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Trump says he expects to be indicted on Tuesday
Former US president Donald Trump said Tuesday that he expects his imminent indictment by special counsel Jack Smith in a fresh criminal case.
Smith has already filed charges against Trump for mishandling top secret government documents and has spent the past eight months investigating the former president's efforts to overturn the November 2020 presidential election results.
"I hear that Deranged Jack Smith, in order to interfere with the Presidential Election of 2024, will be putting out yet another Fake Indictment of your favorite President, me," Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
Trump said two weeks ago that he had received a letter from prosecutors suggesting he is likely to be criminally indicted over the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol by his supporters.
"Why didn't they do this 2.5 years ago?" Trump said Tuesday. "Why did they wait so long?
"Because they wanted to put it right in the middle of my campaign. Prosecutorial Misconduct."
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has repeatedly attacked the investigation as a political "witch hunt" by the Department of Justice.
Trump is scheduled to go on trial in Florida in the classified documents case in May of next year, at the height of what is expected to be a bitter and divisive presidential campaign.
In early June, he was charged with 37 counts related to his refusal to return highly classified documents taken to Florida after he left the White House.
Those counts include retention of national defense information, obstruction of justice, and making false statements, and bring up to 20 years in prison.
Smith filed additional charges against Trump in a superseding indictment last week.
Trump is accused in the latest documents of attempting to delete security camera footage at his Mar-A-Lago residence to prevent it from being provided to the FBI and a grand jury.
The former president confronts other investigations as well, including 34 felony counts filed in New York state in April related to hush money payments to a porn star.
Georgia prosecutors are also looking into whether Trump illegally attempted to overturn the 2020 election outcome in the southern state.
The probe was sparked by Trump's January 2, 2021 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, when he infamously pressured election officials to "find" 11,780 votes that would reverse his defeat to Joe Biden in the state.
As president, Trump was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives for seeking political dirt on Biden from Ukraine and over the events of January 6 but he was acquitted by the Republican-majority Senate both times.
D. Wassiljew--BTZ
