An aide to former President Donald Trump at both the White House and then at Mar-a-Lago has been indicted in Jack Smith’s special counsel investigation the day after Trump revealed he had been charged.
Trump announced the indictment of his personal aide Walt Nauta in a social media post, blasting what he called an unjust prosecution of a “wonderful man.”
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“I have just learned that the ‘Thugs’ from the Department of Injustice will be Indicting a wonderful man, Walt Nauta, a member of the U.S. Navy, who served proudly with me in the White House, retired as Senior Chief, and then transitioned into private life as a personal aide,” Trump said on Truth Social on Friday morning. “He has done a fantastic job! They are trying to destroy his life, like the lives of so many others, hoping that he will say bad things about ‘Trump.’ He is strong, brave, and a Great Patriot. The FBI and DOJ are CORRUPT!”
A day earlier, Trump revealed that Smith, who was handpicked by Attorney General Merrick Garland, had informed him that he was being indicted related to his alleged mishandling of classified records and that he had been summoned to appear in a Miami federal courthouse on Tuesday afternoon.
An indictment unsealed later Friday shows Nauta was charged with six criminal counts — conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding of a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and a false statements charge.
Nauta was a former Navy sailor and military valet in the Trump White House who then followed Trump to his Florida resort home of Mar-a-Lago after Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
The Trump bodyman, who also accompanied the 2024 GOP front-runner on campaign trips this year, reportedly moved around boxes at Mar-a-Lago that contained government records that Trump retained after leaving the White House. Reports have claimed that among Nauta’s many White House duties were bringing Trump a Diet Coke after he pushed a red button on his Oval Office desk.
Nauta was reportedly caught on security cameras moving boxes out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago both before and after the DOJ issued a subpoena in May of last year.
Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward, has reportedly filed a letter under seal with Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging prosecutorial misconduct.
Woodward reportedly alleged during a November visit to the Justice Department that DOJ’s chief of the counterintelligence section, Jay Bratt, said the DOJ wanted Nauta to cooperate against Trump and then told Woodward that “I didn’t take you for a Trump guy” and that “he would do the right thing” before bringing up Woodward’s application to serve as a judge at the superior court in the nation’s capital.
Nauta’s lawyer apparently took this to be inappropriate pressure from Bratt and from DOJ prosecutors.
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James Trusty, a Trump lawyer who was ousted on Friday, said on Fox News on Thursday this was “criminal obstruction behavior by prosecutors” in an apparent reference to Woodward’s allegations against the DOJ.
“They actually have prosecutors who literally … told an attorney that he probably won’t get his judgeship if he doesn’t flip his guy against the president,” Trusty said. “You don’t have to be a lawyer to recognize there is something really wrong with that.”
