2023-07-28 01:07:41
In this photo provided by the US Department of Justice, piles of boxes are seen in a bathroom at Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. – /AFP
It might look like an American series cliche. Federal prosecutors accuse Donald Trump, in a court document released Thursday, July 27, of having tried to have CCTV images erased from his Florida residence, in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of federal investigators in the case of the classified documents that the former tenant of the White House took to his home in Mar-a-Lago.
These images have long been at the heart of the investigation because, according to prosecutors, they show one of the former president’s two aides, Walt Nauta, moving boxes of documents in and out of a meeting room. storage, including the day before an on-site visit by FBI and Justice Department officials in June 2022.
According to the new elements of the indictment, Mr. Trump, as well as Mr. Nauta and another assistant, Carlos De Oliveira, are accused of having, following this visit, asked an employee of the residence of “remove CCTV images of the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent these images from being handed over” to justice, the lawyers having issued a summons to appear to obtain them following noticing the presence of surveillance cameras.
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A request from the “boss”
Walt Nauta had already been charged alongside Donald Trump. The indictment of Carlos De Oliveira is new. The latter, according to the prosecution, “insisted” to a technician in the residence, saying “that ‘the boss’ wanted this server deleted”.
The former president is also accused of having kept an additional secret military document. Mr. Trump had shown and described it to several people following leaving the White House as « secret », “highly confidential” and no “declassified”according to a recording.
The new charges revealed on Thursday are « ridicules »reacted Mr. Trump on the Fox News website, once once more accusing his successor Joe Biden of being behind the investigation led by federal justice. “It’s election interference,” he shouted. “If we didn’t pass Biden by a lot in many polls (…), it wouldn’t happen”he still assured.
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Donald Trump was previously charged with 37 counts including “unlawful retention of national security information”, “obstruction of justice” et “false testimony” in this case, for which he pleaded not guilty in mid-June in federal court in Miami. He is accused of putting the security of the United States at risk by keeping confidential documents following his departure from the White House in January 2021, including military plans or information on nuclear weapons, in his luxury residence, in the instead of handing them over to the National Archives as required by law. Another law, on espionage, prohibits keeping state secrets in unauthorized and unsecured places.
Multiple surveys
These new charges come to thicken a file for which a federal trial is scheduled for May 2024 in Florida, in the midst of the Republican primaries for which Donald Trump is favorite.
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They come the day the Republican billionaire’s lawyers met with Justice Department officials in another investigation into attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, including the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, for which he might also be charged.
A new indictment would therefore be added to that on the White House archives and that, by the justice of the State of New York, for suspicious payments to a former porn actress. stop there for Donald Trump: a Georgia prosecutor must also announce by September the result of her investigation into the pressure he exerted to try to alter the result of the 2020 presidential election in this southern state. UNITED STATES.
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