Just earlier today, we reported on the recent news from the Wall Street Journal, confirming that Garland-appointed DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team have finally finished collective testimonies and various other evidence in their case against scandal-plagued former President Donald Trump, in the case concerning the trove of classified, top-secret government documents Trump stole and stashed away at his Mar-a-Lago resort turned post-White House home at the tumultuous end of his presidential term.
To make matters that much worse for the former president, who is already thoroughly steeped in legal woes from every conceivable direction, the Journal confirms that Donald’s closest allies and insiders are “bracing for his indictment” as the Special Counsel prepares to bring the investigation to a close.
But things get even worse for the big guy still, as the New York Times is out with bombshell new reporting that confirms it was none other than a Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker that provided prosecutors with some of the most damning, key evidence against Trump in the case.
According to the report, a maintenance worker employed at the ex-president’s Palm Beach estate spoke with prosecutors in the DOJ investigation and stated that he personally witnessed a Trump aide moving boxes (assumed to be holding classified documents and materials) into a storage room. The very next day, a Trump attorney met with FBI agents as well as a federal prosecutor who arrived at Donald’s Mar-a-Lago resort/personal home with the purpose of retrieving the stolen classified government documents.
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The resort worker, identified as Walt Nauta who once served as Trump’s valet in the White House, told authorities that he ordered to help move the boxes but was not aware of what was inside of them.
Additional breaking reporting from the Washington Post earlier today revealed that Trump’s aides actually conducted a “dress rehearsal” in preparation for moving boxes of classified documents and materials ahead of the May 2022 subpoena.
Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman write for the Times, “The worker’s account is potentially significant to prosecutors as they piece together details of how Mr. Trump handled sensitive documents he took with him from the White House upon leaving office and whether he obstructed efforts by the Justice Department and the National Archives to retrieve them.”
“Mr. Trump was found to have been keeping some of the documents in the storage room where Mr. Nauta and the maintenance worker were moving boxes on the day before the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, Jay Bratt, traveled to Mar-a-Lago last June to seek the return of any government materials being held by the former president.”
Just mere weeks before, Trump had been hit with a subpoena from the US Department of Justice, legally compelling the return of the classified materials. DOJ prosecutors are now investigating whether the boxes of documents were moved with the specific purpose of concealing them.
“Part of their interest is in trying to determine whether documents were moved before Mr. Corcoran went through the boxes himself ahead of a meeting with Justice Department officials looking to retrieve them,” Feuer and Haberman go on to report.
“Prosecutors have been asking witnesses about the roles of Mr. Nauta and the maintenance worker, whose name has not been publicly disclosed, in moving documents around that time.”
You can read the bombshell full report from the New York Times here.
Featured image via screen capture
