New Trump Indictment Says He Ordered Mar-a-Lago Camera Footage Deleted

WASHINGTON— Donald Trump and his aides sought to have surveillance footage from his Mar-a-Lago club deleted so it couldn’t be turned over to a grand jury, special counsel Jack Smith alleged Thursday in new charges related to the former president’s retention of classified documents after he left the White House.

The new indictment also charges Carlos de Oliveira, a maintenance worker at Trump’s South Florida resort, making him the third defendant in the case.

The additional charges broaden an indictment brought by a Florida grand jury in June alleging the former president held on to sensitive military secrets he knew he shouldn’t have retained access to, shared them with others and directed his staff to help him evade authorities’ efforts to get them back. And they come as Trump braces for separate federal charges over efforts to undo his 2020 election loss.

“This is nothing more than a continued desperate and failing attempt” by the Justice Department to “harass President Trump and those around him,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said, adding Smith was “casting about for any way to salvage their illegal witch hunt.”

The stepped-up charges heighten the extraordinary legal peril facing Trump as he campaigns for the nomination to win back the White House in 2024. The political risk is less clear, as the former president has only seemed to grow stronger among Republicans with each prosecution.

The original June indictment in the documents case charged Trump with 37 counts on seven different charges, including willful retention of national-defense information, withholding a record, false statements and conspiracy to obstruct.

On five of the counts, Trump was charged alongside his personal aide, Walt Nauta, who also faces a false-statements charge. Both he and Trump have pleaded not guilty to those charges. An attorney for de Oliveira, who was also charged with lying to investigators, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The superseding indictment returned Thursday charges Trump with an additional count of willful retention of national-defense information, stemming from a classified national-security document prosecutors said he showed to visitors at his golf club in New Jersey.

The indictment also charges both Trump and Nauta with two more counts of obstruction, counts which say that they and de Oliveira attempted to “alter, destroy, mutilate and conceal” evidence and that they tried to persuade someone else to do so when they pressured another employee to delete the footage.

According to the indictment, Trump had a 24-minute phone call with de Oliveira on June 23, 2022, the day after a lawyer for the Trump Organization received a draft grand-jury subpoena requiring the production of Mar-a-Lago security-camera footage.

A few days later, de Oliveira confronted the unnamed Mar-a-Lago staffer, identified in the indictment as the director of information technology at the resort, and told him that “the boss” wanted the footage deleted and, according to the indictment, asked “What are we going to do?”

The IT director told de Oliveira that he didn’t know how to delete the server and that he didn’t think he had the right to do that, according to the indictment, which doesn’t say any of the footage was actually deleted.

Surveillance footage is at the heart of the Mar-a-Lago case, with prosecutors saying it shows Nauta moving dozens of boxes in the days before Justice Department investigators visited the property in June 2022 to retrieve records.

Prosecutors have alleged the footage showed Nauta moving 64 boxes out of the storage room for Trump to examine and later returning only about 30 of them. It was among the evidence the Justice Department used to justify its unprecedented search of the former president’s residence two months later in August.

De Oliveira later lied to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents during a Jan. 13 interview at his home, according to the indictment, which said he had “personally observed and helped move Trump’s boxes when they arrived at The Mar-a-Lago Club in January 2021,” but during his interview said he “never saw anything.”

The FBI agents had advised him that it was a voluntary interview, and that it is a crime to lie to the FBI, according to the indictment.

The new willful-retention charge relates to a document about a secret attack plan on a country that isn’t named, but is identifiable as Iran. Prosecutors have said Trump in July 2021 bragged to a writer, publisher and two staff members at his golf club in New Jersey about having the document, in audiotaped recordings now at the heart of the government’s case.

“Isn’t that amazing?” Trump told the group, adding: “Except it is, like, highly confidential.” He told them he could have declassified it as president, but couldn’t anymore. “This is still a secret,” Trump said.

A federal judge has scheduled the trial in that case to begin on May 20, 2024.

Smith’s office announced the new indictment just hours after Trump’s lawyers met with prosecutors to try to head off additional criminal charges related to Trump’s attempts to stay in power after President Biden’s election win in November 2020, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The new indictment and the meeting kept the Justice Department as the focus of political interest, a day after a planned plea agreement on tax and gun charges for Biden’s son, Hunter, collapsed during a court hearing where prosecutors surprised the defense team by saying they were still investigating him and he could face new charges.

Trump’s schedule as he campaigns for the nomination to again run against Biden, a Democrat, could be complicated as court hearings mount, and the legal issues could play out differently in a general election.

Trump’s campaign was ready for an indictment, complete with fundraising email blasts, and remains so. The former president has harnessed his legal problems into a broad argument of being politically targeted, with many Republican voters and lawmakers rallying around him.

Defense lawyers often use meetings such as the one Thursday morning to make last-ditch arguments against charging a client, but it couldn’t immediately be determined what was discussed after Trump’s lawyers John Lauro and Todd Blanche arrived at Smith’s office, several miles from the Justice Department’s main headquarters in downtown Washington. Prosecutors revealed little about their plans, as defense attorneys made their arguments against any charges, people familiar with the matter said.

A spokesman for Smith declined to comment.

Trump confirmed the meeting on his Truth Social platform. “My attorneys had a productive meeting with the DOJ this morning, explaining in detail that I did nothing wrong, was advised by many lawyers, and that an Indictment of me would only further destroy our Country,” he said. “No indication of notice was given during the meeting.”

Prosecutors earlier this month told Trump’s legal team he is a target of Smith’s far-ranging investigation into attempts by the former president and his allies to undermine the 2020 election.

The special counsel’s target letter cites three statutes, according to a person familiar with the matter, including a Reconstruction-era civil-rights charge; conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and obstruction of an official proceeding.

—Alex Leary contributed to this article.

Write to Sadie Gurman at [email protected] and Jan Wolfe at [email protected]