Donald Trump Indictment Is Strong, Say Legal Experts: 'The Evidence Is Damning'

While Donald Trump has publicly decried the latest charges against him as a political attack, legal insiders say the former president "has to be nervous," based purely on the strength of the case.

Trump, 76, was arraigned at a courthouse in Miami on Tuesday afternoon, where he faced a judge after being indicted by a federal grand jury last week for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House.

Trump is accused of 37 criminal offenses: 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information (a violation of the Espionage Act); one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice; one count of withholding a document or record; one count of corruptly concealing a document or record; one count of concealing a document in a federal investigation; one count of scheme to conceal; and one count of false statements and representations.

He pleaded not guilty to each count on Tuesday, likely sending his case to trial.

According to a source, Trump is livid about the indictment and telling anyone who will listen that it’s a “witch-hunt, a partisan attack with no merit.”

But legal experts speculate that the former president may be more worried than he lets on, particularly as the indictment details how prosecutors say they have reviewed recordings of Trump bragging about classified documents and admitting that he didn't declassify them. As laid out in the indictment, investigators also have access to notes from at least one of Trump's own attorneys, who claimed the former president worked to hide classified documents from his own legal team, and from the FBI.

“I have said the Mar-a-Lago documents issue would present a challenge to his future freedom,” Dave Aronberg, the state attorney for Palm Beach County and former member of Florida Senate, tells PEOPLE.

“It is a powerful indictment. He directed the movement of boxes of classified documents and asked people around him to move them. The evidence is damning," he adds.

And as Trump continues attacking Special Counsel Jack Smith on social media, and publicly dismissing the charges as being politically motivated, Aronberg believes that the former president is his own worst enemy.

“He makes public admissions that often contradict what his lawyers have said,” says Aronberg of the former president. “It’s as if the special counsel Jack Smith wrote a perfect script for this indictment… and Trump has to be nervous.”

Another political source tells PEOPLE that Trump has an extraordinary ability to believe whatever he wants, no matter what the facts produce.

“Donald is an expert at deceiving himself and believing what he wants,” a political source tells PEOPLE. “He was told by those around him to return the documents when requested but he didn’t. At that point, any doubts he may’ve had with his right to take them were washed away. He believes he is a king, and the adoring crowds are his subjects.”

The recent indictment comes after the FBI conducted a search at the former president's Mar-a-Lago home on Aug. 8 as part of a criminal investigation that began after the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) revealed in February 2022 that officials had removed from the property 15 boxes of documents that should have been handed over at the end of the Trump presidency.

But as the indictment lays out, Trump isn't being charged for taking the documents from the White House initially — but for what he did after federal investigators issued a subpoena for access to those documents.

According to the indictment, the former president allegedly suggested “that his attorney falsely represent to the FBI and grand jury that [he] did not have documents called for by the grand jury subpoena.” 

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Trump has long claimed that any documents he did have at Mar-a-Lago were declassified by him — a statement that Aronberg disputes: “Trump had the authority to declassify when he was President, but he did NOT do it then."

Trump himself acknowledged that at least one document in his possession — a plan to attack Iran drawn up by the Pentagon — wasn't declassified. As noted in the indictment, investigators now have a recording of Trump saying of the memo, "Look what I found, this was [a Senior Military Official’s] plan of attack, read it and just show . . . it’s interesting. ... as president I could have declassified it … Now I can’t, but this is still a secret.”

With his indictment, Trump became the first U.S. president to be charged in a federal investigation (the former president was arraigned earlier this year in a separate criminal investigation at the state level).