Trump Heads to Florida for Court Appearance in Documents Case

Former President Donald Trump was en route to Florida on Monday, a day before his scheduled first appearance in federal court in Miami on criminal charges of mishandling sensitive national security secrets and seeking to thwart the government’s efforts to reclaim classified documents he took with him from the White House.

Trump is planning to spend Monday night at his Doral resort in Miami, where he and his legal team will be conducting last-minute interviews with lawyers to represent him in the case, before heading to the federal courthouse Tuesday afternoon.

The authorities in Miami were bracing for the possibility of large crowds of pro-Trump protesters on Tuesday. Trump has urged peaceful demonstrations, but some of his backers have portrayed this indictment, in an investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, as an act of war and called for retribution.

After the hearing, Trump, who has railed against the new indictment, is expected to fly back to New Jersey. He has announced that he will deliver remarks at his golf club in Bedminster at 8:15 p.m. Tuesday.

Trump’s case has been assigned to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who earlier handled a lawsuit he filed challenging the FBI’s court-authorized search of his Florida estate and club, Mar-a-Lago. That search came in August, after Trump had not fully cooperated with a subpoena requiring him to give back all the documents with classification markings that he still had.

At the hearing, Trump is likely to stand quietly next to his lawyer until the judge gives him permission to speak. It is also not yet clear whether Trump will return for an arraignment later or enter his expected plea of not guilty on Tuesday to eliminate a need to come back for that step.

In the search of Mar-a-Lago, agents found 102 documents marked as classified. Smith has charged Trump with 37 counts of unauthorized retention of national security information based on 36 of those documents, along with one that agents found that had no markings and laid out certain “military contingency planning.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/12/us/politics/trump-florida-court-appearance.html">The New York Times</a>.