Former President Donald Trump was hit with three new additional charges in special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents investigation.
Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, accused the former president Thursday evening of attempting to delete surveillance footage at his Mar-a-Lago property in a new superseding indictment filed in the classified records case.
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The Justice Department named a third defendant in the case, Carlos De Oliveria, an employee of Mar-a-Lago who was a valet before becoming a property manager at the Palm Beach, Florida, club in January 2022, according to the indictment. Prosecutors say Trump acted as the co-conspirator to try and delete the footage and also charged him with an additional Espionage Act charge.
The new charges accuse Trump of acting with De Oliveira and Trump’s other co-defendant, Walt Nauta, in trying to delete the footage.
Trump now faces 40 counts in the investigation following his June 8 arraignment in South Florida. The additional three charges carry a combined maximum of 50 years in prison if convicted.
Prosecutors added two new obstruction of justice charges related to the alleged attempt to delete the footage. They also added a 32nd document to the list for which Trump is facing charges of violating the Espionage Act.
De Oliveira, 56, allegedly tried to determine how long security footage was stored on Mar-a-Lago’s system, according to court filings. It says he later told another employee of the Florida resort that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted” on June 27, 2022.
The new filings also allege De Oliveira and Nauta were conspiring secretly and at times “walked through the bushes” outside the IT office where the security footage was managed.
The new classified document count against Trump relates to a “presentation concerning military activity in a foreign country.” That count is concerning a previously released 2021 audio recording in which Trump said he had a document outlining a “plan of attack,” purportedly referring to a war plan against Iran.
Prosecutors allege Trump willfully kept that record after leaving office and shared it in some manner during a July 21, 2021, conversation with two people who did not possess security clearances at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. In the original indictment, prosecutors said they had a recording of that conversation, but they hadn’t yet charged Trump with possessing the document.
The charging document does not name a country, and Trump, along with some of his allies, has argued he wasn’t holding a document, suggesting in an interview last month that he was “holding up papers and talking about them but had no documents.”
However, the new filing also indicated that Trump allegedly had the classified war plan at his Mar-a-Lago estate, though it doesn’t say how the document arrived at either location.
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The two new charges related to seeking to alter security camera footage carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison each. The charge of willfully retaining national defense secrets is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The subsequent indictment in the classified documents case comes as a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., convened on Thursday in a separate special counsel investigation into Trump’s alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election.
