Ryan J. Reilly is a justice reporter for NBC News.
Katherine Doyle is a White House reporter for NBC News.
Adam Reiss is a reporter and producer for NBC and MSNBC.
Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.
Rebecca Shabad , Ken Dilanian and Garrett Haake contributed .
WASHINGTON — A federal grand jury has indicted Donald Trump in connection with his mishandling of more than 100 classified documents that were discovered last year at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, making the twice-impeached former commander-in-chief the first former president to face federal criminal charges.
Trump said Thursday night that his attorneys were informed that he’s been indicted in the special counsel’s investigation into his handling of classified documents. Two sources familiar with the matter confirmed the indictment.
In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said: “The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax.”
NBC News has confirmed Trump's indictment. He has received a summons to appear in U.S. district court on June 13.
A spokesperson for the special counsel declined to comment.
A source familiar says the indictment is under seal, which is why the government cannot comment.
The decision by the grand jury is the culmination of a months-long Justice Department investigation now led by special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Smith, who was appointed in November 2022 after Trump announced his 2024 run for the Republican nomination, took over existing investigations into Trump’s handling of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago home as well as “key aspects” of the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and efforts to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.
Trump is facing several other investigations. He was separately charged in early April by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to his alleged role in hush money payments toward the end of his 2016 presidential campaign. He pleaded not guilty in that case. Trump is also facing a criminal investigation in Georgia related to the 2020 election.
After Trump left office in January 2021, the federal government made multiple attempts to obtain files Trump had kept from his time in the White House and gave the former president and his legal team several opportunities to hand them over.
The government eventually seized more than 11,000 pages of government documents from Mar-a-Lago, including more than 100 classified documents, after the former president’s team attested that they had done a thorough search for classified documents at the location.
Trump has denied doing anything wrong, rebuffing allegations that he mishandled classified documents by claiming that he had already declassified them.
Smith, who was appointed in November 2022 after Trump announced his 2024 run for the Republican nomination, took over existing investigations into Trump’s handling of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago home as well as “key aspects” of the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and efforts to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.
He has also equated his situation to President Joe Biden, who was also found to be in possession of classified documents from the Obama administration. But the circumstances are much different.
The catalyst for the investigation of the documents came in early 2022 when Trump returned 15 boxes of White House documents from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives and Records Administration. The Presidential Records Act mandates that all presidential records must be properly preserved by each administration and transferred to the National Archives at the end, and the Archives had repeatedly asked Trump’s team to turn over documents it believed were missing, according to government court filings.
After receiving the boxes in January of last year, Archives found that they included classified material that were haphazardly mixed in and asked the DOJ to review whether Trump’s handling of the records violated federal law.
Their review found 184 unique documents that had classification markings in the boxes, including 25 documents marked as “TOP SECRET,” 67 documents marked as “confidential” and 92 marked “secret.”
Archives asked Trump’s team to make sure there weren’t any more documents, and a federal grand jury in May 2022 issued a subpoena to Trump demanding the return of all documents with classified markings in his possession.
Trump’s lawyers turned over some additional documents with classified markings to the feds in early June of last year, along with a certification from the attorneys that following a “diligent search” all sensitive records that had been in Trump’s possession were now returned.
This is a breaking news story, please check back for updates.
