By LIVE UPDATES: Trump’s arraignment on four counts related to the 2020 election.
Members of the grand jury hearing evidence in the special counsel probe of possible 2020 election interference by former President Donald Trump and others left a federal courthouse Tuesday afternoon, fueling speculation that an indictment against the former president was imminent.
It has been two weeks since Trump announced he was a target in the federal investigation into the efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. The probe, lead by special counsel Jack Smith, is also focused on the events surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Trump’s receipt of a target letter gave the strongest indication yet that the former president would likely be charged in the election probe.
The grand jurors met last Thursday, but left for the day without any hint that they had voted to return indictments.
On Tuesday morning, they headed up to their area on the third floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in Washington, D.C., according to NBC News reporters in the building.
The grand jury broke for lunch around noon ET, and resumed meeting about an hour later.Members were seen departing from the courthouse around 2 p.m.
Trump has already been indicted twice since he launched his 2024 presidential campaign, his third run for the White House.
In March, Manhattan prosecutors charged him with falsifying business records related to hush money payments made before the 2016 election to women who allege they had extramarital affairs with Trump.
In June, he was charged with 37 criminal counts in a case that was centered on his handling of classified records after leaving the White House in 2021. Smith is leading both of the federal probes into Trump.
A superseding indictment in the classified documents case was filed last week, and hit Trump with additional charges.
Those new charges related to an alleged effort by Trump and his co-defendants to delete surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort where the top secret records had been stored. Carlos de Oliveira, a property manager at the club who has been added to the case as the third defendant, told another Mar-a-Lago employee that “the boss” wanted to delete a server containing the security footage, prosecutors alleged.
Trump declared in an all-caps social media post over the weekend that the tapes were “voluntarily handed over” to Smith’s prosecutors, whom the former president lambasted as “thugs.”
“We did not even go to court to stop them from getting these tapes,” Trump wrote. “I never told anybody to delete them.”
