Trump and new defendant charged with attempting to delete Mar-a-Lago video surveillance
The special counsel’s office prosecuting Donald Trump over his handling of highly classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach added new charges against the former president on Thursday, accusing him and a new third defendant of attempting to destroy video surveillance footage.
The superseding indictment adds three new counts against Trump. One charges him with another count of willful retention of national defense information. Two other charges allege that Trump, aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira, obstructed justice by attempting “to delete surveillance video footage at The Mar-a-Lago Club in summer 2022,” Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office told McClatchy.
According to the indictment, Trump spoke with De Oliveira for 24 minutes after the Justice Department informed his legal team on June 22, 2022, of a draft grand jury subpoena for the surveillance footage at Mar-a-Lago. Two days later, the subpoena was officially delivered to Trump’s residence. And on June 25, after changing his travel plans, Nauta flew to the Palm Beach estate. Then, on June 27, 2022, Nauta collaborated with De Oliveira to find and destroy the surveillance video, the indictment states.
De Oliveira, who worked at Mar-a-Lago in various capacities, is charged with obstruction related to an attempt to delete surveillance video as well as for allegedly making false statements to the FBI. He is being summoned to appear in the James L. King Federal Courthouse in Miami at 10:30 am on July 31.
Nauta, too, faces additional charges related to the attempt to delete surveillance video.
The indictment does not say whether Trump, Nauta or De Oliveira were successful in deleting any of the video. But previous filings in the special counsel’s case show that a June 2022 grand jury subpoena uncovered video surveillance footage that prosecutors say revealed damning evidence — information that provided the basis for FBI agents to obtain a search warrant of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, when they found and seized more than 100 classified documents in the former president’s office and the club’s storage area.
According to the prosecution’s account of the videos, Nauta could be seen moving 64 boxes between a storage room and other areas at Mar-a-Lago between May 23 and June 2, 2022.
The video footage also shows De Oliveira working with Nauta to move 30 of those same boxes from Trump’s residence back to the storage area, according to the superseding indictment filed Thursday.
After arriving in Palm Beach and traveling to Mar-a-Lago on June 25, the indictment reads, “Nauta and De Oliveira went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors, walked with a flashlight through the tunnel where the storage room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.”
Two days later, De Oliveira went to the club’s IT office and asked an employee there to keep their conversation confidential. “’The boss wanted the server deleted,” De Oliveira told the unnamed employee, according to the indictment. The employee resisted, leading De Oliveira to leave, convene with Nauta and then return to the office that afternoon.
Later on the afternoon of June 27, “Trump called De Oliveira and they spoke for approximately three and a half minutes,” the indictment reads.
In June of this year, the federal grand jury in Miami charged Trump with mishandling highly classified documents under the Espionage Act by storing them at Mar-a-Lago and refusing to return them to federal authorities, along with conspiring to obstruct justice. Nauta also was charged with conspiring to obstruct justice. Both pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Trump is running for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. In a statement, his campaign said, “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.”
“Deranged Jack Smith knows that they have no case,” the statement adds.
Miami Herald reporter Jay Weaver contributed to this story.
This story was originally published July 27, 2023 at 6:18 PM.
