Former President Donald Trump is going to be arrested on Tuesday during a history-making federal court appearance on dozens of felony charges accusing him of illegally hoarding classified information.
At the same time, his campaign for re-election just got a huge boost.
Trump’s Tuesday afternoon appearance in Miami will mark his second time facing a judge on criminal charges in as many months. The Justice Department’s first prosecution of a former president involves Espionage Act charges that carry the threat of a significant prison sentence in the event of a conviction.
At the same time, voters rallied to the 45th president. Trump’s polling surged in the 2024 Republican primary, getting 61 percent of Republican support and 38 points over his nearest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis according to a CBS News poll.
Trump vowed to stay in the 2024 Republican presidential primary even if he’s convicted.
“I’ll never leave,” Trump told Politico on Sunday. “Look, if I would have left, I would have left prior to the original race in 2016. That was a rough one. In theory that was not doable.”
He later admitted that the indictment was a troubling development despite the polling bump.
“Nobody wants to be indicted,” Trump reportedly told the magazine. “I don’t care that my poll numbers went up by a lot. I don’t want to be indicted. I’ve never been indicted. I went through my whole life, now I get indicted every two months. It’s been political.”
Ahead of his arraignment, Trump ratcheted up the attacks against the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case, calling Jack Smith “deranged” and his team of prosecutors “thugs” as he repeated his claims that he was the target of a political persecution.
He called on his supporters to join a protest at the Miami courthouse Tuesday, where he will be arraigned on the charges.
“We need strength in our country now,” Trump said, speaking to his 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 said.
Trump is expected to depart for Miami on Monday and will spend the rest of the day in Florida with advisers. After his court appearance, he will return to New Jersey, where he’s scheduled a press event to publicly respond to the charges.
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 DOJ claims he kept information on nuclear programs, defense and weapons capabilities of the U.S. and foreign governments, and a Pentagon “attack plan,” the indictment says.
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 Trump’s own former attorney general, William Barr, offered a grim prediction of Trump’s fate, 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 in the indictment, “then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a pretty — it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning.”
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The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article