Report: Trump Classified Documents Grand Jury to Reconvene This Week
The grand jury in the federal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents is reportedly scheduled to meet this week in Washington, D.C. potentially signaling that prosecutors are nearing a charging decision.
On Monday, Trump attorneys John Rowley, James Trusty, and Lindsey Halligan were first spotted at the D.C. federal courthouse on Monday morning by CBS News.
The former president’s legal team late last month had requested a meeting with prosecutors.
“We request a meeting at your earliest convenience to discuss the ongoing injustice that is being perpetrated by your Special Counsel and his prosecutors,” Rowley and Trusty wrote in a letter on May 23.
NBC News reported that not much is known at this point about whether special counsel Jack Smith will seek an indictment. Recent reports say the National Archives informed Smith that it has 16 records that allegedly show that Trump and his top advisers had knowledge of the process that Trump would have to go through to declassify information while he was president and audio recordings that prosecutors have obtained that allegedly feature Trump discussing a classified document he kept after leaving office.
The investigation into the former President focuses on whether he retained classified information after leaving office and if he tried to obstruct investigators or destroyed evidence. The National Archives first alerted Trump in May of 2021 that it was seeking approximately two dozen boxes of records to be returned. Trump was warned in late 2021 that they could escalate the issue to prosecutors or Congress if the former president continued to refuse to hand over the documents.
In January 2022, about 15 of the boxes were returned at which time officials discovered there were more than 700 pages of classified materials in the boxes.
On August 8, the FBI executed a search warrant on Trump’s Mar-A-Lago property and recovered additional sets of classified material.
Trump has defended his actions, saying last week that “everything I did was right” and suggesting the case is a “witch hunt.”
Since the raid on Trump, classified documents were discovered in a Biden think tank in Washington, D.C. as well as former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home.
Last week, the Justice Department announced it would not be charging Pence in the investigation into the documents.