Trump worker who now refuses to talk spilled beans to Jack Smith before indictment: CNN
One of Donald Trump's employees who has been charged in the Mar-a-Lago case has already provided testimony that could be used in an eventual trial — even though he stopped cooperating as soon as he was indicted, CNN reported.
Newly unsealed court filings show Walt Nauta told a grand jury two months before an FBI search in August 2022 about boxes of classified documents he handled in a storage room at the resort, agreeing with one grand juror who asked if he would "just pick some off the top" while leaving others, reported CNN.
"At one point in the process of choosing boxes for Trump to review before returning them to the [National] Archives, Nauta said that Trump 'was like, okay, that’s it,'" the network reported.
Nauta's account was corroborated by a second witness whose identity has not been publicly revealed, and both told the grand jury that Trump directed them not to give any more boxes of those materials back to the National Archives.
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The witnesses told investigators that boxes of government materials were haphazardly chosen for return to the National Archives and that Trump himself stopped them from returning dozens of additional boxes that were later found during the execution of a search warrant, CNN reported.
Nauta has stopped cooperating with special counsel Jack Smith's team, but the testimony he gave to the grand jury could still be used by prosecutors in their presentation to the jury, although the trial has been delayed indefinitely by federal Judge Aileen Cannon.
Trump's legal team had been given a deadline of Thursday to complete part of the Classified Information Procedures Act paperwork and notify the court which classified documents they intended to present at trial.
Smith had not opposed a brief delay, but Cannon suspended that deadline indefinitely.