Federal prosecutors Thursday added major accusations to an indictment charging former President Donald Trump with mishandling classified documents after he left office, presenting evidence that he told the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, that he wanted security camera footage there to be deleted.
The new accusations were revealed in a superseding indictment that named the property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, as a new defendant in the case. He is scheduled to be arraigned in Miami on Monday.
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.
The revised indictment added three 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, New Jersey.
The updated indictment was released the same day that Trump’s lawyers met 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.
Prosecutors under Smith had been investigating De Oliveira for months, concerned, among other things, by his communications with an information technology expert at Mar-a-Lago, Yuscil Taveras, who oversaw the surveillance camera footage at the property.
That footage was central to Smith’s investigation into whether Nauta, at Trump’s request, had moved boxes in and out of storage room at Mar-a-Lago to avoid complying with a federal subpoena for all classified documents in Trump’s possession. Many of those movements were caught on the surveillance camera footage.