Donald Trump ordered an employee to delete CCTV footage at his Florida mansion in order to obstruct a criminal investigation, according to new charges.
The former president is accused of illegally keeping top secret documents at his Mar-A-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, after he was booted out of the Oval Office.
Now prosecutors have dramatically unveiled a new 38-page indictment that claims Trump asked a staffer to delete camera footage in order to obstruct the FBI probe into his alleged hoarding of secret files that belonged in the White House.
CCTV at the lavish Mar-A-Lago complex has long been central to the investigation because, according to prosecutors, it shows Trump’s former valet, Walt Nauta, moving boxes of documents in and out of a storage room – including one day before a visit by FBI and Justice Department officials.
They allege this was an attempt to obstruct their investigation.
The new indictment includes new counts of obstruction and willful retention of national defence information.
This piles the pressure on Trump who also faces a further indictment in Washington over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump is alleged to have asked to have the Mar-A-Lago footage deleted after investigators visited in June 2022 to collect classified documents that he took with him after leaving the White House in 2021.
Law enforcement officials issued a subpoena for the footage after noticing surveillance cameras while they were there.
A Trump spokesperson dismissed the new charges as ‘nothing more than a continued desperate and flailing attempt to harass President Trump and those around him’ and to influence the 2024 presidential race, in which he is the Republican frontrunner.
The indictment quotes a Mar-A-Lago property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, telling a colleague that the ‘boss’ wanted a server hosting the footage to be deleted.
It says De Oliveira went to the IT office last June, took an employee to a small room known as the ‘audio closet’ and asked the person how many days the server retained footage.
When the employee said he didn’t believe he was able to delete footage, De Oliveira insisted the ‘boss’ wanted it done, asking: ‘What are we going to do?’
De Oliveira was added to the indictment, charged with obstruction and false statements related to an interview he gave the FBI earlier this year. Both Trump and Nauta have pleaded not guilty.
In a separate case, Trump is accused of efforts to obstruct the investigation into the January 6 riots at the Capitol Building as he refused to concede defeat to Joe Biden following the 2020 election.
His lawyer in the election investigation, John Lauro, told Fox News last week that prosecutors are accusing Trump of ‘some kind of effort to obstruct’ the counting of state electoral votes and ‘whether or not President Trump intimidated anyone or ballot-stuffed’.
‘He’s done nothing criminal,’ Mr Lauro said. ‘And he’s made his case that he was entitled to take these positions as president of the United States. When he saw all these election discrepancies and irregularities going on, he did what any president was required to do because he took an oath to do exactly that.’
Additionally, Trump is scheduled to stand trial in a New York City criminal case.
In May he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to money paid to his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, for orchestrating hush money payments during the 2016 campaign to bury allegations of extramarital sexual encounters.
Prosecutors allege that Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, falsely logged the Cohen payments as being for a legal retainer that didn’t exist.
