Donald Trump tried to eliminate the video surveillance images that recorded some of the movements of the boxes with the classified documents that he took to his residence in Mar-a-Lago (Florida), illegally, when he lost the presidency. The transfer of boxes was made in the summer of 2022.
That attempt to conceal evidence is the basis for one of the two additional charges of obstruction of justice that, along with another charge of willful withholding of national defense information, special counsel Jack Smith endorsed the former Republican president on Wednesday.
The three new charges are added to the 37 that, for seven crimes, the representative of the Public Ministry and Department of Justice of the United States charged him last June. The charges include conspiracy to obstruct justice, witness tampering, making false statements and willful withholding of secret documents in violation of the Espionage Act.
The accusations of conspiracy for obstruction also affect a new defendant, the maintenance worker of the residential complex Carlos De Oliveira, 56 years old. This is the third defendant in the case in addition to Trump and the also employee, Walt Nauta, 40 years old and accused of the same conspiracy, as well as for the false statements and the concealment of secrets itself.
The additional charge of willful withholding of national defense information concerns a top-secret document containing “a presentation of US military activity in a foreign country.” Although Smith’s indictment doesn’t say so, all indicates that it is the report with certain plans for a possible attack by Iran that Trump discussed with during a meeting at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in July 2021; a meeting that was recorded and in which two people participated who were working on the autobiography of former Trump Secretary General Mark Meadows.
In relation to the attempt to destroy evidence, the text with the new accusations details how, at the end of June of last year, the employee De Oliveira went to see the person hired to process the video surveillance images of Mar-a-Lago and He told him that “the boss” wanted the server of the computer that contained the video with the compromising box movement sequences to be deleted.
The person thus requested, Yuscil Taveras, objected and replied to De Oliveira that he would not know how to delete it and he was not clear that he should do it, according to the prosecutor’s brief.
Such images showed Nauta and De Oliveira moving boxes of documents through the Mar-a-Lago complex just before one of Trump’s lawyers, Evan Corcoran, searched for the secret papers pending at that time to be delivered to the Archives institution. Nationals.
Members of the FBI and the Justice Department arrived in Mar-a-Lago the day after that search for Corcoran, and Corcoran then handed them 38 classified documents he had found. But within a few weeks, during the high-profile search carried out in August 2022 at Mar-a-Lago, the FBI recovered more than 100 classified records there. The deliberate concealment was then clear. But from then on the case would only get worse and more complicated for Trump and his people. And what’s left.
