Donald Trump to Appear in Miami Court After Indictment Over Classified Documents

Such brief procedural hearings take place in thousands of courtrooms every day. But with Trump’s appearance, the unprecedented federal criminal case against the former president starts to make its way through the courts as the 2024 presidential campaign heats up.

Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has scheduled comments Tuesday evening from his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. He has denied any wrongdoing, encouraged his supporters to show up Tuesday in Miami and used the indictment to seek campaign contributions. 

Law-enforcement officials were bracing for possible unrest or clashes among protesters. Miami’s police chief Manny Morales said his department was prepared for a crowd of 5,000 to 50,000 people.

“Make no mistake about it, we’re taking this event extremely serious,” Morales said. “We’re ready. Ready for it to be over and done.”

Trump has painted the indictment, the first emanating from an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith, as a politically motivated effort to undermine him, and some of his allies have called for payback. 

Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., posted a picture of Trump on Instagram with the message “RETRIBUTION IS COMING.” Other allies in Congress and elsewhere have used seemingly violent rhetoric in defending Trump.

Gregg Donovan, who calls himself the Ambassador of Hollywood, stood outside the courthouse Tuesday with a blue Trump 2024 sign, a black top hat with Trump’s photo on front and a gold chain around his neck with a sign that read, “In Trump we trust.” Donovan said he arrived in Miami from California on Monday. “I’m here to support the president in every way I can,” he said. “I think this is the worst thing for the Republican Party since the assassination of President Lincoln. It’s just surreal.”

Scott Linnen, a Miami resident and Biden voter, spoke out against pro-Trump protesters. “Biden didn’t try to overthrow the government, y’all,” he called out.

“I needed to come down here today for this documents case just as an affirmation that we are moving, albeit at a snail’s pace, in the right direction…toward justice,” he said.

Miami city officials said Monday they had bolstered police presence downtown and worked alongside federal law enforcement to plan for the event. Hearings in unrelated cases in the same building were being rescheduled to avoid the commotion, and the U.S. attorney’s office encouraged staff to work remotely.

Smith’s prosecutors spent Monday huddled inside what law-enforcement officials know as the courthouse’s “war room,” another federal prosecutor said.

Trump faces 37 counts on seven different charges, including willful retention of national-defense information, withholding a record, false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice. All relate to his handling of documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, roughly 70 miles north of the courthouse.

Charged alongside Trump is his valet, Walt Nauta, who went to work at Mar-a-Lago resort after working in the White House. Nauta separately faces a false-statements charge and is also set to make a court appearance Tuesday in Miami.

Tuesday’s appearance will be Trump’s second time in a courtroom as a defendant since he lost the presidency. He was arraigned in April on charges stemming from the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into his role in a hush-money payment made during the final stretch of the 2016 election to a porn star who alleged she had an affair with him. He pleaded not guilty.

Law enforcement stepped up patrols around that hearing, and crowds of protesters were largely peaceful.

Trump will be digitally fingerprinted during his booking in Miami but won’t have a mug shot taken or be placed in handcuffs, a person familiar with the process said.

Just hours before the hearing, Florida-based lawyer Christopher Kise formally said he would represent Trump in the case.

Trump’s associates have spent weeks talking to top criminal defense lawyers in south Florida, several of whom turned them down, according to people familiar with the matter.

Part of the hesitation, some of the people said, is Trump’s record with his own lawyers, who at times end up in trouble themselves in connection with their work for Trump, or forced to serve as witnesses against him. The former president also has a reputation for not always paying his bills, including legal bills.

In South Florida, local court rules dictate that once a defense lawyer has entered a court appearance on behalf of a defendant who has been arraigned, the lawyer can’t withdraw from the case if a client stops paying them, an arrangement Kise noted in his filing Tuesday.

In a separate filing, Kise, who joined Trump’s legal team late last year, also asked the court to allow New York attorney Todd Blanche, a former federal prosecutor who is already defending the former president against the Manhattan criminal charges, to represent Trump in the documents case.

Federal prosecutors Friday unsealed a detailed, 49-page indictment, including color photographs, alleging the former president held on to documents he knew he shouldn’t have retained access to, shared them with others and directed his staff to help him evade authorities’ efforts to get them back. 

The classified documents Trump kept in his boxes in a bathroom, ballroom, bedroom and elsewhere included information about U.S. and foreign military and weapons capabilities, U.S. nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the U.S. and its allies to military attack, and plans for a possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack, the indictment said. 

Trump’s case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed to the federal trial court in South Florida in 2020. Cannon previously presided over a lawsuit the former president brought last year objecting to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s August search of Mar-a-Lago.

Cannon granted Trump’s request to appoint an outside arbiter—known as a special master—to review documents seized from the former president’s residence and private resort. An appeals court panel later overturned her decision and disbanded the review process, saying there was no justification for treating Trump differently than any other target of a search warrant.

Cannon was randomly assigned to Trump’s criminal prosecution, people familiar with the matter said.

—C. Ryan Barber and Aruna Viswanatha contributed to this article.

Write to Deborah Acosta at [email protected], Sadie Gurman at [email protected] and Erin Ailworth at [email protected]

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