Federal prosecutors on Thursday increased the charges against Donald Trump in the case of his negligent management of confidential documents for which he is already charged, accusing him of having tried to delete CCTV footage that was of interest to investigators.
These new charges add to a case for which a federal trial is scheduled for May 2024 in Florida, in the midst of the Republican primaries for which Donald Trump is the favorite.
The former president, who accumulates legal setbacks, strongly disputes the facts of which he is accused.
The Republican billionaire was already charged in early June in this case, but federal prosecutors have indicated, in a court document made public Thursday, that they accuse him of new facts.
Mr. Trump, as well as two of his assistants, is now accused of having asked an employee of his luxurious residence in Florida to “delete video surveillance images of the Mar-a-Lago Club to avoid that these images are not handed over” to justice.
One of the two offending assistants, Walt Nauta, had already been charged alongside Donald Trump. The indictment of the second, Carlos de Oliveira, is new.
The latter, according to the prosecution, “insisted” with a technician of the residence, saying “that the boss wanted this server erased”, shortly after the federal investigators asked to have access to the tapes of the cameras monitoring a room where boxes of documents were stored.
The former president is also accused of having kept an additional secret military document. Mr. Trump had shown and described it to several people after he left the White House as “secret”, “highly confidential” and not “declassified”, according to a recording.
The new charges revealed Thursday are “ridiculous”, reacted Mr. Trump on the Fox News website, once again accusing his successor Joe Biden of being behind the investigation led by federal justice.
“It’s election interference,” he claimed. “If we didn’t overtake Biden by a lot in many polls (…), it wouldn’t happen,” he said.
Donald Trump was previously charged with 37 counts, including “unlawful withholding of national security information”, “obstructing justice” and “false testimony” in the case, to which he pleaded mid- June not guilty in federal court in Miami.
He is accused of endangering the security of the United States by keeping confidential documents after his departure from the White House in January 2021, including military plans or information on nuclear weapons, in his residence in Florida, in the instead of handing them over to the National Archives as required by law.
Another law, on espionage, prohibits keeping state secrets in unauthorized and unsecured places.
Earlier Thursday, the former president said his lawyers had spoken to Justice Department officials earlier in the day, ahead of his possible re-indictment in another probe, linked to attempts to overturn his defeat. in the 2020 election.
On July 18, Mr. Trump announced that he had received a letter from Jack Smith informing him that he was personally targeted by the federal investigation into attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In this case, he could be targeted on three counts: conspiracy against the American state, obstruction of official process and deprivation of rights.
A federal indictment in this latest case would be added to that on the White House archives and that, led by the justice of the State of New York, for suspicious payments to a former actress of X movies.
The troubles may not end there for Donald Trump: a Georgia prosecutor must also announce by September the result of her investigation into the pressure he exerted to try to alter the result of the 2020 presidential election in this southern state.
28/07/2023 03:47:30 – Washington (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
