Jack Smith IV

Washington, DC As former president Donald Trump was ushered into court in DC Thursday afternoon, dozens of protesters and counter-protesters lined the blocks around the E. Barrett Prettyman US Courthouse. Some danced in celebration at “Trump’s indictment party,” while others marched down the road waving American flags. Obscenities were flung, insults traded, but the presence of any real agitators was small.    For what was billed as such a historic event, the afternoon was shockingly calm. Protesters clashed occasionally, but the Trump supporters and his critics mostly ignored one another. Both groups were, perhaps unsurprisingly, far outnumbered by the media and onlookers on the street.

Donald Trump said Tuesday that he has received notice he is a target in the federal criminal investigation into the January 6 riot and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.  “Deranged Jack Smith, the prosecutor with Joe Biden’s DOJ, sent a letter (again, it was Sunday night!) stating that I am a TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury investigation, and giving me a very short 4 days to report to the Grand Jury, which almost always means an Arrest and Indictment,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site.  Two sources with direct knowledge of the grand jury probe confirmed to NBC News that Smith had sent Trump the target letter.

Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality. A case in point was the chyron that Fox News posted briefly on June 13. That was the day that Donald Trump was arraigned in Miami. The news story featured a split screen. On the left was Joe Biden speaking at an event in Washington for the secretary-general of NATO. On the right was Donald Trump addressing supporters in New Jersey. Underneath ran the unspeakable truth: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” That fresh-breeze-of-truth window was open for a total of twenty-seven seconds. Then it was slammed shut. But that was long enough. Our Guardians on the internet erupted in fury. Fox issued a public apology and canned the veteran producer responsible on the spot.

Donald Trump’s defense that he was just holding up “newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles” always came across rather far-fetched, but an unhelpful excerpt from a Trump staffer's book could materially weaken it further. Veteran reporter Robert Mackey tweeted out a critical observation from Mark Meadows’s memoir, The Chief’s Chief. Mackey noted that in the memoir, the ghostwriter types, “The president recalls a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops.” This sounds remarkably like what Trump discusses in the recording mentioned in the indictment released by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Former president Donald Trump decried what he characterized as the “fake and fabricated charges” brought against him by the Department of Justice in a half-hour speech on the evening of his arraignment Addressing a crowd of around 900 loyalists at his Bedminster resort in New Jersey, Trump referred to Jack Smith’s indictment of him as “election interference” and “political persecution.” “This day will go down in infamy,” he told his adoring fans, claiming that Biden wanted to see him spend “400 years in prison” for “possessing my own presidential papers.

Donald Trump is the first president in history to be indicted for federal crimes, in this case thirty-seven counts that center on his taking of highly classified materials from the White House to Mar-a-Lago in January 2021. The charges also implicate the former president and a close aide, Waltine Nauta, in a conspiracy to hide the documents in whole or in part from the National Archives, the Department of Justice and his own legal team — and making false statements along those same lines.  Hundreds of documents are of concern, classified at the highest levels with origins at the CIA, NSA and elsewhere in the intelligence community. While leaks and speculation prior to the unsealing of the indictment suggested this was a routine Espionage Act case — i.e.

Donald Trump has been indicted by the Department of Justice following an investigation by Special Counsel Jack Smith into classified documents he took while exiting the White House, according to a Truth Social post from the former president. This would be the first time a former president has ever faced federal charges. Trump has been charged with seven counts in the indictment, according to multiple reports. "The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional boxes in Chinatown, D.C.