The justice department on Thursday took the legally and politically momentous step of lodging federal criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, accusing him of mishandling classified documents he kept upon leaving office and then obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them.

Trump confirmed on his social media platform that he had been indicted. The charges against him include willfully retaining national defence secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and a conspiracy to obstruct justice, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The justice department made no comment on the indictment on Thursday and did not immediately make the document 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 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 Joe Biden, whose administration will now be seeking to convict his potential rival of multiple felonies.

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,” Trump wrote, in one of several posts around 7pm (local time) after he was notified of the charges.

The former President added that he was scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Miami at 3pm (local time) on Tuesday. In a video he released later on Truth Social, Trump declared: “I’m an innocent man. I’m an innocent person.”

A lawyer for Trump, Jim Trusty, told CNN on Thursday night that the former President’s legal team had not been shown the indictment itself but that the court summons gave some details on the charges. He mentioned alleged Espionage Act violations, false-statement charges and “several obstruction-based” charges, including offences under Section 1512, which criminalises witness tampering or other means of obstructing an official effort.

Trusty said he believed there was also a conspiracy charge. But he added: “This is not biblically accurate, because I’m not looking at a charging document. I’m looking at a summary sheet.” He also said the Trump legal team had not been told of anyone else being indicted.

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 Trump in a case connected to a hush money payment made to a porn actress in advance of the 2016 election.

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

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

Public filings in the case of the document have painted a picture of Trump as spending more than a year consistently 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 he took with him from the White House and mostly kept at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.

While the nature of a few of the documents found in 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 moreover what, if any, damage to national security his possession of them caused.

Trump has characterised 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.

New York Times News Service