Donald Trump to Make Initial Court Appearance in Miami

Trump’s hearing is scheduled to take place at 3 p.m. Eastern time before a magistrate judge who is expected to inform him of the charges against him and set a next court date.    

Such procedural hearings take place in thousands of courtrooms every day. But with Trump’s appearance Tuesday, 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.

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.

Unknown is how other aspects of Trump’s first federal court appearance will be handled. Criminal defendants who are taken into custody often have their fingerprints taken and are photographed. Their cheeks are often swabbed for a DNA sample. When Trump was arrested in New York, he wasn’t photographed for a mug shot but did have his fingerprints taken, with Secret Service agents accompanying him every step of the way.

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 contributed to this article.

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