On Thursday night, the Department of Justice filed a new 60-page superseding indictment, complete with new grand jury charges, for Donald Trump in the classified documents case. The charging document features new details on a familiar conspirator slash Diet Coke fetcher Waltine “Walt” Nauta, as well as a new character, Carlos De Oliveira, a Mar-a-Lago property manager slash pool boy.
Last June, De Oliveira and Nauta were caught on surveillance cameras moving boxes that contained classified records around Mar-a-Lago. According to the new superseding indictment, Nauta and De Oliveira also allegedly directed another Trump employee to “delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.” You heard that right: De Oliveira, the man who allegedly drained the resort’s swimming pool last October and ended up flooding a room where computer servers containing surveillance video logs were kept, has now joined the permanent cast.
All three defendants are now charged with altering, destroying, mutilating, or concealing an object, as well as a similar but separate crime of corruptly altering, destroying, mutilating, or concealing a document or object.
Meanwhile, the former president picked up new charges in addition to the 37 counts he was already facing. He’s now on the hook for altering evidence; inducing someone else to alter evidence; and a new, 32nd count under the Espionage Act. The last new charge has to do with the now-infamous conversation the president had, while being recorded, at his Bedminster, New Jersey, residence in July 2021. He’s on tape saying, “As president, I could have declassified it, … Now I can’t, you know, but this is still secret.” Not a lot of misdirection there!
The superseding indictment has other new details, including about alleged attempts to cover up the moving of the infamous boxes, wrongdoing, and destruction of evidence.
According to the document, on June 27, 2022, De Oliveira told someone who is identified as “Trump Employee 4” that “ ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted.” When the employee balked, “De Oliveira then insisted to Trump Employee 4 that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted and asked, ‘what are we going to do?’ ’’ (“The boss,” as it turns out, is not a particularly fail-safe nickname for the guy in charge—in this case, Donald Trump.)
Nauta was allegedly covering his own tracks with a similar level of diligence. According to the charging document, after multiple subpoenas were sent for missing Mar-a-Lago security camera footage in June 2022, Nauta had a quick change of plans. Instead of traveling to Illinois with Trump the next day, “he changed his schedule and began to make arrangements to go to Palm Beach, Florida instead.”
Nauta then “texted one person that he would not be traveling with Trump the next day because he had a family emergency and used ‘shushing’ emojis; at 9:48pm that night he texted a Secret Service agent that he had to check on a family member in Florida.” This was allegedly all part of “the attempt to delete security camera footage” to prevent federal prosecutors from obtaining it.
Ah, the shushing emojis! Not the best ones to use whilst covering up a potential crime.
Prosecutors indicated that those emojis helped signal that Nauta et al. had not, in fact, conducted a “diligent search” for classified documents in attempts to return them to the federal government.
All told, the 60-page document features plenty of conspiracy and buffoonery both. And while the alleged effort to hide documents and destroy security camera footage looks wholly unserious, the charges themselves look more serious than ever. Meanwhile, the president awaits yet another indictment, expected to be filed any day, in the fake electors case.
