Special Counsel Jack Smith has brought additional charges against former President Donald Trump in the case involving the mishandling of classified documents from his time in the White House. According to the updated indictment, two Trump employees, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, attempted to delete security camera footage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the footage. De Oliveira allegedly told the resort’s director of IT that “the boss” wanted the server deleted. These new charges come on top of the 37 criminal charges that Trump is already facing, including one additional count of willful retention of national defense information and two additional obstruction counts.
One of the charges against Trump involves the willful retention of a top-secret document about possible Iran attack plans, which he discussed with biographers during a taped meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, in July 2021. The indictment states that Trump “showed” the document to the biographers during the meeting. The document in question was a presentation concerning military activity in a foreign country.
In addition to the charges against Trump, new charges were also filed against his aide Walt Nauta, and Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira was added to the case. De Oliveira is facing charges of lying to the FBI about moving boxes with classified documents. Both Trump and Nauta had previously been charged and have pleaded not guilty.
The Justice Department’s investigation into the mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago has revealed that surveillance footage showed Nauta and De Oliveira moving document boxes around the resort, including into a storage room just before Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran searched it for classified documents. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August, they found over 100 more classified documents in the storage room and Trump’s office. The Justice Department believes that “government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room.”
Carlos De Oliveira has been summoned to appear in federal court in Miami on July 31. In response to the charges, a spokesperson for Trump called them “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.”
Separately, Trump’s defense lawyers met with Special Counsel Jack Smith in Washington, DC, to discuss the investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. No guidance was given to Trump’s team about the timing of a possible indictment. The grand jury in Washington continues to hear evidence from the special counsel’s probe into election subversion efforts by Trump and his allies.
This story is developing, and updates will be provided as more information becomes available.
Original Story at www.cnn.com – 2023-07-27 23:24:00
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