Special counsel Jack Smith has brought four new criminal charges against former President Donald Trump in a case connected to his alleged mishandling of classified documents, alleging that he and two allies attempted to keep security footage out of the hands of federal investigators, according to a Thursday court filing.
In addition to the 37 criminal charges he already faces, Trump was hit with one count of willful retention of national defense information and two counts of obstruction.
New charges were also filed against Trump’s so-called Diet Coke aide Walt Nauta. Both he and Trump pleaded not guilty when they were originally charged in the case last month.
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A new defendant, Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira, was also added to the case in a court document filed just minutes before the new charges.
De Oliveira, 56, has been accused of draining the Florida club’s pool in October—an act that flooded a room containing its surveillance video logs. He is charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, altering, destroying, or mutilating a document, and making false statements.
In the superseding indictment unsealed Thursday, all three men were accused of requesting “that [an unnamed Trump employee] delete security camera footage at The Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.”
Last June, De Oliveira and Nauta were caught on surveillance cameras shifting boxes containing classified records around Mar-a-Lago. The next month, De Oliveira spoke to the unnamed Trump staffer, an information technology worker identified in the indictment as Trump Employee 4, to ask about the servers that held Mar-a-Lago’s security footage.
“De Oliveira told Trump Employee 4 that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” the indictment reads. When the employee said he didn’t think he “would have the rights to do that,” De Oliveira allegedly pressed him, asking at one point, “What are we going to do?”
De Oliveira was repeatedly questioned about the events of last summer by Smith’s team, according to sources familiar with the investigation who spoke to The Washington Post. The newspaper reported that investigators grew increasingly skeptical of the maintenance worker’s answers.
CNN was the first to report that De Oliveira had been charged in the the case. His lawyer declined to comment to The New York Times.
A statement issued by Trump’s campaign team railed against the new charges as “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 and is casting about for any way to salvage their illegal witch hunt and to get someone other than Donald Trump to run against Crooked Joe Biden.”
The expansion of the already existing criminal case shows that federal investigators continue to press further into the former president’s attempts to cover up what need not have been a crime. After leaving the White House in January 2021, Trump could have simply returned to the National Archives the hundreds of classified documents he took with him to South Florida. But instead, he refused to send them over when the agency requested them, triggering the federal investigation.
Adding a third defendant also increases the likelihood that federal prosecutors could attempt to flip low-level employees against their boss.
The new charges on Thursday came hours after it was reported that Trump’s attorneys met with federal prosecutors at Smith’s office in Washington, D.C., a sign that the special counsel may be preparing to indict the former president in his separate investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump confirmed that the meeting had taken place. “My attorneys had a productive meeting with the DOJ this morning,” he said on Truth Social, “explaining in detail that I did nothing wrong, was advised by many lawyers, and that an Indictment of me would only further destroy our Country.”
“No indication of notice was given during the meeting,” he said, contradicting reports on NBC News and elsewhere. “Do not trust the Fake News on anything!”
