president is at his golf club in bedminster, new jersey, he s ordered to appear at a federal courthouse on tuesday in miami. trump announced the indictment on social media. he released a video declaring his innocence. he recorded the video before he heard from the justice department about the indictment. it s election interference at the highest level. there s never been anything like what s happened. i m an innocent man, i m an innocent person. they come after me because we re leading in the polls by a lot against biden and against the republicans a lot. let s start with cnn s sara murray to learn the latest in the indictment. no one has seen the indictment, including the former president s legal team. what do we know? reporter: that s right, this is a historic moment, the first time a former president has faced federal charges, and he broke the news of the indictment on his social media page, and trump and his legal team still
the court at this time. that is still a question. we also know there s a lot of provisions being put in place by federal security officers. the secret service and the u.s. marshals service were both caught off guard by this announcement yesterday, but we do know that the secret service is going to be meeting with staff today to make preparations for the former president, a person they still have in their protective custody or protection at least. it s going to take coordination with the secret service and the u.s. marshals. how does an arrest of a former president or this moment for a former president when it comes to the fbi, when it comes to federal law enforcement work? what are we going to see? i mean, we ve had a little preview of that because we went through this in new york city, although that wasn t a federal arrest. first, you know, this is going to come in three parts. one is getting him there. so, you know, he s in bedminster, new jersey. they re going to have to fly
they want to justify the singular treatment of president trump compared to any other president in history. i guess we re not allowed to go back to 2018 when thousands of declassified documents were kept in a furniture story. this is a president who specifically told doj if you want more, come and ask for it. they said put a lock on the door. he did within two days. and then he dropped off all communications. they dropped off because the prosecutor on the case at this time, even before the surngs according to the washington post, was obsessed with doing a raid on mar-a-lago. they had been trying to get the documents back for quite some time. and they got 15 boxes in january of 2022. well, right. but that raises the question why there were still so many left there when they did show up to execute that search warrant. jim, when it comes to this this document specifically, the heart of this reporting, how did this document wind up at bedminster? i know i m getting boring for your
if you re the president of the united states, you can declassify just by saying it s declassified. even by thinking about it. the incident is so serious that the special counsel investigating trump has now questioned the joint chiefs chairman, general mark milley about it. sources tell cnn that the tape is of a meeting between trump and people without a security clearance. it did not take place at mar-a-lago as well, where the other classified documents were found, but instead they were at trump s golf club in bedminster, new jersey. let me first bring in one of the journalists who broke this story, cnn s kaitlan collins. so kaitlan, a huge scoop here. what does this all tell us about what donald trump knew about the status, the classification status of these documents? yeah, it s really significant reporting from our team. it was team effort on this. and i think the biggest takeaway from it, and likely the biggest concern for trump s legal team and trump s allies is the fact
their own internal rules in doing this, and ultimately, what needs to be fixed is the general system of declassification. what we need is more attention to the process of transition. there was no science to the transition when president trump left, people hurrying around. that being said, i think it s contradictory to say we didn t know what was in the boxes when trump knew what was in the box. the other part of this is we re talking about a conversation that happened at the bedminster club. so is it your understanding that documents went from mar-a-lago to bedminster after he left the presidency? the president under the presidential records act has unfettered authority to do what he wants with documents that he has taken from the white house while president. so if he wants to declassify them, if he wants to personalize them under the presidential record act, that is his right. and that didn t lead to criminal investigations. it never has before, and it probably never will again.