Trump Faces Major New Charges in Documents Case
The office of the special counsel accused the former
president of seeking to delete security camera footage at Mar-a-Lago. The
manager of the property, Carlos De Oliveira, was also named as a new defendant.
By Alan
Feuer, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush
July 27,
2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/us/politics/trump-documents-carlos-de-oliveira-charged.html
Federal
prosecutors on Thursday added major accusations to an indictment charging
former President Donald J. Trump with mishandling classified documents after he
left office, presenting evidence that he told the property manager of
Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, that he wanted security
camera footage there to be deleted.
The new
accusations were revealed in a superseding indictment that named the property
manager, Carlos De Oliveira, as a new defendant in the case. He is scheduled to
be arraigned in Miami on Monday.
The
original indictment filed last month in the Southern District of Florida
accused Mr. Trump of violating the Espionage Act by illegally holding on to 31
classified documents containing national defense information after he left
office. It also charged Mr. Trump and Walt Nauta, one of his personal aides,
with a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to reclaim the
classified material.
The revised
indictment added three serious charges against Mr. Trump: attempting to “alter,
destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence”; inducing someone else to do so; and a
new count under the Espionage Act related to a classified national security
document that he showed to visitors at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
The updated
indictment was released on the same day that Mr. Trump’s lawyers met in
Washington with prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to
discuss a so-called target letter that Mr. Trump received this month suggesting
that he might soon face an indictment in a case related to his efforts to
overturn the results of the 2020 election. It served as a powerful reminder
that the documents investigation is ongoing, and could continue to yield
additional evidence, new counts and even new defendants.
Prosecutors
under Mr. Smith had been investigating Mr. De Oliveira for months, concerned,
among other things, by his communications with an information technology expert
at Mar-a-Lago, Yuscil Taveras, who oversaw the surveillance camera footage at
the property.
That
footage was central to Mr. Smith’s investigation into whether Mr. Nauta, at Mr.
Trump’s request, had moved boxes in and out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago to
avoid complying with a federal subpoena for all classified documents in the
former president’s possession. Many of those movements were caught on the
surveillance camera footage.
The revised
indictment said that in late June of last year, shortly after the government
demanded the surveillance footage as part of its inquiry, Mr. Trump called Mr.
De Oliveira and they spoke for 24 minutes.
Two days
later, the indictment said, Mr. Nauta and Mr. 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.”
A few days
after that, Mr. De Oliveira went to see Mr. Taveras, who is identified in the
indictment as Trump Employee 4, and took him to a small room known as an “audio
closet.” There, the indictment said, the two men had a conversation that was
meant to “remain between the two of them.”
It was then
that Mr. De Oliveira told Mr. Taveras that “‘the boss’ wanted the server
deleted,” the indictment said, referring to the computer server holding the
security footage.
Mr. Taveras
objected and said he did not know how to delete the server and did not think he
had the right to do so, the indictment said. At that point, the indictment
said, Mr. De Oliveira insisted again that “the boss” wanted the server deleted,
asking, “What are we going to do?”
Two months
later, after the F.B.I. descended on Mar-a-Lago with a search warrant and
hauled away about 100 classified documents, people in Mr. Trump’s orbit
appeared to be concerned about Mr. De Oliveira’s loyalties.
“Someone
just wants to make sure Carlos is good,” the indictment quoted Mr. Nauta as
saying to another Trump employee.
In
response, the indictment said, that employee told Mr. Nauta that Mr. De
Oliveira was “loyal” and “would not do anything to affect his relationship with
Mr. Trump.” After the conversation, Mr. Trump — who during his 2016
presidential campaign often assailed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for
deleting material from her email server — called Mr. De Oliveira and said that
he would get him a lawyer.
The revised
indictment also charges Mr. De Oliveira with lying to federal investigators. It
recounts an exchange in which he repeatedly denied seeing or knowing anything
about boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago, even though, the indictment said, he
had personally observed and helped move them when they arrived.
Mr. De
Oliveira’s lawyer, John Irving, declined to comment.
A statement
attributed only to the Trump campaign called the new accusations a “desperate
and flailing attempt” by the Justice Department to undercut Mr. Trump, the
current front-runner for the Republican nomination to take on President Biden
next year.
Mr. Trump
and Mr. Nauta have both pleaded not guilty to the charges in the original
indictment. Their case has been scheduled to go to trial in May.
The new
charges lay out in detail efforts by Mr. Nauta to speak with Mr. De Oliveira
about the security camera footage and to determine how long the footage was
stored after the government sought to obtain it under a subpoena.
The
indictment contains an additional charge related to a classified document — a
battle plan related to attacking Iran — that Mr. Trump showed, during a meeting
at his Bedminster golf club, to two people helping his former White House chief
of staff Mark Meadows write a book.
The updated
indictment provides specific dates during which Mr. Trump was in possession of
the document — from Jan. 20, 2021, the day he left office, through Jan. 17,
2022, the date Mr. Trump turned over 15 boxes of presidential material to the
National Archives. The specificity of the dates indicates that prosecutors have
the document in question and the indictment describes it as a “presentation
concerning military activity in a foreign country,” adding it was marked top
secret.
The meeting
at which Mr. Trump showed off the document was captured in an audio recording
and Mr. Trump can be heard rustling paper and describing the document as
“secret” and “sensitive.”
Still, he
has tried to suggest that he never had a document in his hand and was simply
blustering.
“There was
no document,” Mr. Trump claimed to the Fox News host Bret Baier in a recent
interview. “That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking
about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not, but that
was not a document. I didn’t have a document per se. There was nothing to
declassify.”
The
original indictment filed by Mr. Smith and his team in June came about two
months after local prosecutors in New York filed more than 30 felony charges
against Mr. Trump in a case connected to a hush money payment made to a porn
star in advance of the 2016 election.
Mr. Trump
remains under investigation by Mr. Smith’s office over his wide-ranging efforts
to retain power after his election loss in 2020, and how those efforts led to
the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. He is also being
scrutinized for possible election interference by the district attorney’s
office in Fulton County, Ga.
Chris
Cameron and Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
Alan Feuer
covers extremism and political violence. He joined The Times in 1999. More
about Alan Feuer
Maggie
Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man:
The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team
that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers
and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman
Glenn
Thrush covers the Department of Justice. He joined The Times in 2017 after working
for Politico, Newsday, Bloomberg News, The New York Daily News, The Birmingham
Post-Herald and City Limits. More about Glenn Thrush
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