An employee at former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate has informed federal agents that Trump ordered people to relocate White House documents he was improperly storing in a storage locker at Mar-a-Lago after a subpoena order was issued for the retrieval of the documents earlier this year.
The revelation was made public byThe Washington Post which cited “people familiar with the investigation” in their reporting.
The employee has been interviewed numerous times by investigators and is cooperating with DOJ. Sources who spoke with him said that the employee is cooperating with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and has been interviewed several times by investigators. Post, the employee’s claim has been corroborated by surveillance camera footage.
The identity and whereabouts of the employee have not been disclosed.
According to witness accountsAfter Trump was served with a subpoena by the department in May 2017, he ordered the worker and other workers to move boxes from Mar-a-Lago’s storage area to his estate living quarters.
Initial, the witness cited was the PostTrump denied making such an ordering. As more evidence was collected, however, and upon being asked about the matter a second time, the witness’s story “changed dramatically,” the publication said.
Separate reporting from The New York Times notes that security footage at Mar-a-Lago shows Walt Nauta — a former military aide in the Trump White House who followed the ex-president to Mar-a-Lago after he left office — carrying boxes from the storage area. Nauta isn’t necessarily the individual who the Post said provided the witness testimony to the DOJ; although officials have interviewed him several times, he hasn’t formally cooperated with the investigation so far.
Trump cooperated with officials when the subpoena was issued in June even greeting them when they arrived. It has become evident that Trump has repeatedly refused to cooperate in the investigation, despite his claims.
Trump spent all of 2021, for example, rejecting the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA)Requests that he return thousands upon thousands of government documentsHe took them from the White House. Trump only relented after the agency threatened to include Congress and allowed NARA to retrieve some documents.
Officials discovered that some documents were classified and they contacted the DOJ to retrieve them. The department subpoenaed Trump in late spring to retrieve the remaining classified material. As part of that subpoena, Trump’s legal counsel had to affirm that no more documents marked as classified remained at the property.
After witness testimony and surveillance footage suggested that Trump was still keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, an FBI search warrant was executed in early August, netting around 20 boxes of documents — including More than 100 documents have been classified. Mar-a-Lago has been home to more than 300 classified material since the beginning of the new year.
Trump lashed out against the reporting from PostIn a Truth Social post Wednesday night.
“There is no ‘crime’ having to do with the storage of documents at Mar-a- Lago,” Trump claimed, “only in the minds of the Radical Left Lunatics who are destroying our Country.”
Twitter’s legal experts disagree.
“Moving documents to hide them from DOJ is the kind of aggravating factor that would make Trump’s conduct an indictable offense,” former U.S. attorney and current Michigan Law School professor Barb McQuade said.
“Day by day the evidence that proves Trump personally orchestrated the theft and concealment of top secret documents becomes stronger,” said Laurence TribeProfessor Emeritus Harvard Law School. “Any shadow of a doubt about his guilt is rapidly vanishing.”
