Oct. 13 (UPI) — A longtime aide of former President Donald Trump was captured on security cameras moving boxes out of a storage area at Mar-a-Lago before and after the Justice Department issued a subpoena demanding the return of all classified documents, according to reports.
CBS News, The New York Times and The Washington Post cited sources about the activities of Trump’s former military aide Walt Nauta in connection to if Trump obstructed the government’s efforts to get back classified documents taken from the White House when Trump left office.
The boxes are the continued focus of the investigation, the sources said. The government said the unprecedented search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8 resulted in repeated and failed, attempts to get the documents returned.
One of the sources cited by the reports said Nauta was interviewed “on several occasions” by the FBI before executing the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, where federal agents took more than 11,000 documents, including 100 with classified markings.
Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich told The New York Times that the White House was “colluding with the media through targeted leaks in an overt and illegal act of intimidation and tampering.”
The battle over Trump and White House documents has been brewing since the ex-president left office. The National Archives collected 15 boxes of records at Mar-a-Lago in January and later referred Trump’s retention of the documents to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation.
“The FBI uncovered evidence that the response to the grand jury subpoena was incomplete, that additional classified documents likely remained at Mar-a-Lago, and that efforts had likely been taken to obstruct the investigation,” the Justice Department told the Supreme Court in a filing on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.