Washington (BLAZETRENDS).- Former US President Donald Trump (2017-2021) repeated this Saturday his lies about a “witch hunt” at his first electoral rally after being accused of having taken dozens of dozens to his Florida mansion of boxes with classified material.
Trump, who remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, portrayed himself as a victim to hundreds of his supporters at a rally in the state of Georgia.
“This ridiculous and baseless accusation leveled against me by Joe Biden’s Justice Department will go down as the worst abuse of power in the history of our country,” the former president said in a speech riddled with false claims.
Supporters cheer for Trump
The attendees, many dressed in Trump’s characteristic red caps, reacted with applause to the former president’s words and did not hesitate to boo when the Republican referred to the US president, Democrat Joe Biden.
Biden, who already announced that he will run for re-election in 2024, has not yet referred to Trump’s new indictment, the second after he was already indicted in March of this year in New York for a case of tax fraud.
Trump’s appearance this Saturday was the first since the indictment of the Attorney for the Southern District of Florida was made public on Friday, revealing the 37 charges for the alleged commission of seven federal crimes of which he is accused. The former president is accused of his mishandling of classified material.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, after leaving power in 2021, Trump ordered the transfer from the White House to his mansion in Mar-a-Lago (Florida) dozens of boxes with newspaper clippings, letters, photos and also hundreds of classified documents, including information about nuclear secrets and plans to attack other countries.
Those documents were not stored securely, but instead ended up in different corners of the Trump mansion, including a bedroom, a ballroom and a bathroom, photos included in the indictment show.
Classified documents, danger to national security
Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, all the documents of a president are public property of the United States Government and not private, so when Trump left the White House he had to hand over the classified documents to the National Archives, in charge of their custody.
A few months after Trump left the White House, the National Archives discovered that they had not been given all of the classified documents from his Presidency, and when the former president would not return them, they ended up going to the FBI, which resulted in the opening of a court investigation.
In August 2022, the FBI ended up making a search of the former president’s mansion to seize the boxes of classified documents that were still in his custody.
Despite the intervention of the FBI, according to the indictment, Trump could have endangered the security of the United States. not only because the documents were not kept securely, but also because the former president showed them to people without authorization to see them.
Specifically, in 2021, Trump gave an interview to an author who was writing a book and allegedly showed him an “attack plan” against a country and also showed an individual linked to his electoral campaign a map related to a military operation. .
Due to these facts, the ex-president is summoned to testify on Tuesday in a federal court in Miami.