Trump property manager released on bond in Miami, faces formal arraignment next month
A Mar-a-Lago employee accused of collaborating with former President Donald Trump to hinder U.S. government efforts to retrieve classified documents at his Palm Beach estate appeared in Miami federal court Monday to face obstruction charges.
Carlos De Oliveira, 56, was released on a $100,000 bond but could not enter a plea because — like a co-defendant before him — he could not be formally arraigned since he did not yet have a local lawyer, which is required in the Southern District of Florida. The arraignment was rescheduled for Aug. 10 in the Fort Pierce federal courthouse, where Trump’s classified documents case is set to go to trial in May.
De Oliveira, the property manager at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club, was added to an expanded 42-count indictment last week. The indictment accuses him of conspiring with Trump and a personal aide in an attempt to destroy video surveillance footage of a storage area at Mar-a-Lago, where the former president had kept boxes of classified national security records after leaving the White House.
The superseding indictment adds three new counts against Trump. One charges him with another count of willful retention of national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act. Two other new charges allege that Trump, aide Walt Nauta and De Oliveira obstructed justice by attempting to destroy surveillance video at Mar-a-Lago. Nauta’s initial arraignment in Miami was also postponed because he had not yet retained a local attorney.
De Oliveira, who lives in a rental apartment in Palm Beach Gardens, is also charged anew in an obstruction conspiracy with Trump and Nauta, and with making a false statement to FBI agents when they questioned him about the boxes of classified records earlier this year.
During Monday’s hearing, De Oliveira was represented by Washington, D.C., lawyer John Irving, whose law firm has provided legal services to Trump. At one point in the brief hearing, Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres said he was going to impose a $100,000 personal surety bond for De Oliveiria’s release and Irving quickly noted that the defendant “doesn’t have that kind of money.”
Torres said that the bond would only require De Oliveira’s signature and that he must follow certain conditions, including no communications with other witnesses in the Trump documents case and no travel outside the Southern District of Florida, which extends from Key West to Fort Pierce.
According to public records, De Oliveira went through personal bankruptcy a decade ago and was registered as a Republican in the last presidential election in 2020. De Oliveira, who doesn’t have a social media presence, worked as a valet at Mar-a-Lago before being promoted to property manager in January 2022.
The indictment, returned by a Miami federal grand jury, shows Trump bringing a few underlings at his Palm Beach estate into a close circle that Justice Department prosecutors say assisted him in trying to hide boxes of classified documents from authorities and to delete video security footage of Mar-a-Lago’s storage area and nearby hallway linked to the residence.
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.
The indictment does not say whether Trump, Nauta or De Oliveira were successful in deleting any of the video footage.
But previous filings in the unprecedented case show that a June 2022 grand jury subpoena uncovered video images that prosecutors with the special counsel’s office say revealed damning evidence. The information provided the basis for FBI agents to obtain a court-approved warrant to search Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 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 last Thursday.
After arriving in Palm Beach and traveling to Mar-a-Lago on June 25, 2022, 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 information technology office and asked an employee identified as the IT director to keep their conversation confidential. “ ’The boss’ wanted the server deleted,” De Oliveira told the unnamed employee, according to the indictment.
The employee resisted, saying “he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that,” the indictment states. The employee told De Oliveira that “De Oliveira would have to reach out to another employee who was a supervisor of security for Trump’s business organization.”
According to the indictment, De Oliveira “then insisted” to the IT employee that “ ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted and asked, what are we going to do?”
De Oliveira left the IT office, met with Nauta on an adjacent property, then returned to the office and later reconvened with Nauta that afternoon.
Later on the afternoon of June 27, 2022, “Trump called De Oliveira and they spoke for approximately three and a half minutes,” the indictment states.
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 in the initial 38-count indictment.
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.”
Miami Herald staff reporter Grethel Aguila contributed to this story.
This story was originally published July 31, 2023 at 7:00 AM.
