Trump Indicted: Trump Is Charged in Classified Documents Inquiry (2024)

Pinned

Trump is the first former president in U.S. history to face federal charges.

The Justice Department made no comment and did not immediately make the indictment public.

The indictment, handed up by a grand jury in Federal District Court in Miami, is the first time a former president has faced federal charges. It puts the nation in an extraordinary position, given Mr. Trump’s status not only as a one-time commander-in-chief but also as the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to face President Biden, whose administration will now be seeking to convict his potential rival of multiple felonies.

Mr. Trump is expected to surrender to the authorities on Tuesday, according to a person close to him and his own post on his social media platform, Truth Social.

“The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been indicted,” Mr. Trump wrote, in one of several posts around 7 p.m. after he was notified of the charges.

The former president added that he was scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Miami at 3 p.m. on Tuesday.

In a video he released later on Truth Social, Mr. Trump declared: “I’m an innocent man. I’m an innocent person.”

The indictment, filed by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, came about two months after local prosecutors in New York filed more than 30 felony charges against Mr. Trump in a case connected to a hush money payment made to a p*rn star in advance of the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump remains under investigation by Mr. Smith’s office for his wide-ranging efforts to retain power after his election loss in 2020, and how those efforts led to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. He is also being scrutinized for potential election interference by the district attorney’s office in Fulton County, Ga.

Public filings in the documents case have painted a picture of Mr. Trump repeatedly stonewalling efforts by both the National Archives and Records Administration and the Justice Department to retrieve the trove of hundreds of sensitive government records that the former president took with him from the White House and kept mostly at his private club and residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.

While the nature of a few of the documents found in Mr. Trump’s possession is known — he had held onto letters from the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, for example — it remains unclear what other classified materials were found at Mar-a-Lago and what national security damage his possession of them caused, if any.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly characterized the investigation as a politically motivated witch hunt, and in recent weeks his lawyers have sought to raise what they say are issues of prosecutorial misconduct.

Here’s what else to know:

• A senior Biden administration official said the White House learned of the indictment from news reports.

• The indictment reaches back to the end of Mr. Trump’s term in January 2021, when the documents — many of which were said to be in the White House residence — were packed in boxes along with clothes, gifts, photos and other material, and shipped by the General Services Administration to Mar–a-Lago.

• After lengthy efforts by the National Archives throughout much of 2021 to get Mr. Trump to turn over the material he had taken with him — considered government property under the Presidential Records Act — Mr. Trump turned over 15 boxes of material in January 2022. The boxes turned out to contain highly sensitive material with classified markings, prompting a Justice Department investigation.

• Last August, federal agents descended on Mar-a-Lago to conduct an extraordinary search that turned up material that Mr. Trump had failed to turn over in response to a subpoena months earlier demanding the return of any classified documents still in his possession.

• The Justice Department has repeatedly questioned Mr. Trump’s level of cooperation with the efforts to recover the documents, saying that it had recovered more than 100 documents containing classified markings even after an attestation by one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers that a “diligent search” by his legal team had not turned up any further materials.

• Mr. Trump still faces other open criminal investigations. They include Mr. Smith’s inquiry into Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power following his election loss — and how they led to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol — and an investigation by a prosecutor in Georgia into his attempts to reverse his 2020 election loss in that vital swing state. Mr. Trump is scheduled to go on trial in the Manhattan criminal case next March.

Support for Trump has remained unchanged through multiple investigations.

And in last fall’s midterm elections, only a slim majority of Democratic voters — and just 7 percent of Republican voters — said investigations into Mr. Trump were very important to their vote in the fall, according to Pew Research Center.

When asked about potential criminal charges against Mr. Trump earlier this year, 57 percent of Americans said they thought criminal charges should disqualify him from running for president again, including 23 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of independents, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.

Even so, 57 percent of voters — including one-third of Democrats — said the indictment on separate charges of Mr. Trump in New York earlier this year was politically motivated, according to an April poll from The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Overall, just under half of Americans thought Mr. Trump intentionally did something wrong in how he handled the classified documents, an ABC/Washington Post poll found earlier this year. An additional 29 percent of adults thought he may have unintentionally done something wrong, and 20 percent thought he did not do anything wrong.

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Trusty also said he believed there was a conspiracy count, as has been reported. But he cautioned that he was not looking at the document and that it was vague in places. “This is not biblically accurate, because I’m not looking at a charging document. I’m looking at a summary sheet. There’s language in there that might actually be reflecting a single count instead of two, but I think there was a conspiracy count as well,” he said. He added that the team had not been told of anyone else being indicted.

Trump has claimed he can declassify documents. Here’s what he can and can’t do.

It is also worth noting that none of the three criminal laws cited in the warrant used to execute the search of his Florida home and estate depend on whether documents technically contain classified information. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have not repeated his claim in court, where there are professional consequences for lying. They have also resisted a judge’s proposal that they submit a sworn declaration or affidavit about any declassification action.

But classification is a complicated process.

Officials with the authority to classify or declassify matters can deem information as falling into three categories: confidential, secret or top secret. Access to particularly sensitive information can be restricted even further with a designation of S.C.I., for sensitive compartmented information.

If information is classified, access to it is restricted. Any documents containing that information are supposed to be marked, and only officials with proper security clearances — and a “need to know” — are permitted to see them or be told of their contents. There are also rules limiting how they can be stored, physically transported or electronically transmitted.

In the normal course of business, certain officials who have been designated as “original classification authorities” in federal departments and agencies can classify or declassify information. They are considered to be exercising the president’s power over such matters, which has been delegated to them.

There are formal procedures for doing so. A 2009 executive order directs the head of the department or agency that originally deemed information classified to oversee declassification reviews, and it sets some standards for them.

Presidents can declassify information directly, because it is ultimately their constitutional authority, but do so only rarely. Normally, presidents who want something declassified direct subordinates overseeing the department or agency with primary responsibility for the information to review the matter with an eye to making more of it public.

Even if it is true that Mr. Trump had pronounced the documents declassified while he was in office, he clearly did not follow the regular procedures. But there is no Supreme Court precedent that definitively answers whether that would make any difference.

Notably, a federal appeals court said in 2020 that “declassification, even by the president, must follow established procedures.” But the context was different: That line was part of an opinion rejecting a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit involving whether Mr. Trump had declassified a covert program by discussing its existence in a tweet.

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Here are some of the charges Trump faces.

Here is a closer look.

Unauthorized retention of national security documents

It is a crime to retain national security documents without authorization and to fail to deliver them to a government official entitled to take custody of them.

To win a conviction, prosecutors would have to show that Mr. Trump knew he was still in possession of the documents after leaving the White House and failed to comply when the government asked him to return them and then subpoenaed him.

Each such charged document would be a separate offense, so it is possible that prosecutors have brought as many as five counts of this offense by citing five different records. A conviction would be theoretically subject to 10 years in prison for each count, although defendants in other Espionage Act cases have received significantly less than the maximum.

To obtain a conviction, prosecutors would also have to prove to the jury that the documents related to the national defense, that they were closely held and that their disclosure could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.

Although Mr. Trump has claimed — without evidence — that he declassified all the files he tookto Mar-a-Lago, prosecutors would not technically need to prove that they were still classified because the Espionage Act predates the classification system and does not refer to it as an element.

Conspiracy Charges

It is a crime to agree with another person to break a law. Prosecutors would need to show that Mr. Trump and some other person had a meeting of the minds about committing a specific crime and that one of them took some step toward that goal. The penalty can be up to five years.

Obstruction

It is a crime to conceal records to obstruct an official effort. Prosecutors would need to show several things, includingthat Mr. Trump knew he still had files that were subject to the efforts by theNational Archivesand Records Administration to take custody of presidential records.They would also need to be able to demonstratethathe willfully defiedthe Justice Department’s subpoena for files marked as classified, and that he intentionally caused his subordinates to fail to turn them all over while leading officials to believe they had complied. The penalty is up to 20 years per offense.

False statement

It is a crime to make a false statement to a law enforcement officer about a fact material to the officer’s investigation. Such crimes carry a penalty of up to five years per offense.

Mr. Trump is not known to have directly made substantive statements to the government, but prosecutors could charge him if they can show that he conspired with or induced another person to lie to the Justice Department about there being no further documents responsive to the subpoena.

Or, if prosecutors can show that he induced his lawyers to unwittingly lie to the Justice Department, they could charge Mr. Trump directly for causing the false statement even if he himself did not commit the offense himself. Thelaw says that “whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by him or another would be an offense against the United States, is punishable as a principal.”

It is not known what the other charges are, but here are some possibilities:

Mishandling official documents

Whether or not the documents relate to national security, it is a crime to conceal or destroy official documents. Among other disclosures, former aides to Mr. Trump have recounted how he sometimes ripped up official documents. The National Archives has also said that some of the White House paper records the Trump administrationtransferred to ithad been torn up, including some that had been taped back together. The penalty is up to three years per offense, in addition to a ban on holding federal office, although the latter is most likely unconstitutional, legal experts say.

Contempt of court

It is a crime to willfully disobey a court order, like the grand jury subpoena Mr. Trump received in May 2022 thatrequired him to turn over all documents markedasclassifiedthat remainedin his possession. It carries a penalty of a fine of up to $1,000 and up to six months in prison. To bring this charge, prosecutors would need evidence showing he knew that he was still holding onto other files with classification markings during and after his representatives purported to comply with the subpoena.

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Republicans in Congress Decry Trump Indictment and Vow Retaliation

The chairman of that panel, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, has used his perch to attempt to pressure the Justice Department over what he views as unfair treatment of Mr. Trump. Mr. Jordan this week sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding unredacted documents concerning the investigation of the special counsel, Jack Smith.

“It’s a sad day for America,” Mr. Jordan said in a statement on Thursday. “God bless President Trump.”

Members of Congress have no power to stop criminal charges, but they can attempt to interfere with prosecutors through their legislative powers, such as issuing subpoenas, demanding witness interviews or documents, restricting Justice Department funding and using the platform of their offices to attempt to publicly influence the case.

Several Republicans who are closely allied with Mr. Trump said, without evidence, that the indictment was an attempt to distract from their investigation into President Biden’s family, including his son Hunter’s business dealings. They made clear that they would target federal law enforcement in retaliation.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said the case against Mr. Trump was a “stain on our nation that the F.B.I. and D.O.J. are so corrupt and they don’t even hide it anymore.” She added, “We must win in 2024. We must beat these sick people.”

Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, predicted that the former president would prevail against the charges, and that his rivals would be imprisoned.

“This scheme won’t succeed. President Donald Trump will be back in the White House and Joe Biden will be Hunter’s cellmate,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on Twitter.

It was the second time this year that House Republicans rallied to Mr. Trump’s defense after he was charged criminally. In April, Speaker Kevin McCarthy pledged to use the investigative powers of the House to hold Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, “accountable” after Mr. Trump was charged in New York with 34 counts of falsifying business records.

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Here’s how indictments work in the United States’ legal system.

Unlike a criminal trial, where a jury has to reach a unanimous verdict, a grand jury can issue an indictment with a simple majority.

Grand jurors hear evidence and testimony only from prosecutors and the witnesses that they choose to present. They do not hear from the defense or usually from the person accused, unlike in a criminal trial where proceedings are adversarial.

That one-sided arrangement often leads defense lawyers to minimize indictments and argue that prosecutors can easily persuade jurors to indict.

As in other criminal cases, the exact charges against Mr. Trump are under seal and will not be revealed until he is brought for a formal arraignment. Mr. Trump is expected to surrender himself to the authorities in Miami on Tuesday, according to a person close to him and his own post on Truth Social.

At that point, the indictment will be unsealed, initiating the case’s next phase. Prosecutors will share their evidence with defense attorneys, who often ask a judge to dismiss the case on various legal grounds.

A trial is not guaranteed and may not be scheduled for months, as both sides will most likely argue over the merits of the case and what evidence can be presented to a jury.

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Republican presidential contenders weigh in, mostly with support.

But he stopped short of saying he would pardon Mr. Trump if elected, instead promising that he would “bring accountability” to the Justice Department.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and author, was quick out of the gate — not with a criticism of Mr. Trump, but with wholehearted support for him. Seeking to position himself to secure the backing of Mr. Trump’s supporters if the former president’s legal problems derail his political comeback, Mr. Ramaswamy said, “I commit to pardon Trump promptly on Jan. 20, 2025.”

Echoing Mr. Trump’s assertions that the indictment was purely political, Mr. Ramaswamy wrote of President Biden and the Department of Justice, “I never thought we would see the day when the U.S. president deputizes the D.O.J. to arrest his lead rival in the middle of an election,” a remarkable acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is Mr. Biden’s “lead rival.”

Mr. Ramaswamy also asserted without evidence that former President Barack Obama “shamefully tried to deputize the F.B.I. to infiltrate Trump’s 2016 campaign, but they’re leaving nothing to chance this time around: The federal police state is outright arresting Trump.”

He conceded that “there are also serious legal questions about the president’s power to declassify documents and the potential illegality of the over-classification of federal documents in the first place,” but, Mr. Ramaswamy said, “That’s for the courts to decide.”

And indeed, they may.

Another long-shot candidate, Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas and a longtime critic of Mr. Trump, reiterated his call for Mr. Trump to drop out of the race for the 2024 presidential nomination.

“Donald Trump’s actions — from his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law — should not define our nation or the Republican Party,” he said in a statement. “This is a sad day for our country.”

The indictment, Mr. Hutchinson said, “reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.”

Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting.

The special counsel’s reported choice to indict in Florida could carry significant implications.

Former federal prosecutors described the decision to charge in Miami as strategic. Dennis M. Fitzpatrick, who handled national security cases in Virginia, said that when a prosecutor believes he has a strong case, he takes every step to protect it. That means taking thorny legal issues off the table such as venue, which probably would have triggered a protracted legal fight.

In federal law, “venue” refers to the proper place to hold a trial: Prosecutors cannot choose any federal courthouse in the country, but rather must charge a defendant in a district that has a sufficient connection with the events that gave rise to the matter.

Complexities can emerge when a defendant is being charged with multiple offenses that took place in different parts of the country. In that situation, a defendant could opt to waive their right to challenge whether the case was brought in the proper venue. That would allow prosecutors to address the entire matter in one trial for simplicity’s sake. But if not, prosecutors must hold different trials in different places.

Justice Department prosecutors would typically prefer to bring any case in the Federal District Court in Washington, where they live and work, while a defendant who does not live in Washington would often prefer to be tried where he or she is based.

Beyond that, the pool of available jurors in Washington is more likely to include Democrats, while the pool in a more conservative area, like South Florida, is more likely to include Republicans. That said, during jury selection, lawyers will try to screen out people who cannot put aside their political biases.

Bringing a case in Florida also would also raise the possibility that it could be randomly assigned — or transferred — to Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who shocked experts by intervening on his behalf early in the investigation. The judge was rebuked and shut down by an appeals court that included two other Trump appointees.

Adam Goldman contributed reporting.

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In the four-minute video, Trump calls his indictment “warfare for the law” and claims he did “nothing wrong.” “Very unfair, but that’s the way it is,” he says, wearing a suit and red tie.

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The investigation reaches back to the end of Trump’s term.

That December, Mr. Trump’s lawyers told the National Archives that they had boxes of material that could be reclaimed, and the agency arranged for the boxes — which ultimately totaled 15 — to be retrieved.

When archivists opened the boxes, they discovered that 14 of them contained documents marked as classified. The National Archives alerted the Justice Department and an investigation was opened into whether the materials had been mishandled.

Around that time, Mr. Trump told an aide on multiple occasions to tell archives officials that he had given everything back — which later proved not to be true.

In the months that followed, the Justice Department tried to ensure that it had obtained any other documents that may have ended up at Mar-a-Lago. In May 2022, the Justice Department issued a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s lawyers for any additional records still in his possession.

That June, Justice Department and F.B.I. investigators went to Mar-a-Lago, where Mr. Trump’s lawyers gave them roughly three dozen additional documents that had been found in a storage room, including 17 bearing the “Top Secret” label.

In an apparent effort to show the Justice Department that all the material in question had been returned, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers signed an attestation on June 3, 2022, stating that a “diligent search” had turned up no other documents.

The Justice Department subsequently sent Mr. Trump’s lawyer a letter asking that the room where the boxes were being held be secured and the materials be secured.

The Justice Department developed additional evidence, including from surveillance cameras near the storage room, that gave them probable cause that documents had been withheld.

After getting a search warrant, the F.B.I. descended on Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022. Agents combed through Mr. Trump’s property, finding more than 100 additional classified documents that were discovered in the storage room and Mr. Trump’s office.

“That the F.B.I., in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former president’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter,” the Justice Department wrote in a court filing two weeks after the search.

Mr. Trump — who announced the search to the world several hours after it occurred — quickly clashed with investigators. He tried to fight the Justice Department to have the materials set aside and a special master appointed to look over investigators’ shoulders. Mr. Trump won an early court victory in that matter, but ultimately lost and the department proceeded with its investigation.

In the months that followed, a range of Trump aides and lawyers were interviewed by the F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors. Some of them tried to have federal judges block the Justice Department from questioning them, but those efforts largely failed as well.

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Who is Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted Trump?

He was “the right choice to complete these matters in an evenhanded and urgent manner,” Mr. Garland said in announcing the appointment of Mr. Smith, who had been serving as the top prosecutor investigating war crimes in Kosovo in The Hague.

Mr. Smith, 54, has cut an elusive figure since his appointment last November to investigate former President Donald J. Trump. He has granted no interviews, and kept a profile so low that a recent sighting of him emerging from a Subway with lunch was news in the Justice Department headquarters across town.

But on Friday, he made a concise case for his decision to charge Mr. Trump in connection with his retention of classified documents at his residence in Florida.

“Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice,” Mr. Smith said. “And our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”

Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have accused the Justice Department of pursuing a politically motivated investigation intended to destroy Mr. Trump’s chances of retaking the White House, including by leaking details of the case. But department officials have said Mr. Smith is committed to conducting a fair investigation, and he has defended his own lawyers against attacks from the Trump team, who accuse them of using unethical tactics.

John Luman Smith was born on June 5, 1969, and grew up in Clay, N.Y., a suburb of Syracuse. He graduated from the State University of New York at Oneonta in 1991 before attending Harvard Law School.

Mr. Smith started out as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office shortly after graduating, and soon moved to a similar job at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn. Over the next decade, he rose to a series of supervisory positions, including chief of criminal litigation, overseeing dozens of prosecutors pursuing cases involving gangs, violent crime, financial fraud and public corruption.

Former colleagues said he stood out from the start. He was more intense and more focused than many of his peers. He was known for his succinct and effective courtroom style — so much so that senior attorneys in the office would advise junior prosecutors to watch his trials and take notes, according to a person who worked with him in Brooklyn.

During that time, Mr. Smith met Marshall Miller, now the top adviser to Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco, and the two men worked closely during an investigation into the brutal attack of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was sexually assaulted by the police with a broomstick inside a Brooklyn precinct in 1997.

Mr. Miller — along with Leslie Caldwell, a former department official close to both men — was instrumental in Mr. Smith’s selection as special counsel, telling Ms. Monaco and Mr. Garland that his independence and aggressiveness made him the ideal person for the job, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.

His competitiveness is not limited to the law.

Mr. Smith is an avid runner and cyclist who began competing in triathlons in 2002, even though he was initially a weak swimmer who could barely complete a single lap. Since then, he has participated in at least nine full Iron Man triathlons, including in Germany, Brazil, Canada and Denmark.

It has not been without hazards. In the 2000s, he was struck by a truck while biking, badly fracturing his pelvis. “After the crash, I was always dealing with some injury,” he said in an interview in 2018. “I went through several years of seeing many, many, many therapists with no real improvement.”

From 2010 to 2015, Mr. Smith led the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, which investigates politicians and other public figures accused of corruption.

When he took over, the unit was reeling from the collapse of a criminal case against former Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. In Mr. Smith’s first few months on the job, he closed several prominent investigations into members of Congress without charges.

At the time, Mr. Smith brushed off the suggestion he had lost his nerve.

“If I were the sort of person who could be cowed,” Mr. Smith said, “I would find another line of work.”

Among his more notable corruption cases was a conviction of Robert McDonnell, the Republican former governor of Virginia, that was later overturned by the Supreme Court, and a conviction of former Representative Rick Renzi, Republican of Arizona, whom Mr. Trump pardoned during his final hours as president.

Mr. Trump’s team seized on his spotty record of success in high-stakes cases, to cast doubt on his indictment of the former president. The Trump campaign sent out a fact sheet on Mr. Smith when news of the indictment broke on Thursday, accusing him of trying to “target conservatives during the Obama era” — even though he also investigated Democrats, including Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, during his tenure.

In 2015, Mr. Smith left Washington to accept a post in the federal prosecutor’s office in Nashville, in part to be closer to family members who had relocated there. He was appointed as acting U.S. attorney when Mr. Trump fired Obama-appointed attorneys, but left for a job at a private health care company after being passed over for a permanent appointment in the post, according to a law enforcement official who worked with him in Tennessee.

By late 2017, he had grown restless and jumped at the chance to move to The Hague to oversee the prosecution of defendants accused of war crimes in the Kosovo conflict in the late 1990s, after having served a stint there as a junior investigator earlier in his career.

When Mr. Garland’s aides contacted Mr. Smith, he and his team were fresh off the conviction of a high-ranking official in Kosovo and preparing a case against the country’s former president, Hashim Thaci, who has been connected with the killings of 100 Albanians, Roma and Serbs.

Mr. Smith expressed regret at not being able to be in The Hague for the trial, but eagerly accepted Mr. Garland’s offer, according to officials, saying he viewed his long-term obligations to the department as his primary professional responsibility.

His homecoming was delayed, however, by another biking accident that left his leg badly injured, and he arrived in Washington in late December.

Since then, Mr. Smith has assembled a team that includes career prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and the department’s national security division who were already working on the Trump investigations, along with several trusted aides.

Mr. Trump’s team has been critical of Mr. Smith’s aides, accusing Jay I. Bratt, a top official of the national security division, of inappropriately pressuring witnesses. But one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers at the time, James Trusty, worked closely with Mr. Smith when they served in the department’s criminal division. Mr. Trusty, who left Mr. Trump’s legal team a day after the former president was indicted, has been dismissive of the government’s case in public; but he has privately told associates that Mr. Smith is a tough and formidable opponent.

Still, veteran prosecutors in the department said that the image Mr. Trump and his rivals have projected of Mr. Smith — as a gung-ho prosecutor eager to bring charges — missed the mark. They said he was committed to making decisions, no matter the outcome, without delay and in line with his mandate to act before the 2024 presidential campaign hits full stride.

Former colleagues said Mr. Smith’s most memorable attribute was a stripped-down management style that put a premium on gathering enough information to make a charging decision as swiftly as possible.

“He doesn’t like to sit there, playing with his food,” said one person who worked with him for several years.

He also seemed comfortable with his somewhat mysterious reputation if it gave him an edge.

Case in point: Mr. Smith sat impassively, saying little and allowing subordinates to do most of the talking during a high-stakes meeting on Monday with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to discuss a letter informing them that a prosecution was imminent, according to a person familiar with the situation.

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Here’s where the other investigations against Trump stand.

And Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the documents case, is also examining Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat at the polls in 2020 and his role in the events that led to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Here is where notable inquiries involving the former president stand.

Manhattan Criminal Case

The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, brought the case over Mr. Trump’s role in a hush-money payment to a p*rn star, Stormy Daniels, who was poised during the campaign to go public with her story of a sexual encounter with him.

Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer at the time, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. Once he was sworn in as president, Mr. Trump reimbursed Mr. Cohen.

While paying hush money is not inherently criminal, Mr. Bragg accused Mr. Trump of falsifying records related to the payments and the reimbursem*nt of Mr. Cohen, who is expected to serve as the prosecution’s star witness.

In court papers, prosecutors also cited the account of another woman, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model. Ms. McDougal had tried to sell her story of an affair with Mr. Trump during the campaign and reached a $150,000 agreement with The National Enquirer.

Rather than publish her account, the tabloid suppressed it in cooperation with Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, prosecutors say. (Mr. Trump has denied having affairs with either Ms. Daniels or Ms. McDougal.)

The case is scheduled to go to trial in March.

Georgia Criminal Inquiry

Prosecutors in Georgia recently indicated that they would announce indictments this summer in their investigation of Mr. Trump and some of his allies over their efforts to interfere with the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state.

Mr. Trump and his associates had numerous interactions with Georgia officials after the election, including a call in which he urged the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes” — the number he would have needed to overcome President Biden’s lead there.

Legal experts say that Mr. Trump and others appear to be at “substantial risk” of prosecution for violating a number Georgia statutes, including the state’s racketeering law.

A special grand jury was impaneled in May of last year in Fulton County, and it heard testimony from 75 witnesses behind closed doors over a series of months. The jurors produced a final report, but the most important elements of it — including recommendations on who should be indicted and on what charges — remain under seal.

But the forewoman, Emily Kohrs, has said that indictments were recommended against more than a dozen people, and she strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was included among those names. “You’re not going to be shocked,” she said. “It’s not rocket science.”

Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, will ultimately decide what charges to seek and then bring them before a regular grand jury. She recently indicated that she would do so during the first three weeks of August.

Jan. 6 Inquiries

A House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol spent a year and a half examining the role that Mr. Trump and his allies played in his efforts to hold on to power after his electoral defeat in November 2020.

In December, the committee issued an 845-page report detailing the events that led to the attack on the Capitol that concluded that Mr. Trump and some of his associates had devised “a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”

The panel also accused Mr. Trump of inciting insurrection and conspiracy to defraud the United States, among other federal crimes, and referred him and some of his allies to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

The referrals were largely symbolic, but they sent a powerful signal that a bipartisan committee of Congress believed the former president had committed crimes.

Mr. Smith’s office has been conducting its own investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, building on months of work by other federal prosecutors in Washington who have also filed charges against nearly 1,000 people who took part in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The special counsel’s office has focused its attention on a wide array of schemes that Mr. Trump and his allies used to try to stave off defeat, among them a plan to create false slates of pro-Trump electors in key swing states that were won by Mr. Biden. Prosecutors under Mr. Smith have also sought information about Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising operation after the election.

The special counsel’s office has recently won important legal battles in its inquiry as judges in Washington have issued rulings forcing top Trump administration officials like former Vice President Mike Pence and the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to testify in front of a grand jury.

It is unclear what charges, if any, might come from the federal investigation. But prosecutors continue to pursue a variety of angles. They recently subpoenaed staff members from the Trump White House who might have been involved in firing the cybersecurity official whose agency judged the 2020 election “the most secure in American history,” according to two people briefed on the matter.

New York State Civil Inquiry

In a September lawsuit, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, accused Mr. Trump of lying to lenders and insurers by fraudulently overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars.

Ms. James is seeking to bar the Trumps, including Mr. Trump’s older sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and his older daughter, Ivanka, from running a business in New York.

She has already successfully requested that a judge appoint an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization’s use of its annual financial statements.

Because Ms. James’s investigation is civil, she cannot file criminal charges. She could opt to pursue settlement negotiations in hopes of obtaining a swifter financial payout. But if she were to prevail at trial, a judge could impose steep financial penalties on Mr. Trump and restrict his business operations in New York.

Ms. James’s investigators questioned Mr. Trump under oath in April, and a trial is scheduled for October.

Reporting was contributed by Jonah E. Bromwich, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Michael Gold, Michael Rothfeld, Ed Shanahan, Richard Fausset and Ashley Wong.