The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday abandoned all criminal proceedings against two co-defendants of President Donald Trump in the Florida classified documents case, wiping out any legal peril the pair could have faced.
Trump valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira were charged with conspiring with Trump to obstruct an FBI investigation into the hoarding of classified documents that the Republican took with him when he left the White House after his first presidential term.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Trump’s case in July, saying that the prosecutor who brought it, special counsel Jack Smith, had been illegally appointed by the Justice Department in November 2022. Smith’s team planned to appeal that ruling, but abandoned that after Trump’s November election win.Â
However, an appeal of the dismissal of charges against Nauta and De Olivera remained pending. On Wednesday, prosecutors informed the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that they had withdrawn the appeal, formally ending the case.
“The United States of America moves to voluntarily dismiss its appeal with prejudice,” prosecutors wrote. “The government has conferred with counsel for appellees Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, who do not object to the voluntary dismissal.”
The Justice Department had previously committed to not making public Smith’s report on the classified documents investigation as long as proceedings remained ongoing against Nauta and De Oliveira.
But the Trump administration Justice Department is widely expected to keep the report permanently under wraps.
Boxes moved, prosecutors alleged
Trump was accused of taking thousands of papers containing some of the country’s most sensitive national security secrets when he left the White House in January 2021 and storing them in a haphazard manner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Reportedly, another document may have been in Trump’s possession at a New Jersey property he owns.
The 37-count indictment included alleged violations of the Espionage Act. The charges included references to dozens of top-secret or secret documents.
Prosecutors accused Trump of scheming with Nauta and De Oliveira to conceal video footage from federal investigators after they issued a subpoena for it. Prosecutors alleged that video footage captured Nauta moving boxes of documents in and out of a storage room ahead of a visit by investigators.
According to his indictment, De Oliveira was alleged to have told another unnamed Trump employee that “the boss wanted the server deleted,” in reference to surveillance footage of the boxes being moved.
The classified documents investigation was first referred to prosecutors in 2022 after the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration tried for more than a year to retrieve presidential records from Trump. A search of his Florida estate in August 2022 enraged many Republicans, who complained the Justice Department under Joe Biden’s administration was going after a political rival.
Smith also dropped a separate criminal matter after Trump faced a federal indictment for actions that contested his 2020 loss to Biden and were part of the leadup to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
