This is a backup copy for future reference.
The Real Goal of the New Mar-a-Lago Charges Against Trump
BY DENNIS AFTERGUT
JULY 27, 2023
It’s a bombshell.
The new indictment adds a new defendant, Carlos de Oliveira, Trump’s property manager at his Mar-a-Lago property. More importantly, it also adds explosive new charges that include allegations of a conspiracy to corruptly persuade another person to alter, conceal, delete, and mutilate security camera footage at Mar-a-Lago.
That footage presumably documented the unlawful retention of government documents. The new allegation is that Trump sought to have it destroyed after receiving a grand jury subpoena for it.
Of course, an indictment is only an accusation, not proof. And the defendants are innocent until proven guilty.
Without minimizing the importance of those legal facts, one can state the obvious: These allegations are dynamite for a trial jury. Special Counsel Jack Smith would not have allowed the grand jury to include the charges unless he had compelling evidence to prove them. That evidence at the very least appears to include testimony from Yuscil Taveras, a Mar-a-Lago IT employee whom de Oliveira allegedly cornered in an audio closet days after Trump received the subpoena and told “the boss” wanted the server deleted.
This May Be the Strongest Legal Case Against Trump
As an experienced prosecutor, Smith knows that defense lawyers’ bottom-line job is complete if they provide a jury with enough reasonable doubt so that a single juror resists voting to convict and hangs the jury. Smith is not blind to the fact that Florida, where the trial will take place, is Trump country, and that jurors who start out leaning strongly his way are likely.
What Smith appears to have done with this superseding indictment, however, is to have assembled the kind of case that that is so strong—and alleged misconduct that should be so offensive to any law-abiding citizen—that any majority in the jury room for conviction will be armed with the kind of ammunition that could overpower even the most recalcitrant hold-out.
Here are four reasons why the new charges are packed with punch for jurors.
- First, you don’t need to be a criminologist, or even to have binged Law and Order episodes to understand that destroying evidence is what mobsters do to cover their tracks and try to stay out of the joint. Prosecutors call it “consciousness of guilt,” which can be the best available evidence of corrupt intent.
- Second, the new indictment makes clear that Jack Smith has an inside witness to the conspiracy—the indictment’s “Employee No. 4,” whom the New York Times has reported to be Taveras. The indictment details how the new defendant, de Oliveira, attempted to enlist Taveras in the newly charged obstruction by telling him, “The Boss wants to delete the server.”
Per the indictment, when Employee No. 4 equivocated, Nauta repeated the statement insistently and asked, without apparently subtlety, “What are we going to do?” Again, this would sound to any juror like mobster talk.
You can be sure of three things. First, there’s only one “Boss” at Mar-a-Lago. Second, Taveras testified to those words to the grand jury, or it wouldn’t have included them in the superseding indictment. Last, Jack Smith will not be relying on the word of Taveras at trial without a mountain of corroboration.
Just to take a wild guess about one possibility: It could well be that there is video tape footage in the grand jury’s possession that show de Oliveira and Taveras stepping into that audio closet together. There’s also voluminous texts between de Oliveira and Nauta immediately after Trump would have been informed of the subpoena for the server that points to the pair plotting, as well as documentation of respective phone calls between the two men and Trump. - Third, the time sequences detailed in the indictment scream cover up. Smith would not have described them so precisely without proof beyond any doubt of the timeline. It adds a layer of culpability that will be hard for any common-sense juror to resist.
For example: On June 22, a Trump lawyer was informed that the grand jury was going to subpoena the security footage tapes. The next day, Trump talked by phone to de Oliveira for 24 minutes. The day after that the formal subpoena was delivered and Nauta, meanwhile, immediately changed his travel plans, returning to visit Florida instead of travelling with Trump from Bedminster to Illinois. At this point he contacted de Oliveira and Taveras to enlist them to meet at Mar-a-Lago. The conversations between de Oliveira and Taveras about “deleting the server” occurred first thing that Monday morning, June 27. - Fourth, the grand jury has charged de Oliveira in a separate count of making false statements to the FBI about his role in the conspiracy. Again, the timing is critical. The recounted false statements occur in an interview months after the grand jury subpoena was received and after de Oliveira is on video moving boxes of classified documents, which the FBI had subpoenaed and acquired. In the FBI interview, de Oliveira denied six times—count them—that he had any role in the subterfuge.
That count puts enormous pressure on de Oliveira, just as a parallel count charges Nauta with virtually identical falsehoods. To a prosecutor, and likely a jury, that strongly suggests they got their stories together.
The pressure on these two Trump loyalists, whose lawyers are reportedly being paid by Trump’s PAC, does not mean that either will “flip.” Any one of us can just guess what promises Trump has made to them if he is reelected president and they keep quiet.
But do note this: These separate counts give them a lesser crime to plead guilty to if either decides to protect himself. The maximum penalty for a false statement to the FBI is five years imprisonment. The maximum penalty of concealing or destroying documents from a grand jury is 20 years behind bars. - Fifth, the superseding indictment does something for the nation. Trump himself, and his many defenders, have repeated the argument falsely equating the classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s office and those that Trump has claimed he had a right to. Many citizens not paying close attention may have fallen for that talking point.
But even for citizens who have to date failed to see the difference between Biden’s immediate cooperation in returning the documents in his home versus Trump’s 18 months of stonewalling, here we have something new: There is simply no way to misunderstand the new, even sharper contrast between Biden and Trump: There is no report that Biden sought to conceal anything from a grand jury, much less to have security camera footage obliterated.
And by the way. If, as Trump claims, he had every right to keep the classified documents after his presidency ended, why on earth did he feel a need to destroy tapes or a server?
Just to hammer the point, in this new superseding indictment, Smith added one more charge against Trump under the Espionage Act for a document he allegedly showed a reporter who was working on a book about Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. As we know from the initial indictment, Trump is on tape discussing the document and saying that he never declassified it, an admission that blows a hole in one of his biggest previous defenses.
He has since claimed that there was never any document and that he was just discussing news clippings. Previously, the document had been missing—not recovered in the search of Mar-a-Lago—and Trump’s attorneys had said they couldn’t find it. Well, apparently now Jack Smith has found it. This newly discovered document—reportedly a plan of attack against Iran—will be hung on Trump to show how careless he was with the nation’s top secrets and how he knew that he had no right to show them to anybody.
These charges seem as close to bulletproof as they come.
