Timeline analysis prepared by ECM documents efforts to conceal records from FBI

By Miriam Raftery

Photo, from indictment: Boxes with classified records stored insecurely in a bathroom at Trump’s Mar a Lago Club.

June 10, 2023 (Washington D.C.) – Special Counsel Jack Smith yesterday unsealed a 49-page indictment charging former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump with “felony violations of our national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice,” Smith announced, after a Florida grand jury voted to indict. Trump is charged with 37 felonies; if convicted, he could face decades in prison.

His chauffeur and former White House aide Waltine Nauta also faces charges, including conspiring with Trump to obstruct justice.

Prosecutors allege that Trump:

• Showed a secret Pentagon plan of attack against a foreign country to unauthorized persons including a writer and publisher in a taped meeting in July 2021, in which he stated, “See as president I could have declassified it…Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
• Showed a political action committee member without a security clearance a classified map of a foreign country during a military operation that he stated was “not going well” in summer 2021.
• Asked his lawyers to defy a subpoena, withhold documents and lie to the FBI;
• Ordered an aide to move boxes of subpoenaed documents without telling his attorneys, shortly before the FBI raid on Mar a Lago;
• Stored highly sensitive documents in an insecure manner in a bathroom, ballroom, storage closet and other areas with unlocked doors Mar a Lago, where thousands of guests attended over 150 events while records were there;
• Mishandled documents on nuclear weaponry of the United States, America’s vulnerabilities,  nuclear capabilities of a foreign country, a foreign country’s support of terrorism against U.S. interests,and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

Smith says of the indictment, “I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged…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….We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”