Trump finally faces a judge in the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building: NAJ screen shot

Staff Report –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As word leaked out from Donald Trump himself that he was about to be indicted for trying to remain in office after losing the 2020 election and for inciting a violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to halt the peaceful transfer of power, it was revealed that Trump will face even more charges in the case of mishandling classified documents after leaving office.

The Department of Justice Special Counsel’s office released a superseding indictment this week presenting more evidence of obstruction of justice when Trump ordered a property manager of his private club Mar-a-Lago in Florida to delete security camera footage showing boxes of documents being moved around to hide them from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Property manager Carlos De Oliveira is scheduled to be arraigned in Miami on Monday for cooperating with Trump in hiding the documents.

The original indictment filed last month in the Southern District of Florida accused 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 Trump and Walt Nauta, one of his personal aides, with a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to reclaim the classified material.

Related: Trump Indicted for Mishandling Classified Documents and Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice

The revised indictment added three new serious charges against 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 as Trump’s lawyers were meeting in Washington with prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to discuss a so-called target letter that 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,” according to New York Times coverage of the case.

It is reported that prosecutors have been investigating De Oliveira for months in part for communications with an information technology expert at Mar-a-Lago, Yuscil Taveras, whose job was to oversee the surveillance camera footage at the property. The footage is apparently central to Smith’s investigation into whether Nauta, at Trump’s request, moved boxes in and out of a storage room to avoid complying with a federal subpoena for all classified documents in the former president’s possession.

In late June of last year, shortly after the government demanded the surveillance footage as part of its inquiry, Trump called De Oliveira and they spoke for 24 minutes, according to the indictment. Two days later, Nauta and 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, De Oliveira went to see Taveras, identified in the indictment as Trump Employee 4, and took him to a small room known as an “audio closet.” There the two men had a conversation that was meant to “remain between the two of them.”

It was then that De Oliveira told Taveras that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted.”

Taveras objected and said he did not know how to delete the server and did not think he had the right to do so. At that point, De Oliveira insisted again that “the boss” wanted the server deleted, asking, “What are we going to do?”

Two months later, after the FBI descended on Mar-a-Lago with a search warrant and hauled away about 100 classified documents, people in Trump’s orbit appeared to be concerned about De Oliveira’s loyalties.

“Someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good,” the indictment quoted Nauta as saying to another Trump employee.

In response, that employee told Nauta that De Oliveira was “loyal” and “would not do anything to affect his relationship with Mr. Trump.”

After the conversation, Trump — who during his 2016 presidential campaign often assailed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for deleting material from her email server — called De Oliveira and said that he would get him a lawyer.

The revised indictment also charges 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, he had personally observed and helped move them when they arrived.

Trump and Nauta have both pleaded not guilty to the charges in the original indictment. The case was scheduled to go to trial in May.

The new indictment also contains an additional charge related to a classified document about a battle plan related to attacking Iran that Trump showed to people during a meeting at his Bedminster golf club. Those who saw the document include two people helping his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows write a book.

The updated indictment provides specific dates during which Trump was in possession of the document: From Jan. 20, 2021, the day he left office, through Jan. 17, 2022, the date 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, marked top secret, and the indictment describes it as a “presentation concerning military activity in a foreign country.”

The meeting with Trump showing off the document was captured in an audio recording and Trump can be heard rustling paper and describing the document as “secret” and “sensitive.”

Trump is now trying to say that he never had a document in his hand and was simply blustering.

“There was no document,” 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.”

Trump could also face charges soon for election interference by the district attorney’s office in Fulton County, Ga.

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