“Sometimes they are issued at the beginning of a long investigation and sometimes at the conclusion of an investigation,” he said.
Trump, the front-runner in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has repeatedly described the multiple investigations as politically motivated.
A federal grand jury has been investigating Trump’s retention of classified materials after leaving the White House in 2021.
A second criminal investigation is looking into alleged efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
A spokesperson for Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the probes, declined to comment.
BOXES OF DOCUMENTS
Investigators in August 2022 seized roughly 13,000 documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. One hundred of these were marked as classified, even though one of Trump’s lawyers had previously said that all records with classified markings had been returned.
Trump has defended his retention of documents, suggesting that he declassified them while he was president. However, Trump has not provided evidence of this and his attorneys have not made that argument in court filings.
Trump is the first current or former US president to face criminal charges, having pleaded not guilty in April to felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records relating to hush money paid to a porn star before the 2016 presidential race.
Trump handed over 15 boxes of records in January 2022, a year after leaving office, but federal officials came to believe he had not returned all the documents.
The Justice Department issued Trump a grand jury subpoena in May 2022 asking him to return any other records bearing classified markings, and top officials travelled to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the materials.
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