Former US President Donald Trump pleads not guilty in documents case

Washington, DC

On 4 August 2023, Former US President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to three new charges regarding his handling of US classified documents after he left the White House after completing his tenure in 2021.
Trump appeared in federal court in Miami on June 13, this year to plead not guilty to 37 charges that he unlawfully kept the national security documents, which included details about the US nuclear program and future military plans, and lied to officials who insisted on recovering them. Now, he entered his latest pleas in a written filing.
Donald Trump has asserted his innocence and has accused Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration of attacking him for political reasons. He has called Smith, who was authorised by US Attorney General Merrick Garland in November, last year, to lead the documents and 2020 election investigations, a “Trump hater.” The judge in the documents case has scheduled the trial to begin next year, though that could change further.
As per the opinion polls Trump, who served as the US president from 2017 to 2021, has a large lead over a crowded field of candidates for his party’s 2024 nomination as he seeks a rematch with current US President Joe Biden, who defeated him in 2020.
Donald Trump is accused of taking several state and national security documents containing the country’s most closely held secrets and storing them incautiously in a poor condition at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. According to the indictment, Trump also showed classified information in the document to the people in New Jersey who were not authorised to see it.
In April 2023, Donald Trump officially became the first sitting or former US president to face criminal charges when he was put on trial in New York state court, accused of falsifying business records to keep hush money payments to a porn star out of the sight ahead of the 2016 US Presidential election. He pleaded not guilty in that case as well.