UPDATE
Aug 10, 2023 10:50 AM CDT
Donald Trump aide Walt Nauta appeared in a federal courtroom on Thursday to plead not guilty to charges in a superseding indictment in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Trump also entered a plea of not guilty to charges, including new allegations that he tried to delete security footage, but he waived his right to appear in person, the AP reports. His plea was formally accepted by the magistrate judge on Thursday. A new defendant in the case, Mar-a-Lago club maintenance chief Carlos De Oliveira, was also in court Thursday, but his arraignment was postponed until next week, reports Axios. Trump and Nauta, his valet, also pleaded not guilty in June, before special counsel Jack Smith brought the updated indictment.
Jul 27, 2023 7:13 PM CDT
Prosecutors revised the charges against former President Trump on Thursday concerning his handling of classified documents, adding the accusation that he and the maintenance chief at Mar-a-Lago tried to delete security footage recorded near a storage room before investigators could see it. On top of the 31 counts Trump already faced, a new one charges him with illegally retaining national defense information. And there's a new defendant: Carlos De Oliveira, who works at Trump's Florida home, the Washington Post reports. He was charged with conspiracy to obstruct efforts to retrieve the documents. De Oliveira's lawyer declined to comment. The superseding indictment can be read here.
A spokesperson for Trump called the new charges "nothing more than a continued desperate and flailing attempt" by President Biden's administration "to harass President Trump and those around him" and influence the 2024 presidential race, per the AP. Walt Nauta, Trump's longtime valet, was charged with six counts, including conspiracy to obstruct justice, in June when the former president was indicted. The indictment said Nauta moved dozens of boxes of documents out of the storage room at the former president's direction. Trump and Nauta have pleaded not guilty to the charges. They each picked up two obstruction of justice charges on Thursday.
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Surveillance camera video shows Nauta moving the boxes. The revised indictment says De Oliveira told Mar-a-Lago's IT director in June 2022 that "the boss" wanted the computer server that held that security footage to be deleted, per the New York Times. The IT boss, Yuscil Taveras, objected. The indictment says De Oliveira's response was, "What are we going to do?" Investigators said De Oliveria told FBI agents that he was not involved in moving the documents they were looking for and that he "Never saw anything." The three defendants now are all charged with altering, destroying, mutilating, or concealing an object, as well as a similar crime of corruptly altering, destroying, mutilating, or concealing a document or object, per the Post. (Trump's lawyers met with prosecutors on Thursday about a possible indictment concerning efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.)
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