Trump Arrives at DC Federal Courthouse for Third Arrest of 2023 and Then His Arraignment

Just a block away from the site of the U.S. Capitol insurrection, former President Donald Trump arrived at the federal courthouse on Thursday afternoon to face a reckoning on a four-count indictment for the events leading up to it.

Prosecutors allege that Trump committed four felonies in his zeal to stay in power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Those charges are conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding and a criminal analogue of the Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction-era law designed to protect the civil rights of freedmen and women in the wake of the Civil War.

At 4 p.m. ET, Trump will answer those charges at his arraignment, where he is expected to plead not guilty. 

Security detail was on standby to whisk Trump into the courthouse’s non-public entrance a few hours after dozens of reporters who camped out the night before passed through security screening and waited inside for the proceedings to begin. Broadcast journalists surrounded the courthouse in barricaded press pens set up near the two open entrances on Constitution Avenue and John Marshall Park that abuts the Canadian Embassy to the U.S. 

Trump's case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, known for her harsh sentencing of Jan. 6 rioters, as well as a lacerating ruling authorizing the House Select Committee investigating the insurrection to access troves of his White House files. 

“Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President,” Chutkan wrote two years ago.

On Thursday, Trump will appear before a different jurist: U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya, who was on the bench when the grand jury returned his then-sealed indictment.

Trump's Washington D.C. case is likely to head to trial at some point in 2024, though the schedule remains unclear given the swirl of other legal trouble he faces in other jurisdictions.

He is also facing state criminal charges in New York for alleged hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, with a trial currently scheduled for March of 2024. He has also pleaded not guilty in another federal case tied to his mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House. That case is slated for trial next May in Fort Pierce, Fla.

This is a developing story.