President Trump’s Justice Department Wednesday moved to end the classified documents case against two co-defendants accused of helping him hide top secret documents from the feds at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Walt Nauta, Trump’s longtime valet, and Carlos De Oliveira, a manager at the president’s Palm Beach club, are now set to be cleared of any criminal wrongdoing for their involvement in Trump’s alleged mishandling of hundreds of secret government documents he took with him from the White House at the end of his first term.
The move was not unexpected because the new president had vowed to scrap the case but still marks a serious blow to traditional independence of the Department of Justice from political pressure.
Federal prosecutors informed a federal appeals court without explanation that it is dropping its appeal of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to dismiss the case on the grounds that former Special Counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to grant the request, effectively ending the case against Nauta and De Oliveira, who otherwise might have still faced potential obstruction charges if the court had overturned Cannon’s dismissal.
Smith dismissed the case against Trump himself last year after he won reelection, citing Justice Department policies barring prosecution of a sitting president.
In a twist, Cannon barred prosecutors from releasing a volume of Smith’s final report dealing with the documents case in the final days of former President Biden’s administration.
She cited the chance that Nauta and De Oliveira could still face a trial and their rights could be compromised.
If the appeals court ends the case for good, the Justice Department could theoretically release the report. But Trump is unlikely to permit that and most observers believe it could remain under seal indefinitely.
Trump took the documents with him to Mar-a-Lago during his acrimonious departure from the White House in January 2021. He rebuffed official requests to return them and defied a subpoena demanding their return of all the documents.
The FBI found hundreds of documents, including some dealing with top secret and nuclear issues, in an explosive search of Mar-a-Lago.
The then-former president was charged with dozens of felony counts, including violations of the espionage act and obstruction of justice.
Smith’s prosecutors accused Nauta and De Oliveira of helping their boss keep investigators and even his own defense lawyers from finding boxes of documents stored in a basement store room.
Many legal experts believed the documents case was the most straightforward of the cases against Trump.
But Cannon slow-walked the case and repeatedly came to Trump’s rescue with favorable rulings that often defied legal precedent. She eventually ruled Smith was not appointed properly, though courts repeatedly upheld the validity of the special counsel statute.