Carlos De Oliveira allegedly helped Walt Nauta move boxes around Mar-a-Lago and allegedly had conversations with others about security camera footage there.
Federal prosecutors announced new charges against Donald Trump in his alleged hoarding and hiding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home, alleging the former president and a newly-charged aide tried to keep security camera footage from being reviewed by investigators.
Trump was also hit with a fresh charge, in addition to the 31 counts he already faces, of illegally retaining national defense information.
The indictment charges that Trump and two aides, Waltine “Walt” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, requested that another Trump employee "delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.”
De Oliveira is the second Trump aide to be charged in the documents case. Nauta was indicted alongside Trump in June, accused of helping the former president mislead investigators as they sought to retrieve all of the classified documents that remained at the former president’s home and private club after he left the White House.
People familiar with the investigation have told The Washington Post that investigators for special counsel Jack Smith repeatedly pressed De Oliveira to explain his actions from June 2022, when he helped Nauta move boxes around Trump’s home, and in July 2022, when he allegedly had conversations with others about security camera footage. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss secret grand jury proceedings, have said investigators grew increasingly skeptical of De Oliveira’s answers as the investigation proceeded.
De Oliveira’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung called the charges unveiled Thursday “a continued desperate and flailing attempt” to harass the former president, who is again seeking the GOP nomination for the White House, and those around him.
Trump was indicted last month in Miami, accused of illegally keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago long after he left the White House, and obstructing government efforts to get them back.
That earlier indictment charged him with 37 separate counts, 31 of them for alleged willful retention of national defense information. Each of those 31 counts represents a different classified document that Trump allegedly withheld — 21 that were discovered when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago last August, and 10 that were turned over to the FBI in a sealed envelope two months earlier. Nauta, his longtime valet, originally faced six charges, including conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document, concealing a document and scheming to conceal.
The new indictment adds a total of four charges to the earlier case. All three defendants are now charged with altering, destroying, mutilating or concealing an object, as well as a similar crime of corruptly altering destroying, mutilating or concealing a document or object.
De Oliveira was also charged with lying to the FBI in a January interview in which he allegedly denied seeing boxes being moved or helping move boxes.
Both Trump and Nauta pleaded not guilty after the first indictment, and U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon last week scheduled a trial to start next May, when the 2024 presidential campaign will be well underway and the GOP nomination could already be wrapped up.
Because the case involves highly classified documents, the process of reviewing evidence will be complicated and could bring considerable delays.
Separate from the documents investigation, Smith and his team have been examining efforts by Trump and his allies to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, including the events that led up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump announced last week that his lawyers had been informed by the Justice Department that he could face charges in that case as well. On Thursday, his lawyers met with prosecutors about the investigation, according to a message Trump posted on Truth Social.
Investigators have looked at ads and email messages that sought to fundraise off false claims of election fraud, as well as the decision by Republican electors in some states won by Biden to send signed statements purporting to affirm Trump as the victor.
Trump is also criminally charged in New York state for allegedly falsifying business records in connection with hush-money payments during the 2016 election. The New York case is scheduled for for trial in March; Trump has pleaded not guilty.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.
Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey and Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.
Fuckface commits crime after crime and yet he still walks around free to do whatever the fuck he wants and he can do so confidently because he knows the law doesn’t apply to him.
Can you imagine if poors like us had that kind of immunity
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You love to see it.
Plus, it’s hilarious that his attorney called anything other than his team’s and client actions are "a continued desperate and flailing attempt” at anything
it’s not news until he goes to jail.
Superb. He’s utterly fucked.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Yeah I won’t be getting my hopes up. My best guess is he dies of old age before ever seeing the inside of a cell.
I mean swimming pools don’t just happen to drain into the security room by accident.
:)
In so many words
Republicans smeared Hillary Clinton for years over things that didn’t happen yet are silent (and even defensive) about this.
This is the reason why I will never forgive a Republican.
Imagine how much better we’d be if Al Gore and Hillary Clinton had both been president instead of Republicans.
I think the article was updated since this post was made:
Trump already faced 31 counts of illegally retaining national defense information, but prosecutors have added a 32nd to the list. That count centers on a now-infamous conversation Trump allegedly had at his golf club and summer residence in Bedminster, N.J., in July 2021, focused on what has been described by others as a secret military document concerning Iran.
In that conversation, which was recorded, Trump allegedly said: “As president I could have declassified it. … Now I can’t, you know, but this is still secret.”Pretty damning.
After the FBI conducted a court-authorized search of Trump’s home last August to retrieve the documents with classified markings that he hadn’t returned, at least one Trump employee apparently wanted to make sure that De Oliveira wouldn’t tell officials about attempts to hide the materials, according to the indictment.
“Someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good,” Nauta allegedly said in a call with another Trump employee. That employee assured Nauta that De Oliveira was “loyal” and “would not do anything to affect his relationship with Trump.” The indictment notes that on the same day, Trump called De Oliveira “and told De Oliveira that Trump would get De Oliveira an attorney.”
More witness tampering. FFS.
