In a 60-page superseding indictment, prosecutors also added a third defendant.
Former President Donald Trump arrives at New Orleans International Airport on Tuesday, July 25, 2023. | Gerald Herbert/AP Photo
By Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein
07/27/2023 06:33 PM EDT
Updated: 07/27/2023 07:55 PM EDT
www.politico.com
Special counsel Jack Smith has brought three new felony charges against former President Donald Trump, including explosive claims that he asked an employee of his Mar-a-Lago club to delete security camera footage sought by investigators probing his handling of classified documents.
In a 60-page superseding indictment unveiled Thursday, prosecutors also accused Trump of possessing a highly classified war plan that he shared with people lacking security clearances months after his presidency ended. And prosecutors added a third defendant: Carlos De Oliveira, a worker at Mar-a-Lago who is accused of joining Trump and aide Walt Nauta to seek the destruction of the security footage.
The additional charges are another stunning chapter in prosecutors’ case against the former president, who has repeatedly professed that he “quickly” shared all security camera footage from his estate with the government.
Trump now faces two new obstruction-of-justice charges related to the alleged attempt to erase the security camera video. In addition, the new indictment adds a felony count under the Espionage Act stemming from his alleged possession of the war plan. He now faces 32 counts of willfully retaining national defense information under the Espionage Act and eight counts related to alleged efforts to obstruct the investigation.
The new indictment alleges that on June 27, 2022, De Oliveira met with a Trump Organization employee in an audio closet at Mar-a-Lago and asked that person — unnamed in the indictment — to delete the security camera video sought by prosecutors in a grand jury subpoena days earlier.
“De Oliveira told [the employee] ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” the new indictment alleges. The employee “responded that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe he would have the rights to do that,” the indictment adds.
Prosecutors claim that when the employee said a supervisor would need to be involved, De Oliveira repeated that “the boss” wanted the server deleted and De Oliveira then asked: “What are we going to do?”
The indictment indicates that De Oliveira spoke by phone and texted with Nauta, a longtime Trump aide who is also a defendant in the case, shortly after the exchange with the unnamed employee. De Oliveira and Nauta met in person just off the Mar-a-Lago grounds, and Trump called De Oliveira later that day, the indictment alleges. There is no indication of what was said in the phone calls.
De Oliveira, 56, of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., is scheduled to be arraigned Monday in Miami federal court, according to a court docket. Trump and Nauta will also need to be re-arraigned on the new indictment, but it’s unclear when that will take place.
Smith’s team first obtained criminal charges against Trump and Nauta in Florida last month. They accused Trump of hoarding classified documents after he left the White House and attempting to thwart the government’s efforts to retrieve them, and they accused Nauta of helping Trump obstruct the investigation.
The updated indictment does not merely add new criminal charges; it also shows prosecutors making a concerted effort to undercut some of Trump’s recent public denials of the case they’ve brought against him. And it adds significant new elements to the legal peril he faces and underscores prosecutors’ deep penetration into his cloistered inner circle.
In a separate investigation, Smith’s team appears to be on the verge of indicting Trump in Washington, D.C., for his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election. Trump also faces criminal charges in Manhattan for falsifying business records in connection with a hush money scheme.
The new indictment in the Florida case adds new details about Trump’s alleged handling of the classified war plan, believed to be a plan of attack on Iran. It alleges that, on July 21, 2021, Trump shared the plan at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with two people working on a book being written by his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. In the original indictment, prosecutors had revealed they had a recording of that conversation, but they hadn’t yet charged Trump with possessing the document.
The new indictment charges that Trump also had that classified war plan at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. It does not specify how the document reached either location.
Trump has publicly denied showing the actual document to the researchers, instead claiming he had shown them news clippings.
“I didn’t have a document, per se,” Trump said in a Fox News appearance last month. “There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles.”
Each of the new obstruction-of-justice charges carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. The charge of willfully retaining national defense secrets is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Due to the operation of federal sentencing guidelines and the sheer volume of charges Trump already faced, the new charges may not significantly affect Trump’s bottom-line sentence if he is convicted and given prison time. But they are likely to bolster the narrative prosecutors can present to a jury — and the public.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/27/feds-add-new-charges-against-trump-in-classified-documents-case-00108667
US says Trump ordered video deleted, charges second employee in documents case
By Sarah N. Lynch and Jacqueline Thomsen
July 27, 20236:54 PM CDTUpdated an hour ago
WASHINGTON, July 27 (Reuters) – Donald Trump ordered employees at his Florida resort to delete security videos as he was under investigation for retaining classified documents, U.S. prosecutors said on Thursday as they broadened the case against the former president and charged a second member of his staff with helping to hide documents.
U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith filed three new criminal counts against Trump, bringing the total to 40, and charged a maintenance worker at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Carlos De Oliveira, with conspiracy to obstruct justice, accusing him of helping Trump to hide documents.
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De Oliveira, 56, told another worker at the resort where Trump lives that “the boss” wanted security videos of the property in Florida deleted after the Justice Department subpoenaed them.
Prosecutors also charged De Oliveira with lying to the FBI during a voluntary interview, falsely claiming he had no involvement in moving boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
“Never saw nothing,” De Oliveira told the agents, according to the indictment.
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De Oliveira’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The charges were made public hours after Trump said his attorneys met with the Justice Department officials investigating his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, in a sign that another set of criminal charges could come soon.
“This is nothing more than a continued desperate and flailing attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their Department of Justice to harass President Trump and those around him,” Trump’s campaign said in a statement.
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Trump pleaded not guilty in Miami last month to federal charges of unlawfully retaining the classified government documents after leaving office in 2021 and obstructing justice. Prosecutors accused him of risking some of the most sensitive U.S. national security secrets.
Trump is the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges and has already been indicted twice this year, once in New York over hush-money payments to a porn star and once already over the classified documents.
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The charges have not hurt Trump’s standing as the front-runner in the race for the Republican nomination to challenge President Biden in the 2024 election.
On the contrary, Trump’s lead over nearest rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has grown. A Reuters/Ipsos poll earlier this month showed Trump leading DeSantis 47%-19% among Republicans, a wider lead than his 44%-29% lead before the first indictment in New York in March.
Trump is scheduled to go to trial in March 2024 in New York and May 2024 in Florida, at which point the Republican nomination may already be decided. Special Counsel Smith’s team said in a separate filing that they would work to ensure the new charges would not delay the trial.
Prosecutors filed additional charges against another Trump aide, Walt Nauta. Nauta pleaded not guilty earlier this month to charges he helped the former president hide documents.
According to the new indictment, Nauta and De Oliveira moved 64 boxes of records to Trump’s residence after the Justice Department subpoenaed Trump for any classified records in May 2022. They later returned only 30 of them for inspection by Evan Corcoran, a Trump attorney who asked to review their contents to comply with the subpoena.
De Oliveira is due to appear in court in Miami on Monday.
Prosecutors also said they recovered the document involved in an incident in which Trump, bragged about a “plan of attack” against another country in an interview at his New Jersey golf resort.
According to the indictment, Trump explained the document was highly classified. Nobody else in the room had the authority to examine it, Smith wrote.
Additional reporting by Jacqueline Thomsen, Tim Ahmann and Dan Whitcomb; writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Scott Malone and Grant McCool
