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Trump Documents Case New Charges for Trump The Indictment, Annotated Where Documents Were Found Trump Investigations Tracker

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.

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The revised indictment added three serious charges against former President Donald
J. Trump, including attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence.” Todd
Heisler/The New York Times

By Alan Feuer , Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush

July 27, 2023

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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-
ago, 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
A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2023 , Section A , Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline:
U.S. Alleges Push At Trump’s Club To Erase Footage . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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Our Coverage of the Trump Documents Case

The Justice Department has filed federal criminal charges against former President
Donald Trump over his mishandling of classified documents.

The Indictment: Federal prosecutors said that Trump put national security secrets
at risk by mishandling classified documents and schemed to block the
government from reclaiming the material. Here’s a look at the evidence .

The Judge: Judge Aileen Cannon , a Trump appointee who showed favor to the
former president earlier in the investigation, has scant experience running
criminal trials Can she prove her critics wrong ?
.

The Trial: Cannon has set the trial’s start date for May 20, 2024 , taking a middle
position between the government’s request to go to trial in December and Trump’s
desire to push the proceeding until after the 2024 election.
Walt Nauta: The former president’s personal aide, who has been accused of
conspiring with Trump to obstruct the government’s efforts to retrieve the
documents, has pleaded not guilty .

Classified Evidence: The role of secret evidence at public trials is expected to

raise a series of tricky legal issues and logistical hurdles that could complicate the
case. Here’s a closer look .

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