Television news crews setup outside the the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. District Court House on July 25, 2023 in Washington, DC. Former President Donald Trump has said he’s been informed that he’s the goal of an investigation by a grand jury examining Jan. 6 and efforts to overturn the 2020 election led by special counsel Jack Smith.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images
Members of the grand jury hearing evidence within the special counsel probe of possible 2020 election interference by former President Donald Trump and others arrived at a federal courthouse Tuesday morning, fueling speculation that an indictment against the previous president could soon follow.
It has been two weeks since Trump announced he was a goal within the federal investigation into the efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. The probe, lead by special counsel Jack Smith, can also be focused on the events surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Trump’s receipt of a goal letter gave the strongest indication yet that the previous president would likely be charged within the election probe.
The grand jurors met last Thursday, but left for the day with none hint that they’d voted to return indictments.
On Tuesday morning, they headed as much as their area on the third floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in Washington, D.C., based on NBC News reporters within the constructing.
The grand jury broke for lunch around noon ET, and resumed meeting about an hour later, NBC reported.
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’d 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 each of the federal probes into Trump.
A superseding indictment within the classified documents case was filed last week, and hit Trump with additional charges.
Those recent 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 highest secret records had been stored. Carlos de Oliveira, a property manager on the club who has been added to the case because the third defendant, told one other Mar-a-Lago worker that “the boss” desired to delete a server containing the safety 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 previous president lambasted as “thugs.”
“We didn’t even go to court to stop them from getting these tapes,” Trump wrote. “I never told anybody to delete them.”
