVE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS, TOO?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from those involving Trump.

After classified documents were found at Biden’s think tank and Pence’s Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorized other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Biden or Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. That’s important because the Justice Department historically looks for willfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Biden’s Delaware home and former office. But even if the Justice Department were to find Biden’s case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

WHAT ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON?

In claiming that Trump is the target of a politically motivated prosecution, some fellow Republicans have cited the Justice Department’s decision in 2016 not to bring charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in that year’s presidential race, over her handling of classified information.

Clinton relied on a private email system for the sake of convenience during her time as the Obama administration’s top diplomat. That decision came back to haunt her when, in 2015, the intelligence agencies’ internal watchdog alerted the FBI to the presence of potentially hundreds of emails containing classified information.

FBI investigators would ultimately conclude that Clinton sent and received emails containing classified information on that unclassified system, including information classified at the top secret level. Of the roughly 30,000 emails turned over by Clinton’s representatives, the FBI has said, 110 emails in 52 email chains were found to have classified information, including some top secret.

After a roughly yearlong inquiry, the FBI closed the investigation in July 2016, finding that Clinton did not intend to break the law. The bureau reopened the inquiry months later, 11 days before the presidential election, after discovering a new batch of emails. After reviewing those communications, the FBI again opted against recommending charges.

At the time, then-FBI Director James Comey condemned Clinton’s email practices as “extremely careless,” but noted that there was no evidence that Clinton had violated factors including efforts to obstruct justice, willful mishandling of classified documents and indications of disloyalty to the U.S.

DOES A FEDERAL INDICTMENT PREVENT TRUMP FROM RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT?

No. Neither the charges nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP

Donald Trump made an first appearance in federal court in Miami on Tuesday facing 37 counts related to the mishandling and retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Here’s a look at the charges, the special counsel’s investigation and how Trump’s case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

What happened in court?

Trump’s lawyer entered a not-guilty plea for him, and the former president was released on his own recognizance without having to pay bond. He will not have to surrender his passport or have his personal travel restricted.

He scowled at times during the 50-minute hearing, but was otherwise expressionless. He also crossed his arms, fiddled with a pen and crossed his fingers back and forth as he listened.

Trump leaned over to whisper to his attorneys before the hearing began but did not speak during the proceedings. He remained seated while his lawyer Todd Blanche stood up and entered the plea on his behalf. “We most certainly enter a plea of not guilty,” he told the judge.

Blanche objected to barring the former president from talking to witnesses, including his co-defendant, valet Walt Nauta, saying that they work for him and he needs to be able to communicate with them. After some back and forth, Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman said Trump cannot talk to them about the case except through his lawyers, but he can talk to them about their jobs.

Nauta was granted bond with the same conditions as Trump. He did not enter a plea because he does not have a local attorney. He will be arraigned June 27 before Chief Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres, but he does not have to be present.

Unlike Trump’s arraignment in New York, no photographs were taken because cameras aren’t allowed in federal court. There were, however, sketch artists, and theirs will be the only images from the actual courtroom appearance.

Security remained tight outside the building, but there were no signs of significant disruptions despite the presence of hundreds of protesters. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said on Fox News that there were no arrests or “major incidents.”

What happens next?

After the hearing, Trump is flying back to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. He plans to hold a fundraiser and give a speech later Tuesday night.

Before heading to the airport, Trump’s motorcade took a detour to Versailles Restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, where a small crowd of supporters awaited him. Posing for photos and saying “food for everyone,” Trump commented briefly on his case.

“I think it’s going great,” he said. “We have a rigged country. We have a country that’s corrupt.”

Several religious leaders at the restaurant prayed over him for a moment.

What are the charges?

Trump faces 37 counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, including 31 counts under an Espionage Act statute pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information. The charges also include counts of obstructing justice and making false statements, among other crimes.

Trump is accused of keeping documents related to “nuclear weaponry in the United States” and the “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” along with documents from White House intelligence briefings, including some that detail the military capabilities of the U.S. and other countries, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors allege Trump showed off the documents to people who did not have security clearances to review them and later tried to conceal documents from his own lawyers as they sought to comply with federal demands to find and return documents.

The top charges carry penalties of up to 20 years in prison.

How did this case come about?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Trump in spring 2021 when they realized that important material from his time in office was missing.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the U.S. government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trump’s Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained “a lot” of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trump’s possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trump’s lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings — including some at the top secret level — have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.

Didn’t President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence have classified documents, too?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from those involving Trump.

After classified documents were found at Biden’s think tank and Pence’s Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorized other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Biden or Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. That’s important because the Justice Department historically looks for willfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Biden’s Delaware home and former office. But even if the Justice Department were to find Biden’s case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

What about Hillary Clinton?

In claiming that Trump is the target of a politically motivated prosecution, some fellow Republicans have cited the Justice Department’s decision in 2016 not to bring charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in that year’s presidential race, over her handling of classified information.

Clinton relied on a private email system for the sake of convenience during her time as the Obama administration’s top diplomat. That decision came back to haunt her when, in 2015, the intelligence agencies’ internal watchdog alerted the FBI to the presence of potentially hundreds of emails containing classified information.

FBI investigators would ultimately conclude that Clinton sent and received emails containing classified information on that unclassified system, including information classified at the top secret level. Of the roughly 30,000 emails turned over by Clinton’s representatives, the FBI has said, 110 emails in 52 email chains were found to have classified information, including some top secret.

After a roughly yearlong inquiry, the FBI closed the investigation in July 2016, finding that Clinton did not intend to break the law. The bureau reopened the inquiry months later, 11 days before the presidential election, after discovering a new batch of emails. After reviewing those communications, the FBI again opted against recommending charges.

At the time, then-FBI Director James Comey condemned Clinton’s email practices as “extremely careless,” but noted that there was no evidence that Clinton had violated factors including efforts to obstruct justice, willful mishandling of classified documents and indications of disloyalty to the U.S.

Does a federal indictment prevent Trump from running for president?

No. Neither the charges nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

Carlson was ousted from Fox in late April, less than a week after Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to settle an explosive defamation case. The network provided no explanation for the firing, but a wave of reports on damaging text messages and other statements Carlson made during his time at Fox have since piled up.

Since leaving Fox, Carlson kicked off a “Tucker on Twitter” series — arguing that Twitter was “the only” major remaining platform that allows free speech as he denounced news media. The series, which has published two episodes so far, has appeared to escalate contract tensions between Carlson and Fox.

Fox has demanded Carlson stop posting videos to Twitter, The New York Times also reported Monday — as the network’s lawyers accuse Carlson of violating his contract, which runs until early 2025 and restricts his ability to appear on other media outlets. Meanwhile, Carlson’s lawyers have said the network breached the contract first.

A spokesperson for Fox News Media and attorneys representing Carlson, Bryan Freedman and Harmeet Dhillon, did not immediately return requests for comments on Tuesday.

“Doubling down on the most catastrophic programming decision in the history of the cable news industry, Fox is now demanding that Tucker Carlson be silent until after the 2024 election,”

Dhillon said in a statement sent to Axios and the Times. “Tucker will not be silenced by anyone.”

Before his April firing, Carlson was Fox’s top-rated host. His stew of grievances and political theories grew to define the network over recent years and made him an influential, and widely controversial, force in GOP politics.

Carlson has previously come under fire for defending a white-supremacist theory that claims white people are being “replaced” by people of color, as well as spreading misinformation about issues ranging from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Donald Trump became the first former president to face a judge on federal charges as he pleaded not guilty in a Miami courtroom Tuesday to dozens of felony counts accusing him of hoarding classified documents and refusing government demands to give them back.

The history-making court date, centered on charges that Trump mishandled government secrets that as commander-in-chief he was entrusted to protect, kickstarts a legal process that could unfold at the height of the 2024 presidential campaign and carry profound consequences not only for his political future but also for his own personal liberty.

Trump approached his arraignment with characteristic bravado, posting social media broadsides against the prosecution from inside his motorcade en route to the courthouse and insisting as he has through years of legal woes that he has done nothing wrong and was being persecuted for political purposes. But inside the courtroom, he sat silently, scowling and arms crossed as a lawyer entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in a brief arraignment that ended without him having to surrender his passport or otherwise restrict his travel.

The arraignment, though largely procedural in nature, was the latest in an unprecedented public reckoning this year for Trump, who faces charges in New York arising from hush money payments during his 2016 presidential campaign as well as ongoing investigations in Washington and Atlanta into efforts to undo the results of the 2020 race.

He’s sought to project confidence in the face of unmistakable legal peril, attacking the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case as “a Trump hater,” pledging to remain in the race and scheduling a speech and fundraiser for Tuesday night at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club. He stopped on his way out of Miami at Versailles, an iconic Cuban restaurant in the city’s Little Havana neighborhood where supporters serenaded Trump, who turns 77 years old on Wednesday, with “Happy Birthday.”

Even so, the gravity of the moment was clear.

Until last week, no former president had ever been charged by the Justice Department, let alone accused of mishandling top-secret information. The indictment unsealed last week charged Trump with 37 felony counts — many under the Espionage Act — that accuse him of illegally storing classified documents in his bedroom, bathroom, shower and other locations at Mar-a-Lago and trying to hide them from the Justice Department as investigators demanded them back. The charges carry a yearslong prison sentence in the event of a conviction.

Trump has relied on a familiar playbook of painting himself as a victim of political persecution. But Attorney General Merrick Garland, an appointee of President Joe Biden, sought to insulate the department from political attacks by handing ownership of the case to a special counsel, Jack Smith, who on Friday declared, “We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”

Smith attended Tuesday’s arraignment, sitting in the front row behind his team of prosecutors.

The court appearance unfolded against the backdrop of potential protests, with some high-profile backers using barbed rhetoric to voice support. Trump himself encouraged supporters to join a planned protest Tuesday at the courthouse. Though city officials said they prepared for possible unrest around the courthouse, there were little signs of significant disruption.

While Trump was not required to surrender a passport – prosecutor David Harbach said he was not considered a flight risk, a likely recognition of his status as a presidential candidate – he was directed to not have any personal contact with any witnesses in the case. That includes Walt Nauta, his valet and close aide, who was indicted last week on charges that he moved boxes of documents at Trump’s direction and misled the FBI about it. He did not enter a plea Tuesday because he did not have a local lawyer with him.

The magistrate judge who presided over the arraignment directed Trump not to discuss the case with any witnesses, including Nauta, but said they can discuss work.

Even for a man whose post-presidential life has been defined by criminal investigations, the documents probe had long stood out both because of the volume of evidence that prosecutors had seemed to amass and the severity of the allegations.

A federal grand jury in Washington had heard testimony for months, but the Justice Department filed it in Florida, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located and where many of the alleged acts of obstruction occurred. Though Trump appeared Tuesday before a federal magistrate, the case has been assigned to a District Court judge he appointed, Aileen Cannon, who ruled in his favor last year in a dispute over whether an outside special master could be appointed to review the seized classified documents. A federal appeals panel ultimately overturned her ruling.

It’s unclear what defenses Trump is likely to invoke as the case moves forward. Two of his lead lawyers announced their resignation the morning after his indictment, and the notes and recollections of another attorney, M. Evan Corcoran, are cited repeatedly throughout the 49-page charging document, suggesting prosecutors envision him as a potential key witness.

The Justice Department unsealed Friday an indictment charging Trump with 37 felony counts, 31 relating to the willful retention of national defense information. Other charges include conspiracy to commit obstruction and false statements.

The indictment alleges Trump intentionally retained hundreds of classified documents that he took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office in January 2021. The material he stored, including in a bathroom, ballroom, bedroom and shower, included material on nuclear programs, defense and weapons capabilities of the U.S. and foreign governments and a Pentagon “attack plan,” prosecutors say

Beyond that, prosecutors say, he sought to obstruct government efforts to recover the documents, including by directing personal aide Walt Nauta — who was charged alongside Trump — to move boxes to conceal them and also suggesting to his own lawyer that he hide or destroy documents sought by a Justice Department subpoena.

Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York and Terry Spencer, Kate Brumback, Curt Anderson and Joshua Goodman in Miami, contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Much of the theft was brazen, even simple.

Fraudsters used the Social Security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to get unemployment checks. Cheaters collected those benefits in multiple states. And federal loan applicants weren’t cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy borrowers.

Criminals and gangs grabbed the money. But so did a U.S. soldier in Georgia, the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri and a roofing contractor in Montana.

All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the worst pandemic in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall.

An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.

That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes.

How could so much be stolen? Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic’s early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy.

“Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access,” said Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Washington. “Folks kind of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn’t legal.”

The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.

Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Those programs were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic.

The pilfering was wide but not always as deep as the eye-catching headlines about cases involving many millions of dollars. But all of the theft, big and small, illustrates an epidemic of scams and swindles at a time America was grappling with overrun hospitals, school closures and shuttered businesses. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, more than 1.13 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Michael Horowitz, the U.S. Justice Department inspector general who chairs the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told Congress the fraud is “clearly in the tens of billions of dollars” and may eventually exceed $100 billion.

Horowitz told the AP he was sticking with that estimate, but won’t be certain about the number until he gets more solid data.

“I’m hesitant to get too far out on how much it is,” he said. “But clearly it’s substantial and the final accounting is still at least a couple of years away.”

Mike Galdo, the U.S. Justice Department’s acting director for COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement, said, “It is an unprecedented amount of fraud.”

Before leaving office, former President Donald Trump approved emergency aid measures totaling $3.2 trillion, according to figures from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion. About a fifth of the $5.2 trillion has yet to be paid out, according to the committee’s most recent accounting.

Never has so much federal emergency aid been injected into the U.S. economy so quickly. “The largest rescue package in American history,” U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told Congress.

The enormous scale of that package has obscured multibillion-dollar mistakes.

An $837 billion IRS program, for example, succeeded 99% of the time in getting economic stimulus checks to the proper taxpayers, according to the tax agency. Nevertheless, that 1% failure rate translated into nearly $8 billion going to “ineligible individuals,” a Treasury Department inspector general told AP.

An IRS spokesman said the agency does not agree with all the figures cited by the watchdog and noted that, even if correct, the loss represented a tiny fraction of the program’s budget.

The health crisis thrust the Small Business Administration, an agency that typically gets little attention, into an unprecedented role. In the seven decades before the pandemic struck, for example, the SBA had doled out $67 billion in disaster loans.

When the pandemic struck, the agency was assigned to manage two massive relief efforts — the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection programs, which would swell to more than a trillion dollars. SBA’s workforce had to get money out the door, fast, to help struggling businesses and their employees. COVID-19 pushed SBA’s pace from a walk to an Olympic sprint. Between March 2020 and the end of July 2020, the agency granted 3.2 million COVID-19 economic injury disaster loans totaling $169 billion, according to an SBA inspector general’s report, while at the same time implementing the huge new Paycheck Protection Program.

In the haste, guardrails to protect federal money were dropped. Prospective borrowers were allowed to “self-certify” that their loan applications were true. The CARES Act also barred SBA from looking at tax return transcripts that could have weeded out shady or undeserving applicants, a decision eventually reversed at the end of 2020.

“If you open up the bank window and say, give me your application and just promise me you really are who you say you are, you attract a lot of fraudsters and that’s what happened here,” Horowitz said.

The SBA inspector general’s office has estimated fraud in the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program at $86 billion and the Paycheck Protection program at $20 billion. The watchdog is expected in coming weeks to release revised loss figures that are likely to be much higher.

In an interview, SBA Inspector General Hannibal “Mike” Ware declined to say what the new fraud estimate for both programs will be.

“It will be a figure that is fair, that is 1,000% defensible by my office, fully backed by our significant criminal investigative activity that is taking place in this space,” Ware said.

Ware and his staff are overwhelmed with pandemic-related audits and investigations. The office has a backlog of more than 80,000 actionable leads, close to a 100 years’ worth of work.

“Death by a thousand cuts might be death by 80,000 cuts for them,” Horowitz said of Ware’s workload. “It’s just the magnitude of it, the enormity of it.”

A 2022 study from the University of Texas at Austin found almost five times as many suspicious Paycheck Protection loans as the $20 billion SBA’s inspector general has reported so far. The research, led by finance professor John Griffin, found as much as $117 billion in questionable and possibly fraudulent loans, citing indicators such as non-registered businesses and multiple loans to the same address.

Horowitz, the pandemic watchdog chairman, criticized the government’s failure early on to use the “Do Not Pay” Treasury Department database, designed to keep government money from going to debarred contractors, fugitives, felons or people convicted of tax fraud. Those reviews, he said, could have been done quickly.

“It’s a false narrative that has been set out, that there are only two choices,” Horowitz said. “One choice is, get the money out right away. And that the only other choice was to spend weeks and months trying to figure out who was entitled to it.”

In less than a few days, a week at most, Horowitz said, SBA might have discovered thousands of ineligible applicants.

“24 hours? 48 hours? Would that really have upended the program?” Horowitz said. “I don’t think it would have. And it was data sitting there. It didn’t get checked.”

The Biden administration put in place stricter rules to stem pandemic fraud, including use of the “Do Not Pay” database. Biden also recently proposed a $1.6 billion plan to boost law enforcement efforts to go after pandemic relief fraudsters.

“I think the bottom line is regardless of what the number is, it emanates overwhelmingly from three programs that were designed and originated in 2020 with too many large holes that opened the door to criminal fraud,” Gene Sperling, the White House American Rescue Plan coordinator, said in an interview.

“We came into office when the largest amounts of fraud were already out of the barn,” Sperling added.

In a statement, an SBA spokesperson declined to say whether the agency agrees with the figures issued by Ware’s office, saying the federal government has not developed an accepted system for assessing fraud in government programs. Previous analyses have pointed to “potential fraud” or “fraud indicators” in a manner that conveys those numbers as a true fraud estimate when they are not, according to the statement.

Han Nguyen, a spokesman for the SBA, said Monday that “the vast majority of the likely fraud originated in the first nine months of the pandemic programs, under the Trump administration.” For the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program, Nguyen said, SBA’s “working estimate” found $28 billion in likely fraud.

The coronavirus pandemic plunged the U.S. economy into a short but devastating recession. Jobless rates soared into double digits and Washington sent hundreds of billions of dollars to states to help the suddenly unemployed.

For crooks, it was like tossing chum into the sea to lure fish. Many of these state unemployment agencies used antiquated computer systems or had too few staff to stop bogus claims from being paid.

“Yes, the states were overwhelmed in terms of demand,” said Brent Parton, acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration. “We had not seen a spike like this ever in a global event like a pandemic. The systems were underfunded. They were not resilient. And I would say, more importantly, were vulnerable to sophisticated attacks by fraudsters.”

Fraud in pandemic unemployment assistance programs stands at $76 billion, according to congressional testimony from Labor Department Inspector General Larry Turner. That’s a conservative estimate. Another $115 billion mistakenly went to people who should not have received the benefits, according to his testimony.

Turner declined AP’s request for an interview.

Turner’s task in identifying all of the pandemic unemployment insurance fraud has been complicated by a lack of cooperation from the federal Bureau of Prisons, according to a September “alert memo” issued by his office. Scam artists used Social Security numbers of federal prisoners to steal millions of dollars in benefits.

His office still doesn’t know exactly how much was swiped that way. The prison bureau had declined to provide current data about federal prisoners. The AP reached out to the bureau several times for comment, starting June 2. Bureau spokesperson Emery Nelson said on Monday the agency had provided in February and March “all the necessary data” to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Turner is a member of the committee.

Ohio State Auditor Keith Faber saw trouble coming when safeguards to ensure the unemployment aid only went to people who legitimately qualified were lowered, making conditions ripe for fraud and waste. The state’s unemployment agency “took controls down because on the one hand, they literally were drinking from a firehose,” Faber said. “They had a year’s worth of claims in a couple of weeks. The second part of the problem was the (federal government) directed them to get the money out the door as quickly as possible and worry less about security. They took that to heart. I think that was a mistake.”

Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services reported in February $1 billion in fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims and another $4.8 billion in overpayments.

The ubiquitous masks that became a symbol of the COVID-19 pandemic are seen on fewer and fewer faces. Hospitalizations for the virus have steadily declined, according to CDC data, and Biden in April ended the national emergency to respond to the pandemic.

But on politically divided Capitol Hill, lawmakers have not put the pandemic behind them and are engaged in a fierce debate over the success of the relief spending and who’s to blame for the theft.

Too much government money, Republicans argue, breeds fraud, waste and inflation. Democrats have countered that all the financial muscle from Washington saved lives, businesses and jobs.

The GOP-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee is investigating pandemic relief spending. “We must identify where this money went, how much ended up in the hands of fraudsters or ineligible participants, and what should be done to ensure it never happens again,” the panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, said in a statement Tuesday.

Republicans and Democrats did, however, find common ground last year on bills to give the federal government more time to catch fraudsters. Biden in August signed legislation to increase the statute of limitations from five to 10 years on crimes involving the two major programs managed by the SBA.

The extra time will help federal prosecutors untangle pandemic fraud cases, which often involve identity theft and crooks overseas. But there’s no guarantee they’ll catch everyone who jumped at the chance for an easy payday. They’re busy, too, with crimes unrelated to pandemic relief funds.

“Do we have enough cases and leads that we could be doing them in 2030? We absolutely could,” said Fruchter, the federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Washington. “But my experience tells me that likely there will be other priorities that will come up and will need to be addressed. And unfortunately, in our office, we don’t have a dedicated pandemic fraud unit.”

Congress has not yet passed a measure that would give prosecutors the additional five years to go after unemployment fraudsters. That worries Turner, the Labor Department watchdog. Without the extension, he told Congress in a late May report, people who stole the benefits may escape justice.

Sperling, the White House official, said any future crisis that requires government intervention doesn’t have to be a choice between helping people in need and stopping fraudsters.

“The prevention strategy going forward is that in a crisis, you can focus on fast delivery to people in desperate situations without feeling that you can only get that speed by taking down commonsense anti-fraud guardrails,” he said.

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McDermott reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

The 49-page federal indictment of former President Donald Trump lays out a stunning timeline of events, detailing allegations that he not only mishandled sensitive material, but also took steps to hide records and impede investigators.

Here are some of the key events leading to the 37 criminal charges against Trump, according to the indictment:

Jan. 20, 2021: As Trump leaves the White House, he directs the movement of dozens of storage boxes to Mar-a-Lago, prosecutors say. The boxes, packed by Trump and his White House staff, contain newspaper clippings, letters, photos and other mementos from his time in office, but also hundreds of classified documents that, as a former president, he wasn’t authorized to have.

Under the Presidential Records Act, presidential records are considered federal, not private property and must be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration. Multiple federal laws govern the handling of classified and sensitive documents, including statutes making it a crime to remove such material and keep it at an unauthorized location.

After Jan. 20, 2021: Some boxes brought from the White House are stored on a stage in one of Mar-a-Lago’s gilded ballrooms. A photo in the indictment shows boxes stacked on a stage.

March 15, 2021: Boxes are moved from the ballroom to the business center at Mar-a-Lago.

April 2021: Some boxes are moved into a bathroom and shower. A photo included in the indictment shows them stacked next to a toilet, a vanity and a trash can.

May 2021: Trump directs employees to clean out a storage room in a highly accessible area on Mar-a-Lago’s ground floor so it can be used to store his boxes, the indictment says. Trump also directs that some boxes be brought to his Bedminster, New Jersey, summer residence.

On or about May 6, 2021: Realizing that some documents from Trump’s presidency may be missing, the National Archives asks that he turn over any presidential records he may have kept upon leaving the White House. The agency makes subsequent, repeated demands.

June 2021: The National Archives warns Trump through his representatives that it will refer the matter to the Justice Department if he does not comply.

June 24, 2021: Boxes are moved to the storage room. More than 80 boxes are kept there.

July 21, 2021: Trump allegedly shows a military “plan of attack” that he says is “highly confidential” to a writer interviewing him at his Bedminster property. Trump remarks, “as president I could have declassified it. … Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” according to the indictment, citing a recording of the interview.

August or September 2021: Trump allegedly shows a classified map relating to a foreign military operation to a representative of his political action committee at his Bedminster golf course, the indictment says. Trump tells the person that he shouldn’t be showing anyone the map and that the person shouldn’t get too close.

November 2021: Trump directs his executive assistant and “body man” Walt Nauta and another employee to start moving boxes from a storage room to his residence for him to review. Nauta is charged in the indictment as Trump’s co-conspirator.

Dec. 7, 2021: Nauta finds that several of Trump’s boxes have fallen, spilling papers onto the storage room floor, the indictment says. Among them is a document with a “SECRET” intelligence marking. According to the indictment, Nauta texts another Trump employee, “I opened the door and found this,” to which the other employee replies, “Oh no oh no.”

Late December 2021: The National Archives continues to demand that Trump turn over missing records from his presidency. In late December 2021, a Trump representative tells the agency that 12 boxes of records have been found and are ready to be retrieved.

January 17, 2022: Trump turns over 15 boxes to the National Archives. According to the indictment, Nauta and another Trump employee load them into Nauta’s car and take them to a commercial truck for delivery to the agency.

The boxes are found to contain 197 documents with classified markings, including 69 marked confidential, 98 secret and 30 top secret. Some documents have markings suggesting they include information from highly sensitive human sources or the collection of electronic “signals” authorized by a court under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Feb. 9, 2022: The National Archives refers the matter to the Justice Department after a preliminary review finds the boxes contain numerous classified documents. The special agent in charge of the agency’s Office of the Inspector General writes, “Of most significant concern was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records” and otherwise improperly identified.

Feb. 10, 2022: Trump’s Save America PAC releases a statement insisting the return of the documents had been “routine” and “no big deal.” Trump insists the “papers were given easily and without conflict and on a very friendly basis,” and adds, “It was a great honor to work with” the National Archives “to help formally preserve the Trump Legacy.”

Feb. 18, 2022: In a letter to a congressional oversight committee, the National Archives reveals the boxes contained classified information and confirms the Justice Department referral. Trump’s Save America PAC releases another statement insisting, “The National Archives did not ‘find’ anything,” but “were given, upon request, Presidential Records in an ordinary and routine process to ensure the preservation of my legacy and in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.”

March 30, 2022: The FBI opens its investigation.

April 12, 2022: The National Archives informs Trump that, at the Justice Department’s request, it intends to provide the FBI with the 15 boxes he turned over on Jan. 17, 2022. Trump’s representative asks for an extension until April 29.

April 26, 2022: The grand jury investigation begins.

April 29, 2022: The Justice Department asks Trump’s lawyers for immediate access to the 15 boxes, citing national security interests and the need for “an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported.” Trump’s lawyers again ask for an extension, saying they need to review the material to “ascertain whether any specific document is subject to privilege.”

May 10, 2022: The National Archives informs Trump’s lawyers that it will provide the FBI access to the boxes as soon as May 12.

May 11, 2022: A grand jury issues a subpoena to Trump and his office requiring that they turn over all classified materials in their possession.

May 23, 2022: Trump’s lawyers advise him to comply with the subpoena, but Trump balks, telling them, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes.” Prosecutors, citing notes from one of the lawyers, say Trump wondered aloud about dodging the subpoena, asking his counsel, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” and ”isn’t it better if there are no documents?”

May 26, 2022: Nauta is interviewed by the FBI and, according to prosecutors, repeatedly lies about his knowledge of the movement of boxes at Mar-a-Lago. Nauta claims he wasn’t aware of boxes being brought to Trump’s residence for his review and says he didn’t know how boxes turned over to the National Archives got to Trump’s residence.

Nauta also lies when asked whether he knew where Trump’s boxes were stored before they went to his residence and whether they’d been in a secured or locked location, prosecutors say. His reply, according to the indictment: “I wish, I wish I could tell you. I don’t know. I don’t — I honestly just don’t know.”

June 2, 2022: One of Trump’s lawyers returns to Mar-a-Lago to search boxes in the storage room and finds 38 additional classified documents — five documents marked confidential, 16 marked secret and 17 marked top secret. After the search, prosecutors say, Trump asks: “Did you find anything? … Is it bad? Good?” and makes a plucking motion that the lawyer takes to mean that he should take out anything “really bad” before turning over the papers.

Prior to the search, prosecutors say, Trump had Nauta move 64 boxes from the storage room to his residence. Of those, 30 were moved back to the storage room, leaving 34 boxes in Trump’s residence and out of the lawyer’s sight.

June 3, 2022: FBI agents and a Justice Department lawyer visit Mar-a-Lago to collect the 38 classified documents from Trump’s lawyer. They are in a single accordion folder, double-wrapped in tape. While there, investigators are allowed to go to the storage room, but are “explicitly prohibited” from looking inside boxes, “giving no opportunity” for them “to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained,” according to a court filing.

Trump tells investigations he’s “an open book,” according to the indictment. Another Trump lawyer, acting as his custodian of records, provides investigators a sworn certification that prosecutors say falsely claimed they had conducted a “diligent search” of boxes moved from the White House and “any and all responsive documents” were turned over.

Earlier in the day, prosecutors say, some boxes were loaded onto a plane so Trump could take them to Bedminster for the summer.

June 8, 2022: The Justice Department sends Trump’s lawyer a letter asking that the storage room be secured, and that “all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in that room in their current condition until farther notice.”

July 2022: The grand jury is shown surveillance video of boxes being moved at Mar-a-Lago.

Aug. 5, 2022: The Justice Department applies for a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, citing “probable cause” that additional presidential records and classified documents were being stored there. U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart approves the application the same day.

Aug. 8 2022: The FBI searches searches Mar-a-Lago, seizing 102 classified documents — 75 in the storage room and 27 in Trump’s office, including three found in office desks.

The Justice Department says in a subsequent court filing that the results call “into serious question” earlier representations by Trump’s legal team that they had conducted a “diligent search” and that no classified documents remained.

Aug. 12, 2022: Reinhart makes public the warrant authorizing the Mar-a-Lago search. The document reveals that federal agents are investigating potential violations of three federal laws, including the Espionage Act.

Aug. 26, 2022: A highly redacted version of the affidavit laying out the FBI’s rationale for searching Mar-a-Lago is made public.

Aug. 30, 2022: After Trump’s lawyers request a special master to review the documents for possible executive privilege, the Justice Department responds with a filing that reveals new details about the investigation and a photo of seized documents with marking like “TOP SECRET//SCI” splayed out on a Mar-a-Lago carpet.

March 24, 2023: One of Trump’s lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran, testifies before the Mar-a-Lago grand jury in Washington after being forced to do so by a judge. The Justice Department, in a hugely significant moment in the investigation, succeeded in piercing the attorney-client privilege by arguing that Trump had used Corcoran’s legal services in furtherance of a crime.

June 8, 2023: A grand jury in Miami indicts Trump and Nauta. Trump announces the indictment on his Truth Social platform, calling it “a DARK DAY for the United States of America.” In a video post, he says, “I’m innocent and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly.”

June 9, 2023: The indictment is made public. It shows that Trump is charged with 37 felony counts, including conspiracy to obstruct justice, corruptly concealing a document or record and willful retention of national defense information. Nauta is charged with six counts, including conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case, makes a brief public statement at his office in Washington, saying: “Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”

June 13, 2023: Trump is scheduled to make an initial court appearance at 3 p.m. alongside Nauta at the federal courthouse in Miami.

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More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump

If the latest charges against Trump start to fall apart, it will throw the spotlight back on Democrats and Biden, and confirm what half the country believes – that this is a politically motivated prosecution.

Trump, about to turn 77, is still in a precarious position heading into 2024, with possible indictments related to Jan. 6 and Georgia still to go. Just from a stamina point of view, it will be tough for Trump to survive the heat.

But polls conducted after the 37-count indictment on classified documents was released show the former president is still the frontrunner in the GOP race. A clear majority of Republican primary voters – 81% – say they believe the indictment for illegally keeping secret documents and lying about it is politically motivated.

That’s a clear indication that the charges won’t yet hurt Trump’s cause in the GOP primaries, and may in fact boost him. A new Reuters poll showed 43% of Republicans support Trump, while just 22% picked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

But it’s still early and those numbers could change as more evidence comes back against Trump.

Trump is now in Miami in preparation for his court appearance on Tuesday, but he is already defiant in denying the indictment.

“I HOPE THE ENTIRE COUNTRY IS WATCHING WHAT THE RADICAL LEFT ARE DOING TO AMERICA,” he posted on his Truth Social site.

The question now is, will the spotlight eventually come back to Biden and his own problem with keeping classified documents in his garage?

And will voters blame Biden for bringing the case against Trump, despite the president’s attempts to stay away from it?

It’s pretty hard for Biden to claim he knows nothing about the indictments. Difficult to believe the Department of Justice wouldn’t at least brief the White House about the coming charges. The DOJ is part of the administration, along with the FBI.

If the latest indictment starts to fizzle, it could be bad news for the president and rocket fuel for Trump, much the same way the collapse of the Russian collusion case helped the former president.

Republican voters – and many independents – seem inclined to side with Trump right now in this latest attempt to wound him legally. And they are bound to take it out against Biden.

At the very least, the case against Trump is likely to drag on well past next year’s election, meaning voters will have to decide based on incomplete information.

The 80-year-old Biden – if he really does follow through with his reelection plans – better hope that Americans start to turn against his former rival soon, or there will be a reversal of the 2020 election — no matter how many indictments they bring.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump arrived in Florida on Monday ahead of a history-making federal court appearance on dozens of felony charges accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents and thwarting the Justice Department’s efforts to get them back.

Trump’s Tuesday afternoon appearance in Miami will mark his second time since April facing a judge on criminal charges. But unlike a New York case some legal analysts derided as relatively trivial, the Justice Department’s first prosecution of a former president concerns conduct that prosecutors say jeopardized national security, with Espionage Act charges carrying the prospect of a significant prison sentence.

Ahead of his court date, he and his allies have been escalating efforts to undermine the criminal case against him and drum up protests. He’s ratcheted up the rhetoric against the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case, calling Jack Smith “deranged” as he repeated without any evidence his claims that he was the target of a political persecution. And even as his supporters accuse the Justice Department of being weaponized against him, he vowed Monday to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate President Joe Biden and his family if Trump is elected to a second term.

Trump landed in Miami around 3 p.m. Monday and got into a waiting SUV. He was expected to huddle with advisers before his court appearance, as he looks to line up additional lawyers following the departure before his indictment last week of two attorneys who had handled the defense for months.

He’s encouraged supporters to join a planned protest at the Miami courthouse Tuesday, where he will face the charges and surrender to authorities.

“We need strength in our country now,” Trump said Sunday, speaking to longtime friend and adviser Roger Stone in an interview on WABC Radio. “And they have to go out and they have to protest peacefully. They have to go out.”

“Look, our country has to protest. We have plenty to protest. We’ve lost everything,” he went on.

He also said there were no circumstances “whatsoever” under which he would leave the 2024 race, where he’s been dominating the Republican primary.

Other Trump supporters have rallied to his defense with similar language, including Kari Lake, the unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial candidate in Arizona who pointedly said over the weekend that if prosecutors “want to get to President Trump,” they’re ”going to have to go through me, and 75 million Americans just like me. And most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.”

Trump’s calls for protest echoed exhortations he made ahead of a New York court appearance in April, where he faces charges arising from hush money payments made during his 2016 presidential campaign, though he complained that those who showed up to protest then were “so far away that nobody knew about ’em,” And just like in that case, he plans to address supporters in a Tuesday evening speech hours after his court date.

After his court appearance, he will return to New Jersey, where he’s scheduled a press event to publicly respond to the charges. He’ll also be holding a private fundraiser.

Trump supporters were also planning to load buses to head to Miami from other parts of Florida, raising concerns for law enforcement officials who are preparing for the potential of unrest around the courthouse. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said the city would be ready, and police chief Manuel A. Morales said downtown could see anywhere from a few thousand up to 50,000 protesters. He said the city would be diverting traffic and possibly blocking streets depending on crowd size.

“Make no mistake about it,” Morales said. “We are taking this event extremely serious. We know there is a potential of things taking a turn for the worse but that’s not the Miami way.”

The Justice Department unsealed Friday an indictment charging Trump with 37 felony counts, 31 relating to the willful retention of national defense information. Other charges include conspiracy to commit obstruction and false statements.

The indictment alleges Trump intentionally retained hundreds of classified documents that he took with him from the White House to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, after leaving the White House in January 2021. The material he stored, including in a bathroom, ballroom, bedroom and shower, included material on nuclear programs, defense and weapons capabilities of the U.S. and foreign governments and a Pentagon “attack plan,” the indictment says. The information, if exposed, could have put at risk members of the military, confidential human sources and intelligence collection methods, prosecutors said.

Beyond that, prosecutors say, he sought to obstruct government efforts to recover the documents, including by directing personal aide Walt Nauta — who was charged alongside Trump — to move boxes to conceal them and also suggesting to his own lawyer that he hide or destroy documents sought by a Justice Department subpoena.

Some fellow Republicans have sought to press the case that Trump is being treated unfairly, citing the Justice Department’s decision in 2016 to not charge Democrat Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified information through a private email server she relied on as secretary of state. But those arguments overlook that FBI investigators did not find any evidence that Clinton or her aides had willfully broken laws regarding classified information or had obstructed the investigation.

New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, speaking Sunday on CBS News, said there was a “huge difference” between the two investigations but that it “has to be explained to the American people.”

The Justice Department earlier this month informed former Vice President Mike Pence that it would not bring charges over the presence of classified documents in his Indiana home. A separate Justice Department special counsel investigation into the discovery of classified records at a home and office of President Joe Biden continues, though as in the Clinton case, no evidence of obstruction or intentional law-breaking has surfaced.

Trump’s own former attorney general, William Barr, offered a grim assessment of Trump’s predicament, saying on Fox News that Trump had no right to hold onto such sensitive records.

“If even half of it is true,” Barr said of the allegations, “then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a pretty — it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning. And this idea of presenting Trump as a victim here — a victim of a witch hunt is ridiculous.”

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Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press writers Adriana Gomez Licon in Miami and Terry Spencer in Doral, Florida contributed to this report.

Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP

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More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump

It wouldn’t be an indictment of Donald Trump if it did not contain at least one count of making false statements. One surmises that this is the only count that truly shocked Trump, who was assessed by the Washington Post to have made over 35,000 false statements during his presidency alone, and that only counts public ones.

Trump apparently doesn’t have any attorneys, at least in The Case of The Stolen National Security Secrets, because more or less contemporaneously with the unsealing of the indictment, the two principal lawyers representing him quit. True to form, Trump insisted that he had fired them. But apart from the fact that nothing Trump says is truthful, no rational attorney appreciates being associated with a debacle.

Both the evidence and the law disfavor Trump – lopsidedly. Of the hundreds of classified documents that Trump deliberately took with him to Mar-a-Lago and deliberately withheld knowing that he could not lawfully do so, the Justice Department chose to confine itself to charging Trump on 31, marked either “secret” or “top secret.” These included documents regarding White House intelligence briefings, documents concerning our military capabilities and those of foreign countries, documents concerning our military planning, documents concerning our vulnerability to military attack – and documents concerning our nuclear weapons. “The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents,” the grand jury charged, “could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”

Trump had these sensitive documents strewn all over Mar-a-Lago – in his office, in his bathroom and in a ballroom, and actively schemed to keep representatives of the United States government from finding them. He suggested to certain of his lawyers that they lie to the FBI and the grand jury about his retention of the documents, and suggested to another that he hide or destroy documents. In familiar mob boss fashion — familiar to mob bosses and familiar to Trump – he caused another of his attorneys to falsely certify that all classified documents had been turned over, knowing, of course, that that was a lie. We will never know the scope of the harm that Trump has caused the women and men of our armed forces, or to the country as a whole. All we really now, from experience, is that Donald Trump couldn’t care less.

MAGA World responded with the usual risible nonsense, chalking the indictment up to retaliation by “the Biden Crime Family,” and so forth. William Barr, Trump’s former Attorney General, was somewhat more tethered. “These documents are among the most sensitive secrets the country has,” Barr told Fox News. “If even half of (the indictment) is true then he’s toast.” Donald Trump may indeed be headed to prison at long last. But it is the country he falsely claims to give a damn about that’s gotten burnt.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

“It’s a disgrace to our country,” Trump said on Howie Carr’s radio show Monday night of the accusations made against him by the Biden administration’s Justice Department.

Trump, the current leading contender for the Republican nomination to the White House in 2024, was indicted on charges he willfully mishandled classified information he apparently admitted he did not have the right to possess and continued to withhold from the government despite numerous attempts by the National Archives and the Department of Justice to secure the nation’s secrets.

The 45th President is due to surrender himself to federal authorities in Miami on Tuesday at 3 p.m. Trump told Carr he would plead “not guilty” to all charges.

“Getting ready to head down to Doral in Miami. We must all be STRONG and DEFEAT the Communists, Marxists, and Radical Left Lunatics that are systematically destroying our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he declared Monday morning, capitalization included.

Trump has maintained his innocence from the moment the FBI raided his Mar-A-Lago resort-turned-residence in August of last year, claiming he had declassified any records in his possession and that the files were of a personal, not presidential, nature. He has responded to the indictment with both shock and anger.

“Hard to believe that the leading candidate, by far, of the opposition party, got indicted. This is strictly Third World. MAGA,” Trump said through his Truth Social media company. He said “we’re like a third-world country” again during his evening interview with Carr.

The former president was not alone in his assertion that the Biden Administration’s Justice Department had gone too far in accusing the ex-command-in-chief of mishandling documents when so many other former government officials have come forward with their own misplaced classified information, including President Joe Biden, and former Vice President Mike Pence.

Scores of Republicans in the House and Senate jumped to his defense over the weekend and after the 49-page indictment was unsealed and made public, a march that continued through Monday. Even Trump’s leading opponent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, questioned whether Trump was getting a fair deal, though he didn’t name his chief rival.

Many Republicans say the charges are an attempt by Democrats to remove Trump from electoral consideration.

“The radical Far Left will stop at nothing to interfere with the 2024 election in order to prop up the catastrophic presidency and desperate campaign of Joe Biden,” U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, the number-four Republican in the House, wrote on Truth Social in a post shared by Trump.

In a post-indictment interview with conservative political activist Roger Stone, the former president called on his supporters to protest his court date.

“Our country has to protest,” the President told Stone, who he pardoned for allegedly lying to Congress.

Officials in Miami, apparently responding to reports that far-right group The Proud Boys would answer Trump’s call to protest his court appearance, were prepared for up to 50,000 protesters to arrive, according to reporting by the Miami Herald.

“Stay strong. Stay very, very strong,” he said to his supporters during Carr’s show.

Trump, 76, of Palm Beach, Florida, is scheduled to surrender himself to authorities in Miami at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, when he is expected to tell U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon he is not guilty of the 37 felony counts leveled against him. A full 31 of those charges pertain to his allegedly deliberate attempts to withhold classified government documents that the National Archives and Department of Justice had both demanded he relinquish after leaving office and which are detailed in a 49 page indictment unsealed ahead of the weekend.

Through his campaign on Sunday, Trump announced he would follow the court date in Florida with an appearance at his property in New Jersey.

“President Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America, will deliver remarks at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in Bedminster, New Jersey on Tuesday, June 13, 2023, at 8:15PM EDT,” his campaign said.

Trump declared himself an “innocent man” in social media postings when the details of his alleged misdeeds were made public. He told crowds in Georgia and North Carolina Saturday during campaign stops that it’s his run for the White House that led to the charges, not his conduct as a private citizen.

“The ridiculous and baseless indictment of me by the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice will go down as among the most horrific abuses of power in the history of our country,” he said in Columbus, Georgia. “In the end, they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you and I’m just standing in their way.”

Trump also vowed Saturday to remain in the race, even if he is convicted in the case.

“I’ll never leave,” he told Politico in an interview aboard his plane after his speech in Georgia.

According to the unsealed indictment, the Trump stored classified documents in a bathroom and a ballroom at his Mar-A-Lago resort-turned-residence where they were accessible by people without the clearance to view them.

Charging documents further allege the former president instructed his lawyers to destroy some classified records he was ordered to return, hid others from his legal team, and kept them despite repeated demands from the government and assertions from records custodians he previously returned everything required.

Trump would often chant “Lock her up” with crowds at 2016 campaign rallies, referring to Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the race, and her alleged mishandling of classified information. After a roughly yearlong inquiry into her use of a private email server, the FBI closed out the investigation into Clinton, finding that she did not intend to break the law.

“Joe Biden is trying to jail his leading political opponent, just like in Stalinist Russia or Communist China. I never thought such a thing could happen in America. No different,” Trump said over the weekend.  “We now have two standards of justice in our country and no criminal is more protected than Crooked Joe Biden.

The question is whether he would be running for president had not Donald Trump, as expected, been indicted again, this time on far out and desperate federal charges over alleged mishandling of classified documents.

Still, you have to hand it to the former governor of New Jersey.

He is the only one of eight or so Republicans who ran against Donald Trump for president in the GOP primaries in 2016 who is now running again.

He did not last very long back then, and probably won’t now, throwing in the towel after coming in sixth in the New Hampshire presidential primary.

Yet, Christie, 60, a former two term governor, was in New Hampshire Tuesday where he announced his candidacy for president again.

It is a given that Trump gets into people’s heads and drives them loco. This not only includes progressives who hate him, but Republicans like Christie as well.

And he is going to drive his opponents even crazier as his popularity soars and his fundraising increases following the latest questionable criminal proceedings against him.

“I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States,” Trump said, echoing the thoughts of millions of Americans. But these are the times we live in. If you can’t beat him, indict him.

Christie, back when he was considered a rising GOP figure, was once against Donald Trump for president before he was for him. Now he is against him again.

Before endorsing Trump in 2016, Christie on the campaign trail referred to Trump as a “carnival barker.”

“I don’t think that he’s suited to be president of the United States,” he said. “I don’t think his temperament is suited for that and I don’t think his experience is.”

After he was routed in the New Hampshire 2016 primary he provided Trump with an important endorsement, becoming the first Republican governor or senator to publicly come out for Trump.

“I will lend my support between now and November in any way for Donald Trump,” Christie said.

Christie then went on to campaign for Trump with the hope perhaps of becoming attorney general or a cabinet secretary. Trump did name Christie to head his transition team after he was elected, but Christie was shortly replaced by Mike Pence.

Now Christie, a longshot in a field of longshots, is on the attack again.

Appearing at a town hall type setting at Saint Anselm College, Christie said, “The person I am talking about, who is obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake, who never admits a fault, and who always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong, but takes credit for anything that goes right, is Donald Trump.”

Christie could have been talking about Joe Biden.

But neither Christie nor any of the other Republicans candidates are running against Joe Biden. They are running against Donald Trump.

If they think Biden’s cowardly vendetta against Trump will help them, they are wrong.  Trump will campaign on the indictment, and the twisting of the justice system to indict him will only show how fundamentally fearful, vindictive and weak Biden is.

As for several of Trump’s GOP opponents, including Christie, their first (and maybe last) opportunity to confront Trump on it will come at the GOP’s first presidential debate August 23 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

To qualify for the debate, a candidate must have received 40,000 contributions from individual donors; showed at least 1 % in three national polls, or 1% in two national polls and 1% in two early state polls.

The rules are aimed toward eliminating fringe candidates.

Also, each participant must pledge to support whoever emerges as the Republican nominee for president.

Christie, well before he announced, said there was “no way” he would support Trump as the GOP nominee even though Trump does not want or need his support. Trump doesn’t even want or need the debate.

The extraordinary and pathetic indictment of a former president by Biden’s politized U.S. Justice Department on such weak charges may be enough to re-elect Donald Trump.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

Former Trump AG  Bill Barr

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, the former Attorney General said the government was not conducting a “witch hunt” in charging the former president.

“If even half of it is true, then he is toast. It’s a very detailed indictment and it’s very, very damning. This idea of presenting Trump as the victim here, victim of a witch hunt, is ridiculous,” he said. “He is not a victim here. He was totally wrong that he had the right to have those documents. Those documents are among the most sensitive secrets that the country has.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

A former military lawyer, the Sunshine State’s governor called the charges politically motivated, defending his political rival without naming him.

“I think there needs to be one standard of justice in this country,” he told a crowd in North Carolina, before referencing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s alleged use of a private server to store classified information. “Is there a different standard for a Democrat Secretary of State versus a former Republican president?”

Former Vice President Mike Pence

Appearing at the same North Carolina venue as his former boss this weekend, Pence criticized the “politicization” of the Justice Department.

“The very nature of a grand jury is that there is no defense presented,” Pence said. “That’s why I said today I’m going to urge patience, encourage people to be prayerful for the former president, but also for all those in authority and for the country going forward.”

Former Ark. Gov. Asa Hutchinson

The former federal prosecutor, two-term Arkansas governor and now-candidate for president, told CNN on Sunday that Trump should get out of the race.

“We need someone who has a high regard for military secrets, for classified documents, and for the rule of law,” he said, speaking from New Hampshire. “We know Donald Trump is not going to drop out of the race, this is going to be an issue that the voters have to decide. My point is that this is bad for our country, bad for the presidency, and it is a legitimate campaign issue.”

N.H. Gov. Chris Sununu

The Granite State’s governor, fresh off his declaration he would not seek the White House in 2024, told CBS that he doesn’t think the charges against Trump are politically motivated, though he stressed it will be hard to explain that to the average voter.

“If half of what they say they can prove is provable, then he’s got a real problem on his hands and it’s self-inflicted… He had every chance in the world to hand all those files and documents back, he did just the opposite and he bragged about keeping them,” he said.

That’s the mantra this weekend among Democrats and state-run media (but I repeat myself).

In America today, that is undoubtedly true. No man — or woman — is above the law.

Unless his or her name is, say, Biden or Clinton or Comey or Clapper or Brennan or Wray or McCabe or Strzok or Lerner or Holder or… well, you get the picture.

No man is above the law unless… he’s a Democrat. In which case, there are no laws. Or at least, none that will ever be used against you.

If you read the feds’ “sweeping” indictment of former President Donald J. Trump, the charges barely rise to the level of, “Are you kidding me?”

The key evidence — the smoking gun — seems to be a conversation Trump had two summers ago in New Jersey. He was talking with several people — also known as witnesses — concerning an upcoming book. His remarks were recorded, because Trump didn’t want to be misquoted down the road.

Trump was chatting about the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark “Thoroughly Modern” Milley, the pride of Belmont Hill School.

Milley had been dumping on Trump, around the clock, on all the stations on the RCHN — the Russian Collusion Hoax Network. Milley’s latest whopper was that after the 2020 election, Trump had wanted to attack Iran.

The president had been rummaging around in some old documents — the way anybody does who’s looking for some piece of paper that’s suddenly become germane again. Apparently POTUS had just found what he was looking for.

The crooked G-men Democrats don’t use the words “Milley” and “Iran” because that’s the official procedure if you’re on the level, which they most certainly aren’t. But Milley and Iran are who and what Trump is talking about.

This is Trump on his own tape, talking about Thoroughly Modern Milley:

“He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers. This just came up. Look — that was him.”

He was probably holding the paper up, like anybody would do.

“They presented me this — this is off the record. They presented this to me. This was him… This wasn’t done by me. This was him.”

And next comes what I guess special Democrat prosecutor who calls himself “Jack Smith” considers the smoking gun.

“This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”

To which I say, Big bleepin’ deal.

Okay, Trump shouldn’t have been waving the documents around, but so what? It’s not like he’s accused of taking $10 million in payoffs from a country to which we have now funneled at least $75 billion in foreign handouts to — do you see where I’m going with this?

The FBI has been ignoring those accusations against Joe Biden since 2020. If Republicans hadn’t won the House, the G-men would still be giving all the crooked Bidens a good-leaving alone.

But, but I thought no man was above the law.

Compared to what the Bidens are accused of, these allegations against Trump seem like very thin gruel indeed. Yet a special counsel to frame, I mean investigate Trump was appointed just last November. Now, less than seven months later, we have a 37-count indictment.

There’s a famous quote attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

A Boston lawyer named Harvey Silverglate wrote a book about how easy it is now for the G-men to take down whomever they decide to target.

The title says it all: “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”

Maybe Trump did violate some obscure statute about classified documents, but does he stand accused of taking millions in payoffs from sinister foreign nationals?

Was Trump ever the beneficiary of a vast left-wing conspiracy by the “intelligence community” after his son admitted on his laptop to being Joe Biden’s bagman and picking up cash for the family from the Red Chinese?

Of course not. Because… Democrats. Call it professional courtesy.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was likewise violating the Espionage Act, only on a much grander scale, among other things destroying 33,000 emails subpoenaed by Congress. She hired the wife of an NBC “News” anchor as her lawyer. Her Democrat fellow travelers then permitted her to claim attorney-client privilege for all her aides, even the ones who weren’t lawyers. That meant nobody could testify against her. How convenient.

Yet Trump’s lawyer was just forced by a Democrat judge to turn over evidence against him because… Republicans.

At the end Hillary wasn’t indicted, because, as corrupt FBI boss James Comey lectured, “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

Again, professional courtesy.

The FBI sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for months, doing absolutely nothing, trying to run out the clock on the statute of limitations. But boy did the G-men move fast on Trump making a joke about Thoroughly Modern Milley.

I’m just surprised Trump also wasn’t charged with some federal version of lese-majeste, or maybe even blasphemy, for making sport of that bloated paper-shuffler Milley. How dare anyone laugh at the teammate of Adm. Rachel Levine on the 1-6 Belmont Hill football team of 1974!

And such fortuitous timing for the indictment, the day after we finally find out what was in that FD-1023 that the G-men a week ago were claiming didn’t exist. And the charges also came shortly after the release of the incredible Durham report about the Democrats’ Russian collusion hoax, and all the bombshells therein.

Hillary’s hoax was the biggest scandal in American political history, by far. Yet nobody went to prison, nobody even lost their pensions. Instead they all got big book contracts, sinecures on state-run cable TV and lecture tours. They became “adjunct professors” of ethics and bought mansions on Martha’s Vineyard.

But no man is above the law. Remember that, all you damn deplorables. Wink wink nudge nudge.

The families pointed out that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals. Trump, who was playing in the tournament with his son Eric, merely rubbed salt into their wounds by saying, falsely, that “nobody has gotten to the bottom of 9/11.” Also playing that cozy day in Bedminster: the chief banker to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

U.S. intelligence concluded that MBS ordered the torture and killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. The Saudis have long denied it.

Despite protests from families of 9/11 victims, the LIV golf league grew more successful, buoyed in part by the game’s surge in popularity during the COVID-19 crisis. Golfers from all over the world were offered obscene sums of upfront money (or appearance fees) to participate, and the Professional Golfers’ Association went on the attack to protect its turf.

By 2022, the PGA was denying permission for players to participate and threatening disciplinary action if they did, even as its golfers said they were independent contractors who preferred some of the LIV tournament rules that they saw as more empowering, and lucrative, for players even beyond the top tier. And before LIV came along, the players said, the PGA routinely had issued waivers.

All just business, you might say. But Jay Monahan, the head of the PGA, didn’t hesitate to lambaste the Saudi human rights record and support outraged 9/11 families.

About a year ago, at the Canadian Open, Monahan said: “I have two families that are close to me that lost loved ones,” adding, “My heart goes out to them, and I would ask that any player that has left, or that would ever consider leaving, have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?”

“Life is all about meaning and purpose,” Monahan said, “and we’re an organization with meaning and purpose.”

What hypocrisy. On Tuesday, in news that stunned the golf world, the PGA Tour and LIV Golf announced they had agreed to a merger, ending their costly rivalry in favor of a complex structure of assured mutual profitability. Monahan, reportedly will get to run the new operation as chief executive, while Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, will be chairman.

Unsurprisingly, the 9/11 families were furious at the merger.

“The PGA and Monahan appear to have become just more paid Saudi shills,” Terry Strada, the chair of 9/11 Families United, said in a statement, “taking billions of dollars to cleanse the Saudi reputation so that Americans and the world will forget how the Kingdom spent their billions of dollars before 9/11 to fund terrorism, spread their vitriolic hatred of Americans, and finance al Qaeda and the murder of our loved ones.”

What a sad week for healthy competition, American sport and the beautiful game of golf. Not to mention ethical consistency. Is this what golf’s leadership really wants to teach the next generation of players and fans?

Chicago Triubune/Tribune News Service

Former President Donald Trump, now facing a federal indictment, was caught on tape admitting he was in possession of a secret military document at a 2021 meeting at his New Jersey golf resort, according to a transcript of the damning audiotape reported on Friday.

“As president, I could have declassified. But now I can’t,” Trump says on the tape, according to the transcript obtained by CNN.

Trump, who on Thursday was reportedly charged with seven counts for taking hundreds of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort after leaving office, was discussing a secret U.S. plan to attack Iran in a meeting with researchers for an unrelated book project at his Bedminster resort.

According to the tape transcript, the former president then flashes a document that he boasts is highly classified.

“It’s, like, confidential. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump adds, according to the transcript. “This was done by the military and given to me.”

The transcript report came hours after Trump announced that he had been indicted on charges stemming from his taking classified documents to his Florida resort after leaving office. It makes Trump the first former president in U.S. history to face federal criminal charges even as he leads the race for the Republican presidential nomination by a wide margin.

He could face a trial in the midst of a 2024 White House campaign and the possibility of a prison sentence if convicted.

The Justice Department did not immediately confirm the indictment publicly and would normally be expected to unveil the charging documents on Tuesday afternoon when Trump says he has been summoned to appear in Miami federal court.

A Trump defense lawyer said the charges include retaining classified documents, obstruction of justice, violations of the espionage act and conspiracy.

Trump shook up his legal team within hours of the indictment. He said Todd Blanche, a veteran and respected white collar defense lawyer, will lead the defense team for the case that will unfold in south Florida starting next week. His previous lawyers, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, resigned Friday.

In a shocking twist, Trump’s case was initially assigned to controversial right-wing federal District Judge Aileen Cannon, ABC News first reported.

It was not immediately clear if Cannon would preside over only the arraignment or the entire case.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, made several pro-Trump rulings that legal experts derided as legally unfounded. Her actions delayed the investigation into the documents until they were overturned by higher courts.

Trump wasted no time lashing out at the indictment filed by special counsel Jack Smith, a dogged former Brooklyn prosecutor.

“I am an innocent man,” Trump declared on his social media site late Thursday night. “This is … a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.”

Republican leaders, including most of his GOP presidential rivals, quickly backed the former president, reflecting his strong grip on the the party. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is a distant second in most polls to Trump, blasted the Justice Department for targeting the ex-president.

“Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?” tweeted DeSantis, referring to GOP bogeymen Hillary Clinton and presidential son Hunter Biden.

President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic candidate in 2024, has not commented on the indictment.

Trump took some 300 classified documents after exiting the White House in January 2021, according to prosecutors.

After months of haggling with federal archives officials, he returned several boxes. But prosecutors demanded the rest of them, prompting them to hit him with a subpoena. Trump lawyers handed over some documents and signed a statement that they conducted a “diligent search” that revealed no additional classified materials.

But prosecutors later became convinced that Trump was hiding even more documents, leading to a bombshell judge-approved search that turned up about more than 100 of the additional classified documents.

The documents found by the feds reportedly include some that described the nuclear capabilities of a foreign power and others that could expose American spies and intelligence methods. Some of the most sensitive documents were found in Trump’s personal office.

The case adds to fast-deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been charged with state crimes in New York related to hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Trump, 77, also faces a separate probe by Smith for his effort to overturn his loss to Biden in the 2020 election that culminated with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

There are also serious civil legal woes like the sprawling fraud case filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James against Trump’s eponymous real estate company.

———

©2023 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

ANKENY, Iowa (AP) — Former Vice President Mike Pence opened his bid for the Republican nomination for president Wednesday with a firm denunciation of former President Donald Trump, accusing his two-time running mate of abandoning conservative principles and being guilty of dereliction of duty on Jan. 6, 2021.

On that perilous day, Pence said, as Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol after the president falsely insisted his vice president could overturn the election results, Trump “demanded I choose between him and our Constitution. Now voters will be faced with the same choice.”

Pence is the first vice president in modern history to challenge the president under whom he served. While he spent much of his speech, delivered at a community college in a suburb of Des Moines, criticizing Democratic President Joe Biden and the direction he has taken the country, he also addressed Jan. 6 head-on, saying Trump had disqualified himself when he declared falsely that Pence had the power to keep him in office.

Trump’s statements about mass voting fraud led a mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, sending Pence and his family scrambling for safety as some in the crowd chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!”

“I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States, and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United Sates again,” the former vice president said.

Pence has spent much of the past two-and-a-half-years grappling with fallout from that day as he has tried to chart a political future in a party that remains deeply loyal to Trump and is filled with many who still believe Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen and that Pence somehow could reject the results.

While Pence has criticized Trump as he has worked to forge an identity of his own outside the former president’s shadow, he has generally done so obliquely, reflecting Trump’s continued popularity in the party. But Wednesday, as Pence made his pitch to voters for the first time as a declared candidate, he did not hold his tongue.

He accused the former president of abandoning the conservative values he ran on, including on abortion.

Pence, who supports a national ban on the procedure, said: “After leading the most pro-life administration in American history, Donald Trump and others in this race are retreating from the cause of the unborn. The sanctity of life has been our party’s calling for half a century — long before Donald Trump was a part of it. Now he treats it as an inconvenience, even blaming our election losses in 2022 on overturning Roe v. Wade.”

Trump has declined to say what limits he supports nationally and has blamed some midterm candidates’ strong rhetoric for their losses last November.

Pence also bemoaned the current politics of “grudges and grievances,” saying the country needs leaders who know the difference between the “politics of outrage and standing firm.”

“We will restore a threshold of civility in public life,” he pledged.

Nonetheless, in an interview with Fox News after his speech, Pence said he will “absolutely support the Republican nominee,” even if it’s Trump. And during a CNN town hall Wednesday night, Pence said he does not believe Trump should be indicted in the Mar-a-Lago documents case — even if federal prosecutors have evidence he committed a crime.

“I would just hope that there would be a way for them to move forward without the dramatic and drastic and divisive step of indicting (the) former president of the United States,” he said. He also refused to say whether, if elected, he would pardon Trump, if Trump were convicted.

Trump offered no response to Pence’s opening speech, but his supporters shot back.

“The question most GOP voters are asking themselves about Pence’s candidacy is ‘Why?’” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for a Trump-backing super PAC.

With Pence’s entry into the race, on his 64th birthday, the GOP field is largely set. It includes Trump, who’s leading in early polls, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who remains in second, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Pence’s campaign will test the party’s appetite for a socially conservative and deeply religious candidate who has criticized the populist tide that has swept through his party under Trump. Pence, in many ways, represents a throwback to a party from days past. Unlike Trump and DeSantis, he argues cuts to Social Security and Medicare must be on the table and has blasted those who have questioned why the U.S. should continue to send aid to Ukraine to counter Russian aggression.

Pence and his advisers see Iowa — the state that will cast the first votes of the GOP nominating calendar — as key to his pathway to the nomination. Its caucusgoers include a large portion of evangelical Christian voters, whom they see as a natural constituency for Pence, a social conservative who often talks about his faith.

But Pence faces steep challenges. Despite being one of the best-known Republican candidates in the crowded field, he is viewed skeptically by voters on both the left and the right. Trump critics consider him complicit in the former president’s most indefensible actions, while many Trump loyalists have maligned him as a traitor, partly to blame for denying the president a second term.

A CNN poll conducted last month found 45% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they would not support Pence under any circumstance. And in Iowa, a March Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll found Pence with higher unfavorable ratings than all the other candidates it asked about, including Trump and DeSantis.

But Pence, who has visited Iowa more than a dozen times since leaving office, has been warmly welcomed by voters during his trips.

His Wednesday audience included a number of Iowa Republican officials, including former Iowa Rep. Greg Ganske, whose time in Congress overlapped briefly with Pence’s.

“I’m here because we’re friends,” said Ganske, who represented the Des Moines area in the House. Still, he said he hadn’t figured out who he was going to support in the caucuses. “We have a lot of good candidates,” he said.

John Steuterman, a 44-year-old insurance executive, said he was drawn to Pence’s experience in the White House and was “tired of the negativity” another Trump term would bring.

“Mike Pence is a decent man,” he said. But asked whether he was locked in for Pence in the leadoff caucuses, Steuterman said, “I’m not married to the idea, but I’m going to watch and listen and I’m going to follow this guy.”

It was the same for Dave Bubeck, who lives in Grimes and praised Pence as “a super professional guy,” “statesmanlike,” and “a man of high character” — with the capacity to serve as president. “But I think there’s other good candidates,” too, he said, adding he would “wait and see how it all shakes out.”

Asked why he wasn’t sold on Pence, Bubeck said: “Maybe he’s a little too nice. … I don’t know if he’s tough enough for what we need right now. That would be my hesitancy.”

Pence’s decision to focus on Jan. 6 reflects his advisers’ strategy that the Capitol attack has to be confronted directly.

His argument resonated with Ruth Ehler, a retired teacher from West Des Moines who attended the speech.

“The Constitution is the document of our country and I stood by him on Jan. 6 when he followed the Constitution. If that’s where he feels he differs from our past president, it’s a great point for him to make,” Ehler said.

And yet, Ehler could not say whether she was leaning toward supporting Pence in the caucuses.

Where other GOP hopefuls have attempted to strike a very delicate balance — stuck somewhere between making clear that they should be the party’s pick to face President Biden in November of 2024, while not insulting the 45th president directly lest they alienate his MAGA-movement base — Christie launched his campaign with broad-ranging historical references to successful political leaders from the past and then promptly began an unapologetic assault on Trump’s record and public scandals.

“A lonely, self-consumed, self-serving, mirror hog is not a leader,” he said. “So now we have pretenders all around us, who want to tell you ‘pick me, because I’m kind of like what you picked before, but not quite as crazy, but I don’t want to say his name.’ Because for these other pretenders, he is — for those of you who read the Harry Potter books — like Voldemort. He is he who shall not be named.”

“Well let me be clear, in case I have not been already,” he said to laughter.

“The person I am talking about, who is obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake, who never admits a fault, and who always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong but finds every reason to take credit for anything that goes right, is Donald Trump” Christie said in New Hampshire during a town hall style appearance at Saint Anselm College, before officially announcing his candidacy for the GOP nomination.

Christie, who served two terms as New Jersey’s governor, has run for president before.

He left the 2016 race after coming in sixth in New Hampshire’s first in the nation primary. He would later endorse and lead Trump’s White House transition team. Since then, he has become something of an oddity among his party, calling Trump responsible for the events of January 6 and openly opposing his obviously false claims the 2020 election was somehow stolen.

Christie said he would have declined if asked to run even a year ago, but the 60-year-old went on to tell the standing room only crowd inside the New Hampshire Institute of Politics that another four years of the 45th President would be disastrous for the country. He said the last decade has been one of division brought about by our nation’s highest office holders.

“We’ve had leaders who have led us to be small. Small by their example. Small by the way they conduct themselves,” he said. “They are making us smaller by dividing us into smaller and smaller groups.”

According to Christie, it’s a problem among both Republicans and Democrats.

“Barack Obama made us smaller, by dividing us,” he said. “Donald Trump made us smaller, by dividing us even further.”

“And now Joe Biden is doing the very same thing,” he continued.

Christie acknowledged past failings without naming them, telling the audience if they were looking for a perfect candidate it wasn’t him and they should leave.

“When I’ve made mistakes, I’ve admitted it,” he said. “If your leaders are not willing to admit to you that they are fallible, that they make mistakes, that they hurt like you, that they bleed like you, that they suffer disappointments and let downs: beware.”

Christie’s announcement he hopes to oust President Biden from the White House follows that of Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to launch his campaign in Iowa on Wednesday.

Christie, known as a take-no-nonsense brawler of a politician, has his work cut out for him if he hopes to sit in the Oval Office someday. Trump is currently dominating in the polls. The former president leads by an average of 30 points, with DeSantis a distant second and Haley an even further third. Christie currently averages at 1% support.

Kim West, a partner at Ashcroft Law Firm in Boston, was recently selected as the Specialist Prosecutor at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office in The Hague, Netherlands.

West was one of the high-profile local lawyers who were being looked at as the replacement for Andrew Lelling to lead the Bay State U.S. Attorney’s Office. Rollins, the Suffolk County district attorney at the time, was later picked as U.S. Attorney — and she recently resigned following bombshell investigative reports from two federal watchdog agencies.

Instead of the experienced and accomplished West running the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office, she’s now heading to the European Union-backed court.

“I am extremely grateful to the European Union for selecting me for this position,” West said in a statement. “My colleagues at Ashcroft Law Firm know that my passion has long been centered around international investigations. They recognized that this is an opportunity of a lifetime, and have all been very supportive.

“This new role allows me to continue working with victims, witnesses, and the international community to ensure that perpetrators of war crimes are brought to justice,” West added.

She began her legal career as assistant district attorney in Plymouth County. Then after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she joined the Anti-Terrorism and National Security Unit at the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Later, she served for five years as a trial attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, where she prosecuted Radovan Karadzic — who was found guilty of directing the genocide of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in the worst massacre on European soil since the Holocaust.

Then as chief of the Criminal Bureau for the Attorney General’s Office in Massachusetts, West supervised a team of more than 120 professionals responsible for investigating and prosecuting a range of financial, fraud, public corruption, narcotics, gaming, human trafficking, and other offenses.

West at Ashcroft Law Firm has focused on white-collar cases, primarily representing international clients.

“We are immensely proud of her achievements and grateful for the contributions she has made to our firm,” said Michael Sullivan, managing partner of Ashcroft Law Firm’s Boston office. “People from around the world have sought her help because of her empathy and commitment to international justice and accountability. Those same characteristics will guide her in her new position.”

Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, the firm’s founder and chairman, said of West, “Her appointment to the European Union-backed court is not at all surprising because her career has been defined by a dedication to justice on a global scale. We are sad to be losing Kim as our colleague, but by selecting her for this key position, the international community has chosen the ideal steward to oversee the important responsibilities of investigating war crimes in Kosovo.”

To say Sununu’s announcement landed with a thud is even giving it too much impact. Almost no one thought he was really going to run anyway. Well, maybe CNN bit on it.

It comes the same day former Vice President Mike Pence announces his White House bid and the day before former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum wades into the 2024 battle. That’s right, Burgum.

Sununu said he decided not to run because he didn’t want to expand the crowded field any more, making it easier for Donald Trump to win the nomination.

“The stakes are too high for a crowded field to hand the nomination to a candidate who earns just 35% of the vote, and I will help to ensure this does not happen,” he tweeted.

Sununu also got on his favorite network to scold Republicans who are in the race, saying they should get out if they can’t win.

“There are 12 people in the race. I don’t think all 112 of them firmly believe that they can be president, I think a lot of them just want to audition to be in the Cabinet or vice president. And at this time, there’s no place for that,” he said on CNN.

But the reality is you can include Sununu on that list. He was dead last in the polls even in his home state and could not compete against Trump or even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. His brief flirtation with a White House run was somewhat embarrassing, although it did give him a platform on liberal networks. Sununu is such a political lightweight he makes Mitt Romney seem like a heavyweight.

Sununu, who also turned down a U.S. Senate bid last year, said he plans to stay involved in the race by endorsing someone.

No thanks, Chris. Who wants that kiss of death?

Let’s not forget where Sununu comes from. His father, former White House chief of staff John Sununu, was forced out partly because of the “travelgate” scandal – taking more than 70 rides on military jets for personal use like ski trips and visits to the dentist. So his constant dumping on Trump for ethical problems sounds a little hollow.

“If he is the nominee, Republicans will lose again,” Sununu said of Trump in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “Just as we did in 2018, 2020 and 2022.”

Sununu of course leaves out 2016, when Trump won the White House for Republicans.

Sununu is relatively popular in the Granite State, and likely could win another term as governor. Or maybe he’s holding out for an upset defeat of Trump so he can latch on with another RINO candidate.

While he was flirting with a run, Sununu was trying to walk a fine line of being a Romneyesque Republican, and calling himself conservative. Sununu is more in the mold of former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, and Sen. Mitt Romney – all former or current Bay State governors, none of them profiles in courage.

Last time we heard from Romney he was feuding with George Santos

Are these weak Northeast governors supposed to represent the new Republican Party? If so you can count on Democrats controlling the states for decades to come.

While Trump’s approach to politics often appears more incoherent than intelligible, there in fact is a calculated strategy steering his primary campaign. It involves turning his intensifying legal troubles into martyrdom at the hands of the left-wing political establishment, while at the same time relentlessly attacking his top opponent, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. 

Though this strategy is largely devoid of actual policy, it has been effective thus far: Trump has consolidated the support of the majority of Republican primary voters nationally, doubling his lead over DeSantis, per RealClearPolitics’ average of primary polls. Bearing in mind that national data is best viewed as a general gauge, the latest polls in the first four primary states also find Trump with at least a 20-point lead.

Throughout the campaign, Trump will continue positioning himself as a victim of political persecution and making the case that President Biden and Hunter Biden – both of whom are also under federal investigation – are the figures who deserve more serious scrutiny. Regardless of the truth or falsity of this narrative, it allows Trump to maintain a solid constituency within the Republican Party that will continue supporting him, especially in light of the potentially multiple additional indictments he is likely to face.

Indeed, Trump’s martyrdom narrative will only become more entrenched if he is indicted in the special counsel’s probe, either for mishandling classified documents or for attempting to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. This is especially likely if the concurrent federal probes into President Biden’s potential mishandling of classified documents and Hunter Biden’s alleged influence peddling – among other investigations into the First Son – fail to result in charges.

In a recent letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, which Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, Trump’s lawyers sought to reinforce the narrative that their client is suffering an unfair application of justice, versus the Bidens, who are being given a free pass.

To be sure, Trump’s lawyers well-know that the Attorney General must decline the meeting they demanded, as Garland took the appropriate step of recusing himself from the special counsel’s investigation into Trump to avoid the appearance of political interference, as he did with the probe into President Biden. But this fact is irrelevant to Trump and his team, whose primary focus is uniting Republicans around Trump by positioning him as a political warrior facing unjust persecution.

Throughout his political career, Trump has proven himself a virtuoso at playing both the winner and the victim, and this is no exception. As Rich Lowry recently wrote for POLITICO, this role has allowed Trump to construct “an impenetrable political forcefield” with Republican voters – each success he experiences proves that he is on top, while any setback validates his victimhood and shows that his political enemies are threatened by his strength.

This positioning, taken together with Trump’s habit of persistently attacking his political opponents, has made him into an almost unbeatable primary opponent, as DeSantis is quickly discovering.

As Republican voters have embraced Trump’s self-contrived image as a political martyr, DeSantis, who was once viewed as the most viable non-Trump candidate, has simultaneously declined in the polls. In turn, DeSantis’ deterioration has motivated other Republicans to jump in the race – a scenario that inherently benefits the former president, as it splits the non-Trump vote.

Even though DeSantis only officially declared his candidacy recently, Trump has been going after him for months with anything he feels he can make stick – ranging from DeSantis’ support for cuts to broadly popular entitlement programs, to accusing him of “grooming” high school girls, to calling him a “RINO globalist” and “Ron DeSanctimonious.”

For his part, DeSantis has only recently begun hitting back after months of tiptoeing around the former president’s barrages. The Florida Governor recently suggested that Trump was “moving to the left,” referring to his recent flip-flopping on issues such as immigration and spending, and has sought to implicitly contrast his record advancing conservative reforms with the chaos Trump brings. 

“At the end of the day, leadership is not about entertainment…It is about results, and in Florida, we didn’t lead with merely words…we have produced a record of accomplishment that we would put up against anybody in this country,” DeSantis said at a recent campaign stop in Iowa. 

If history is any guide, DeSantis’ veiled shots will only fire-up Trump to double-down on insulting his former protégé. 

To be sure, Trump’s 2024 playbook – insulting his challengers into submission and positioning himself as a political martyr and an aggrieved victim of the political left – is nothing new. And while it’s hard to say whether this strategy will continue to pay off as the campaign begins in earnest, it appears increasingly likely that Donald Trump will bludgeon his way to the top of the GOP ticket, once again.

Douglas Schoen is a longtime Democratic political consultant.

As you’ve probably seen, Biden tripped over a sandbag and fell head first onto the stage at the Air Force Academy after speaking, drawing audible gasps from the audience. Looking dazed and confused, the commander-in-chief pointed at the sandbag, as if it had jumped out in front of him.

The media coverage of the incident was almost apologetic, as if covering for the president. The media pool report described Biden as looking “spry” after the fall. The headline in the Reuters story was, “Biden trips and falls during graduation ceremony, recovers quickly.” White House officials called him “totally fine.”

A number of media had to go back to 1975 to talk about a fall then-President Gerald Ford took, as if to somehow imply this was common.

But it wasn’t. If your 80-year-old father fell like that, you wouldn’t be quite so dismissive. You’d be naturally quite concerned about his future well-being. But instead of showing compassion toward Biden, or any elderly man, the media was in denial.

If it was Putin or another world leader who fell, the coverage would not be so dismissive. What if Trump had taken the tumble? How would the press have reported that?

Trump didn’t even fall – he just walked slowly down a ramp and was endlessly mocked for that.

The media of course went to Trump immediately after Biden’s fall on Thursday, no doubt hoping he would ungraciously slam his successor. But even Trump wouldn’t oblige.

The former president said, “He actually fell down? Well, I hope he wasn’t hurt.”

This was Biden’s third public fall in the last year, including falling off a bicycle last summer. And that doesn’t include near falls or falls we don’t see. It’s a pattern. Biden actuallly also bumped his head on the helicopter door after falling on Thursday.

You’re not just seeing a man who is clumsy. And that’s a problem.

Yet Democratic Party leaders are so desperate to cling to power, they would rather look the other way than get Biden help.

But they won’t be able to ignore it much longer, if Biden continues to fall, or shake hands with invisible people, or babble incoherently.

Could we be seeing a doomsday scenario when party leaders step in to pick the nominee themselves? Under that scenario, Biden would coast through the primaries with only token opposition, but before or just after he accepted the nomination would bow out, citing health and safety concerns.

Under party rules, the DNC leaders would then come together to coronate a new nominee to get him or her on the November ballot. That way, the nominee, say Hillary Clinton, would be spared the rigors of a primary process.

While it’s never happened before with a presidential nominee, it has with a vice presidential nominee. In 1972, Democratic leaders picked Sargent Shriver as the VP nominee after George McGovern’s first choice, Sen. Thomas Eagleton, had to drop out.

Biden would be 85 if he finished a second term. It’s clear the demands of the job are taking a physical and mental toll on him. He can’t even complete ceremonial assignments like the graduation at the Air Force Academy. And it will only get worse as Biden ages.

It’s time party leaders and the media faced that reality, rather than ignore it.

Though he didn’t mention former President Donald Trump by name during a “fireside chat” in Rochester, N.H., DeSantis clearly had the ex-reality TV star on his mind as he addressed a standing-room-only audience at the American Legion.

“Leadership is not about entertainment, leadership is not about building a brand, leadership is not about virtue signaling,” he said. “Leadership is about producing results for the people you represent.”

Currently polling as the clear second in the conservative contest for the presidency, when presented with a crowd of first-in-the-nation voters, the Florida governor used the opportunity to tout his success at home and knock President Biden’s record over the last few years, all without mentioning any of his potential Republican rivals by name.

“In the state of Florida, we have produced more results during my administration than I would say any administration in the history of my state and I would put us up against anyone in the modern history of the Republican party,” he said.

Though his politics and positions are entirely in step with the party and therefore perhaps unremarkable when compared to other Republicans running this cycle, DeSantis said his work in Florida shows that he doesn’t just make empty promises, unlike, he seemed to indicate, some others who might make the rounds in the Granite State.

“We will finally after years and years of discussions and Republicans complaining about it, we will finally be the administration to bring this border issue to a conclusion. We are going to shut the border down, we are going to build the border wall,” he said to applause, referencing a central but undelivered promise from Trump’s 2016 campaign.

DeSantis’ stop in Rochester followed a rally in Laconia, where he apparently clashed with an Associated Press reporter who asked why the 49th Governor of Florida was in New Hampshire but not taking questions directly from voters.

The governor balked at the suggestion, saying he was directly interacting with voters, which he apparently did briefly as he left the VFW post where he spoke alongside Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis.

“People are coming up to me, talking to me,” the governor fired back at AP reporter Steve Peoples’s question. “What are you talking about? Are you blind? Are you blind? People are coming up to me, talking to me whatever they want to talk to me about.”

The Governor did not take questions from the crowd while speaking to the audience, however, nor did he when speaking later at the American Legion in Rochester, instead opting to accept questions from a moderator before again briefly interacting with locals.

Those locals, as is typical of New Hampshire voters every four years, seemed generally responsive to hearing what the former Navy officer had to say, though more than one openly wondered whether he stood a chance in a race that involved Trump.

One woman commented she was considering DeSantis out of an abundance of caution, considering the fact that 34 felony charges filed against the former president in New York State could well mean he finishes his campaign from a courtroom or a jail cell.

“Trump probably won’t be able to run,” she said.

Regardless of those charges — in fact, perhaps in some small way as a result of them — Trump is by far and away the leading GOP candidate, both in New Hampshire, where he’s won the primary twice, and nationally.

According to polling aggregator Real Clear Politics, the Florida-residing former president holds a more than 30-point lead on his state’s governor.

But the GOP is pressing ahead with its effort to derail the president’s plan, which would forgive up to $10,000 in student loan debt for those who meet income limits, and another $10,000 for those who got Pell Grants.

The Senate on Wednesday voted to take up a joint resolution of disapproval that would block the forgiveness plan. The measure passed the House last week with the support of every Republican and two Democrats: Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Glusenkamp Perez of Washington.
The Senate vote on the motion to proceed was 51-46, with Democrats Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana as well as independent Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona voting “yea.”

A vote on final passage is set for Thursday, but the White House has said Biden would veto the measure if it reaches his desk. The ultimate test for the proposal, however, may be determined by the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in February on a pair of challenges. Justices are expected to issue a ruling before the end of June.

The agreement announced over the weekend to raise the debt ceiling and cut government spending doesn’t block Biden’s loan forgiveness plan, despite Republican attempts to incorporate such a provision into the legislation. The White House views that as a victory.

“The bottom line here is that there are hardly any changes on the student loan front,’’ Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director National Economic Council, said on a call with reporters Tuesday.

“The original Republican bill called for revoking the entirety of the president’s one-time student loan debt relief program. … It called for repealing or rescinding the administration’s income-based repayment reforms that would make monthly payments much more manageable for student loan borrowers. Neither of those are in this final deal.”

The legislation codifies what Biden had already proposed: ending the freeze on loan payments by Sept. 1. The pause was first instituted by former President Donald Trump in March of 2020 and has been extended several times. The bipartisan agreement bars Biden from issuing another extension of the current pause, but Ramamurti said it “does not preclude the president from using his existing legal authority to initiate other pauses in the future if they are justified.”

Ending the pause means millions of Americans who borrowed money to pay for college tuition would see their payments resume. About 26 million people have applied for the loan forgiveness program and more than 16 million applications were approved, according to a fact sheet prepared by the White House.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said she’d like to see some sort of extension to allow people time to adjust.

“Our belief is that there needs to be some time to at least extend the pause,’’ Jayapal said, “until the administration can get their other debt repayment plan sort of up and running so that people aren’t being thrown into this limbo or back-and-forth seesaw of ‘you don’t need to pay your bills, your student debt payments,’ ‘now you need to pay them,’ ‘now you don’t need to pay them.’”
Activists pressing for student loan relief said the issue should have never been part of the debt ceiling discussion.

“These are real people that are impacted by this,’’ said Melissa Byrne, founder of We, The 45 Million, an advocacy group for student loan relief. “People are experiencing extreme mental health stress because they’re watching people play politics with their financial security. Twenty million people with student loan debt live in Republican districts and (Republicans) are hurting their own voters just to own the libs.’’

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©2023 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Christie, who also ran in 2016, is planning to make the announcement at a town hall Tuesday evening at Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics, according to a person familiar with his thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity to confirm Christie’s plans.

The timing, which was first reported by Axios, comes after several longtime Christie advisers started a super political action committee to support his expected candidacy.

The Associated Press had previously reported that Christie was expected to enter the race “imminently.”

Christie has cast himself as the only potential candidate willing to aggressively take on former President Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the nomination. Christie, a former federal prosecutor, was a longtime friend and adviser to Trump, but broke with Trump over his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election. Christie has since emerged as a leading and vocal critic of the former president.

Christie, who is currently polling at the bottom of the pack, dropped out of the 2016 presidential race a day after finishing sixth in New Hampshire’s primary.

In addition to Trump, Christie would be joining a GOP field that includes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and biotech entrepreneur and “anti-woke” activist Vivek Ramaswamy.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is expected to announce his candidacy on June 7, according to two GOP operatives. And former Vice President Mike Pence is also expected to launch a campaign soon.

Allies believe that Christie, who has been working as an ABC News analyst, has a unique ability to communicate. They say his candidacy could help prevent a repeat of 2016, when Trump’s rivals largely refrained from directly attacking the New York businessman, wrongly assuming he would implode on his own.

Christie has also said repeatedly that he will not run if he does not see a path to victory. “I’m not a paid assassin,” he recently told Politico.

While Christie is expected to spend much of his time in early-voting New Hampshire, as he did in 2016, advisers believe the path to the nomination runs through Trump and they envision an unconventional, national campaign for Christie with a focus on garnering media attention and directly engaging with Trump.

Biden has dropped so low in the polls on all the issues that the only way he can get re-elected is by getting the millions of illegal immigrants he let into the country vote for him.

Which means that practically any Republican can beat him, especially a candidate like DeSantis.

But first the 44-year-old governor must get by Donald Trump, 76, which will be no easy task.

While the field of Republican presidential candidates continues to grow, there is hardly a candidate—outside of DeSantis—with the standing and toughness needed to stand up to the pugnacious Trump.

A couple of the candidates, unannounced and official, worked for Trump (Vice President Mike Pence, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley) while a third potential candidate (Chris Christie) tried to but failed to get hired.

One only has to recall how Trump, with his slash and burn technique, wrecked the candidacy of several GOP opponents in the 2016 television debates and ended up as the last man standing. Candidates seeking civil discourse don’t stand much of a chance debating Trump.

He is expected to slash and burn again. Only this time Trump’s opponents will be on guard. DeSantis is no cream puff.

Unlike most of the other GOP hopefuls, DeSantis has a solid conservative record of achievement as governor to run on, a record that is fresh in peoples’ minds.

People from crime ridden, high tax states and cities like New York and elsewhere are moving to Florida not because of Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago but because of Ron DeSantis and Tallahassee.

DeSantis has made Florida the most attractive state in the country.

Ideologically speaking, DeSantis is Trump without the braggadocio and baggage. But he does have just enough of the Trump swagger to make him a formidable opponent.

While DeSantis is well behind Trump in the polls, he is the main threat in what is shaping up as a two-man contest for the GOP presidential nomination.

Trump knows this, which is why his well-funded PACs have spent $50 million in television ads attacking and ridiculing DeSantis well before DeSantis officially announced his candidacy, which he did Wednesday night.

The bad blood between the two would diminish the possibility—as remote as it might seem– that there could be a Trump/DeSantis ticket, with the understanding that DeSantis would succeed Trump after four years when DeSantis would be just 48 years old.

Aside from the war of words between the two, DeSantis’ first real test will come in January at the Iowa Republican caucus.

If DeSantis can beat Trump in Iowa, where the first contest of the campaign takes place, his candidacy would receive a tremendous boost going into the New Hampshire primary the following week.

It would show Republicans across the country that, not only could the former president be beaten, but that conservative Republicans could have Trumpism without Trump.

DeSantis will play up a list of recent Florida conservative accomplishments—fresh in voters’ minds–that appeal to Iowa Republicans, like the six-week prohibition on abortion, prohibiting biological men from competing in women’s sports and banning the teaching of LGBTQ issues in public schools, to name a few.

But it would be a mistake to sell Trump short. While losing the Iowa caucus to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in 2016, Trump went on to win the New Hampshire GOP primary by a wide margin and then went on to become president.

This time it is different, though. While controversies swirled around candidate Trump in 2016, they pale in significance to what Trump is going through now.

Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in relation to hush money allegedly paid to porn star Stormy Daniels. His trial is scheduled for March.

And Special Counsel Jack Smith is soon to report on his investigation of the mishandling of classified documents by Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home. And there is more.

While Trump is running for the White House, he will also campaign to stay out of the Big House.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

That was back when Lindsay Graham had credibility. Those were also the days when he described Donald Trump as a “nut job,” “a loser as a person” and “ill-suited to be president.”

Graham was of course right about both Biden and Trump. But that was before his sad servility to Trump led him to assist Trump in trying to overthrow the 2020 Georgia election – assistance which may lead him to be indicted this August.

Graham is far from the only national Republican to continue to cower before Trump, too intimidated by Mar-a-Lago’s Classified Document Collector-in-Chief to cross him and risk being insulted. As the 2024 election season gets underway, and the Republican case against Biden is that he has an arthritic spine, an occasional stutter and a son with a former addiction problem, the GOP nomination appears to be the indicted insurrectionist’s to lose. His challengers have nether the courage nor the inclination to speak plainly about what a threat Trump is to our democracy and, indeed, to the country’s ability to survive as we have known it.

After due consideration of the nature of Republican primary voters, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis settled on this for his campaign message: “You want crazy? I’ll give you crazy.” What he is selling is snarling attacks on marginalized Americans, like communities of color and the LGBTQ community, which want celebrate their identities and want others in this diverse nation we’re privileged to live in to have the opportunity to do the same.

Then there are the snarling attacks on books, on learning, on science and on tolerance itself. It is a particular quality of vileness that many Americans thought we had put in our rear view mirror. But that isn’t so, and it is the essence of DeSantis’ campaign.

DeSantis’ calculation that what Republicans want in their standard-bearer is a crude, swaggering bully of the sort we all remember from schoolyards may be loathsome, but it isn’t wrong. What is questionable is his thesis that Republicans would prefer a crude, swaggering bully who isn’t a felon. The truth is that the Republican base is so off-base that Trump’s very criminality is seen as a virtue by a sizable segment of Republicans.

And the Republican contenders for president know it. No candidate with a likelihood of obtaining the GOP nomination will be caught saying what would have been a no-brainer in times past: It really would be good if the president of the United States were not a criminal, all other things being equal.

Trump’s less serious challengers are little better. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who showed real principle on Jan. 6, seems to have decided that once was enough. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who said that Trump was “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president” before happily accepting a position in his cabinet, has ricocheted between distancing herself from Trump and prostrating herself before him. “I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture. I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far,” Haley said about The Boss after Jan. 6. But nine months later, she was kissing his ring. “He’d has the ability to get strong people elected,” she gushed. “He has the ability to move the ball, and I hope he continues to do that.” Senator Tim Scott, a recent entrant into the race, has blamed Democrats for inciting the violence on Jan. 6. “The one person I don’t blame is President Trump,” he said.

It’s quite a crew the GOP has assembled. It is, however, one which is serving up what its voters want to see served up.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

The former Secretary of State insists she’s not running for president again, but has offered only a tepid endorsement of Biden while raising questions about his age.

“I obviously hope he stays very focused and is able to compete in the election,” Clinton said condescendingly of the 80-year-old President. “Because I think he can be re-elected and that’s what we should all hope for.”

But Clinton even agreed that falling is a potential health risk for Biden, and did not dismiss the age issue as many other in denial Democrats have.

“His age is an issue and people have every right to consider it,” she said at last weekend’s Financial Times Weekend Festival.

Clinton also said she thinks Biden is ready to run for office again and said he hasn’t gotten enough credit for his “good record” in office.

Thanks, Hillary. She’s lucky her remarks were mostly ignored.

But if hope turns to reality and Biden can’t compete, could we see a 2016 rematch between Clinton and Donald Trump?

Just because she says she’s not running again, those promises will be meaningless if Biden drops out and Democrats are suddenly left with no strong candidate.

No matter what Clinton says now, she’s the only moderate, centrist mainstream Democrat on the horizon beyond Biden. The rest are too liberal or far out of the mainstream to get elected. Think Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Clinton has not disappeared from the public eye as some expected after she decided not to run in 2020. She may be 75 but she hasn’t lost any of her competitive drive or mental faculties. She would be an instant front-runner in the Democratic primaries if she decided to go for it.

On the Republican side, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s official entry into the White House race on Wednesday isn’t scaring off Trump or his supporters.

DeSantis is no more than a political stunt man right now. Trump is still the Democrats’ greatest fear, which is why they’re trying legal maneuvers to keep him out.

There is no stop DeSantis movement like there is with Trump, because his critics don’t see DeSantis as a threat right now. He’s the backup in case Trump can’t or won’t stay in the race.

Hillary Clinton recently called out DeSantis for flying migrants to the Vineyard, and last year criticized Biden’s border policy.

Former Clinton advisers believe that’s a sign she could be interested in a 2024 run.

So Trump or DeSantis’s opponent might not be the aged, shaky Biden after all.