Throughout the day on Thursday, political reporters and Trump-crime-watchers were buzzing about a possible and inevitable new indictment coming down for Donald Trump. The buzz was that Jack Smith, the Department of Justice’s special counsel, had convened a grand jury and the grand jury was ready to hand out a slew of new indictments for Trump and his people, all around the January 6th insurrection. Trump’s lawyers even met with prosecutors in the special counsel’s office about those possible indictments yesterday. Then, at the end of the business day, the special counsel’s office did something else entirely: they revealed a “superseding indictment” in the case about Trump’s stolen classified documents.

Federal prosecutors on Thursday added major accusations to an indictment charging former President Donald J. Trump with mishandling classified documents after he left office, presenting evidence that he told the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, that he wanted security camera footage there to be deleted. The new accusations were revealed in a superseding indictment that named the property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, as a new defendant in the case. He is scheduled to be arraigned in Miami on Monday.

The original indictment filed last month in the Southern District of Florida accused Mr. Trump of violating the Espionage Act by illegally holding on to 31 classified documents containing national defense information after he left office. It also charged Mr. Trump and Walt Nauta, one of his personal aides, with a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to reclaim the classified material.

The revised indictment added three serious charges against Mr. Trump: attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence”; inducing someone else to do so; and a new count under the Espionage Act related to a classified national security document that he showed to visitors at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

Prosecutors under Mr. Smith had been investigating Mr. De Oliveira for months, concerned, among other things, by his communications with an information technology expert at Mar-a-Lago, Yuscil Taveras, who oversaw the surveillance camera footage at the property.

That footage was central to Mr. Smith’s investigation into whether Mr. Nauta, at Mr. Trump’s request, had moved boxes in and out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago to avoid complying with a federal subpoena for all classified documents in the former president’s possession. Many of those movements were caught on the surveillance camera footage.

[From The NYT]

In case this is too in-the-weeds for you, just know that the special counsel’s office – as in, high-level federal prosecutors – have an open-and-shut case against Trump for violating the Espionage Act in dozens of ways, and not only that, they have substantial evidence of Trump’s childish attempts to cover up his crimes. The basic gist is that Trump ordered Carlos De Oliveira to go to Yuscil Taveras and ask him/order him to delete the footage of the stolen classified documents being moved. If “Lordy, I hope there are tapes” was a superseding federal indictment.

Also: I’m guessing that the January 6th-insurrection indictment will probably come today or early next week. Would they do it as a Friday news dump? It would be funny.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Avalon Red, Cover Images.

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