Filing new obstruction charges against former President Donald Trump in the case involving his White House documents may hurt the credibility of the prosecutor, special counsel Jack Smith, according to former federal prosecutor William Shipley.
The new charges allege that Mr. Trump sought to have deleted Mar-a-Lago security camera footage that was to be handed over to the prosecutors under a June 2022 subpoena. The Mar-a-Lago property manager, Carlos de Oliveira, is now included as a defendant. Together with Mr. Trump and his aide Valentine Nauta, he faces one count of attempting to destroy evidence and one count of a conspiracy to do so.
The charges, unveiled by Mr. Smith on July 27, were unexpected given that just two weeks ago Mr. Smith asked the presiding District Judge Aileen Cannon for a trial date in December.
Nor does it appear that the information in the new superseding indictment had just come to Mr. Smith’s attention, observed Mr. Shipley, who now represents numerous people charged in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol protest and breach.
“He didn’t just discover this new evidence and decide to indict a third defendant in the past 2 weeks. So he knew this was in front of him when he wrote that he wanted a Dec. trial date,” Shipley said in a tweet.
The crux of the information comes down to a conversation Mr. de Oliveira allegedly had with the Mar-a-Lago IT director on June 27—three days after Mr. Trump’s lawyers received a subpoena for nine months of security camera footage from some areas of Mar-a-Lago where Trump had stored documents and artifacts from his presidency. Mr. de Oliveira led the IT director to a room for a one-on-one talk and told him that “the boss” wanted the server storing the footage deleted, the indictment alleges.
The IT director refused and referred Mr. de Oliveira to a Trump Organization security superviser, the allegation goes.
This information, it appears, could have only come from either party to the conversation—Mr. de Oliveira or the IT director. Both men would have been high on the list for Mr. Smith to interview. Despite a deluge of leaks from the investigation, there has been no revelation in the media that either of them recently came forward with such explosive evidence.
Waiting until now to add the charges undermines Mr. Smith’s credibility before the judge, Mr. Shipley argued.
“It makes it look like he was lying two weeks ago when he said the case could go to trial in 5 months,” he said.
The timing of the trial has been a matter of keen interest given Mr. Trump is running for president. Judge Cannon has set the date for May 2024, by which time primary voters will already have decided whether he’ll be the GOP nominee. Adding new charges and a defendant may give Mr. Trump more room to delay the trial further.
Mr. Shipley and others have forecast that the trial won’t be over before the general election.
The case deals with Mr. Trump’s retaining some documents from his presidency. It cites the Espionage Act to allege that he illegally retained national defense information. It further alleges that after prosecutors subpoenaed all documents with classification markings, he and Mr. Nauta conspired to keep some of the documents from Mr. Trump’s lawyer, who was conducting the search in response to the subpoena.
The fortitude of the new charges, as they pertain to Mr. Trump, appears to hinge on whether Mr. Trump indeed ordered the security camera footage in question deleted. The indictment doesn’t include direct evidence that Mr. Trump made such an order, only that he talked to Mr. de Oliveira on the phone after his lawyers were first notified of the upcoming subpoena.
