It might look like an American series cliche. Federal prosecutors accuse Donald Trump, in a court document released Thursday, July 27, of having tried to have CCTV images erased from his Florida residence, in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of federal investigators in the case of the classified documents that the former tenant of the White House took to his home in Mar-a-Lago.
These images have long been at the heart of the investigation because, according to prosecutors, they show one of the former president’s two aides, Walt Nauta, moving boxes of documents in and out of a meeting room. storage, including the day before an on-site visit by FBI and DOJ officials in June 2022.
According to the new elements of the indictment, Mr. Trump, as well as Mr. Nauta and another assistant, Carlos De Oliveira, are accused of having, after this visit, asked an employee of the residence to “remove CCTV footage from the Mar-a-Lago club, to prevent these footage from being handed over” to justice, the lawmen having issued a subpoena to obtain them after noticing the presence of surveillance cameras.
A request from the “boss”
Walt Nauta had already been charged alongside Donald Trump. The indictment of Carlos De Oliveira is new. The latter, according to the prosecution, “insisted” with a technician at the residence, saying “that ‘the boss’ wanted this server erased”.
The former president is also accused of keeping an additional secret military document. After leaving the White House, Mr. Trump had shown and described it to several people 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 pass Biden by a lot in many polls (…), it wouldn’t happen,” he said.
Donald Trump was previously charged with 37 counts including “unlawfully withholding national security information”, “obstructing justice” and “false testimony” in the case, to which he pleaded in 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 and information on nuclear weapons, in his luxury residence, 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.
Multiple surveys
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 a favorite.
They come the day the Republican billionaire’s lawyers met with Justice Department officials as part of another investigation into attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, including the assault on the Capitol, on January 6, 2021, which could also end with an indictment.
And 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 presidential election. of 2020 in this southern state of the United States.