Jack Smith in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

 

     Republican strategist Scott Jennings calls this "A-Grade buffoonery" because it is. While we've had our sights set on Fulton County, Georgia or on Jack Smith's anticipated next round of fresh indictments related to the January 6 insurrection, he surprised us all and filed what's known as a "superseding indictment" in the Southern District of Florida.

     As is his legal purview, Smith was able to add charges to the indictment as well as a third defendant, one Carlos De Oliveira, the head of maintenance at Mar a Lago. In this 60 page superseding indictment, Smith and his team give an amazingly granular account of what happened between June 22 and June 24th last year. The FBI had visited Mar a Lago on June 1st and noticed security cameras trained on the storage area where some of the documents were kept.

     By the 22nd, the DOJ notified Trump they would need the security footage of that area and provided a draft subpoena from the grand jury to compel him to turn over that video evidence.

     Well, in true Trump fashion, he then contacts De Oliveira the very next day and the two talk for nearly a half an hour. Next thing anyone knows, Nauta is changing his travel plans and flying to Mar a Lago and contacting people in the IT department there about... something, He makes a series of phone calls to De Oliveira, who eventually talks to an IT person asking how long security footage remained extant. 

     He's told about 45 days and De Oliveira then asks the IT guy how to damage the servers and delete the footage. The guy gets cold feet and tells De Oliveira, "Uh, you'll want to talk to my boss about that." This was after De Oliveira told him "the boss", meaning Trump, wanted the servers erased.

     Now, I'll just stop here and ask you if you remember reading earlier this year about a pool boy who'd drained the pool at Mar a Lago and wound up flooding the security room.

     That happened in October last year, months after the security footage had been compelled by the grand jury's draft and final subpoenas.

     Just typing this up, I'm literally laughing my ass off as I'm reading this superseding indictment page by page (to get an expert legal analysis of it, watch Ben Meiselas' video on the Miedas Touch Network). Essentially, what happened was the DOJ ordered Trump to turn over security footage. The next day, he calls his goon, Walt Nauta. Nauta contacts the head of maintenance De Oliveira, who then waylays an IT guy and asks him how long security footage is stored on the servers and how to wipe it clean (the same thing Trump accused Hillary Clinton of doing), because that's what "the boss" wanted.

     Months later, the security room gets flooded when the pool gets drained.

     Yes, Trump flooded his own security room at his own resort in some ham-fisted attempt to destroy security footage showing Nauta and others moving boxes to and fro so Evan Corcoran couldn't get his hands on them.

     It's incredible that this idiotic, Mr. Bill simplicity of mind has worked for Trump for as long as it had but it's impossible to imagine that a normal function for a resort, a pool drain, could be so mismanaged that it results in the flooding of a room in which servers are stored containing footage that the DOJ compelled to be turned over. It's spoliation at best, obstruction at worst.

     And that Trump actually expected the DOJ would accept his bullshit excuse that it was all an unfortunate accident.