'Security camera footage' shows a Trump aide moving boxes at Mar-a-Lago 'before and after' DOJ subpoena

13 October 2022

No former president in U.S. history has been the subject of more investigations than Donald Trump. Twenty and one-half months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Trump continues to be investigated by everyone from Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis to New York State Attorney General Letitia James to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — which has been probing not only his January 6, 2021-related activities, but also, government documents being stored at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound in Palm Beach, Florida. In May, DOJ issued a subpoena demanding that Trump return any classified documents he had in his possession — and according to reporting in the New York Times, “security camera footage” shows a Trump aide, Walt Nauta, moving boxes in and out of a Mar-a-Lago storage room both “before and after” that subpoena was issued.

In an article published by the Times on October 12, journalists Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer report, “The footage showed Walt Nauta, a former military aide who left the White House and then went to work for Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, moving boxes from a storage room that became a focus of the Justice Department’s investigation, according to the people briefed on the matter. The inquiry has centered on whether Mr. Trump improperly kept national security records after he left the White House and obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to get them back.”

Haberman, author of the new book “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” has reported on Trump extensively for the Times and has been a frequent guest on CNN.

According to Haberman and Feuer, one of the Times’ sources said that DOJ has interviewed Nauta several times.

“Those interviews started before the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on August 8 and carted off more than 11,000 documents, including about 100 that bore classification markings,” Haberman and Feuer explain. “Mr. Nauta has answered questions but is not formally cooperating with the investigation of Mr. Trump’s handling of the documents.”

Haberman and Feuer note that on October 12, the Washington Post reported that Trump had asked an employee to move some boxes at Mar-a-Lago and that the employee had been interviewed by FBI. But the Times reporters point out that “it is not clear whether that employee was Mr. Nauta” and that it is also “unclear if the boxes that were moved were among the material later retrieved by the FBI.”

“The National Archives, the federal agency that oversees presidential records, spent much of 2021 attempting to retrieve boxes of records that its officials had been told were in the White House residence at the end of the Trump presidency,” Haberman and Feuer. “Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers tried to facilitate their return; one lawyer for Mr. Trump, Alex Cannon, told Mr. Trump to ship the boxes back as they were, instead of going through them, and that the archivists would return whatever was personal property, two people briefed on the matter said. Mr. Cannon told Mr. Trump’s aides not to go through the boxes because it was unclear what was in them, and the materials might require security clearances.”

The Times reporters add, “Mr. Trump instead went through the boxes himself in December, according to a person familiar with the move, and the archives sent people to retrieve 15 of them a month later. When they got the boxes, they found 184 classified documents, prompting alarm. The Justice Department subsequently began an investigation and quickly concluded that Mr. Trump might not have returned all the material in his possession when he turned over the 15 boxes in January.”

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