Trump hit with further counts in classified documents case as second aide charged – as it happened – The Guardian

Here’s a recap of today’s developments:

• Special counsel Jack Smith has brought three new felony charges against former president Donald Trump in the investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House. Trump has been charged with one additional count of willful retention of national defense information and two additional obstruction counts, according to the court docket.

• Federal prosecutors also added a third defendant, Carlos de Oliveira, who they say joined Trump and aide Walt Nauta to seek the destruction of security footage.

• Lawyers for Trump met with members of Smith’s team investigating the former president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump said his attorneys had a “productive” meeting with the Department of Justice this morning, and that “no indication of notice” was given during the meeting.

• Joe Biden will not pardon his son Hunter on tax- and gun-related charges, the White House said. In court in Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday, Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to two tax charges, both misdemeanours. He had been expected to plead guilty as part of a deal with federal prosecutors that also included a pre-trial diversion program on the guns charge, a felony.

• Joe Biden announced new steps to help Americans face the “existential threat of climate change” and extreme heat. The new measures will shield workers from high temperatures, improve weather forecasting, strengthen access to drinking water and otherwise improve heat resilience, Biden said.

• The supreme court cleared what may be the last obstacle to construction of the Mountain Valley pipeline, a controversial natural gas conduit in West Virginia and Virginia.

• The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, suffered an initially unreported fall earlier this month, before a very public health scare this week revived questions about his age and fitness.

The Trump campaign has released a statement following the news that the former president faces additional charges in the case surrounding his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House.

The statement reads:

This is nothing more than a continued desperate and flailing attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their Department of Justice to harass President Trump and those around him.

Deranged Jack Smith knows that they have no case and is casting about for any way to salvage their illegal witch hunt and to get someone other than Donald Trump to run against Crooked Joe Biden.

Here’s a bit more detail on Carlos De Oliveira, the maintenance worker at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate who has been charged by federal prosecutors investigating the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.

De Oliveira has been charged with conspiracy to obstruct efforts to retrieve the documents, along with Trump and his aide Walt Nauta.

He first came to the attention of prosecutors as they investigated Trump’s response to repeated efforts by federal officials to retrieve presidential records and classified material that he had taken with him after leaving the White House, according to the New York Times.

Mr De Oliveira was caught on a surveillance camera moving boxes into a storage room at Mar-a-Lago at a crucial moment of the investigation: in the days between the issuance of a grand jury subpoena demanding all remaining classified material in Mr Trump’s possession and a visit by federal prosecutors to see Mr Trump’s lawyers and enforce the subpoena.

Phone records show that Mr De Oliveira also called an information technology worker at Mar-a-Lago last summer. The call caught the government’s attention because it was placed shortly after prosecutors issued a subpoena to Mr Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, demanding the footage from the surveillance camera near the storage room.

Donald Trump has been charged with three new counts in the case surrounding his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House, according to new court documents.

The former president is charged with one additional count of willful retention of National Defense Information.

The superseding indictment also charges Trump, his aides Carlos De Oliveira and Walt Nauta with two new obstruction counts stemming from allegations that they attempted to delete surveillance camera footage last summer at Mar-a-Lago. From Politico’s Kyle Cheney:

Special counsel Jack Smith has brought additional charges against Donald Trump in the case surrounding his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House, according to court documents.

The additional allegations of obstruction and willful retention of national defense information were added to the indictment by a team of prosecutors led by Smith. A new defendant, Carlos De Oliveira, was also added to the case.

Carlos De Oliveira, who has just been charged in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, is a longtime employee of Donald Trump.

According to CNN, surveillance footage turned over to justice department officials showed Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, and De Oliveira moving document boxes around the Florida resort, including into a storage room just before Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran searched it for classified documents.

De Oliveira spoke to investigators earlier this year and his phone had been seized, the news channel reported.

Prosecutors have pressed De Oliveira to explain his actions in June 2021, when he helped Nauta move boxes around Trump’s home, as well as in July, when he allegedly had conversations with others about security camera footage, according to the Washington Post.

A third defendant has been charged alongside Donald Trump and his aide, Walt Nauta, in the classified documents case in Florida, according to court documents in Florida.

Special counsel Jack Smith has charged Carlos De Oliveira, a maintenance worker who helped Nauta move boxes of classified documents around Mar-a-Lago after investigators first subpoenaed Trump for classified documents last May.

South Carolina senator and GOP presidential candidate Tim Scott has begun to see some momentum in early state polling as the campaign of his rival Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, appears to be floundering.

Several recent early presidential primary state polls show Scott gaining ground on DeSantis. A pair of recent Fox Business polls in South Carolina and Iowa found Scott in the double digits. The senator appears to be picking up some steam in the states that matter most at this point in the race: Iowa and New Hampshire, according to CNN.

Meanwhile, the senator has reportedly met with several Republican governors and key donors in Aspen, Colorado. The Hill reports Republican strategist Mike Dennehy as saying:

He’s just a very positive guy who has a positive message for the country. And after so many years now of a deteriorating political environment, I do think there’s a large segment of voters who want that kind of change.

It comes as the DeSantis campaign confirmed on Tuesday that more than a third of its staff were being cut, “a total of 38 jobs shed across an array of departments”, two senior advisers among them.

The grand jury conducting special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss has left the federal courthouse in Washington.

Just before 3pm EST, a deputy clerk at the courthouse told journalists that no indictments had been returned on Thursday and that none were expected by the end of the day.

According to a Politico report, anticipation was palpable at the courthouse throughout the day.

Throngs of journalists crowded hallways and looked for signs of movement in the vicinity of the courthouse’s sealed grand jury spaces. Trump’s announcement that his lawyers had met with Smith’s team earlier in the day further fueled speculation that an indictment was imminent.

The media encampment outside the D.C. courthouse continued to grow through the day Thursday, despite the sweltering heat.

Vice-President Kamala Harris expressed deep concern over the attempted army coup in Niger during a call with Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, the White House said in a statement.

The statement reads:

The vice president strongly condemned any efforts to seize power by force in Niger, and emphasized that our substantial cooperation with the government of Niger is contingent on Niger’s continued commitment to democratic standards.

Harris and Tinubu committed to “defending democracy” in west Africa and the Sahel, it said.

Niger’s president, Mohamed Bazoum, remained held in the presidential palace this afternoon and it was unclear who had taken charge of the country, after a group of soldiers declared a military coup on Wednesday evening.

Rightwingers have long cried foul over Hunter Biden’s treatment by federal authorities.

The pardon power is established in article 2 of the US constitution, which says the president “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment”.

The use of the pardon power has become increasingly controversial; presidents including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump having bestowed pardons and acts of clemency on donors and supporters.

Trump was widely reported to have considered whether he could pardon himself, on issues including alleged collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Trump also reportedly explored the idea of giving preemptive pardons to family members, another step he did not ultimately take.

Joe Biden will not pardon his son Hunter on tax- and gun-related charges, the White House said on Thursday.

At a briefing, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked: “From a presidential perspective, is there any possibility that the president would end up pardoning his son?”

“No,” Jean-Pierre replied. Pressed, she said:

I just said no. I answered.

In court in Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday, Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to two tax charges, both misdemeanours. He had been expected to plead guilty as part of a deal with federal prosecutors that also included a pre-trial diversion program on the guns charge, a felony.

Donald Trump confirmed earlier today that his lawyers met with officials at the office of special prosecutor Jack Smith in Washington DC.

Trump’s attorneys attended the meeting not to argue the facts of the case against indicting the former president, but instead with a broader appeal that indicting him would only cause more turmoil in the country’s political environment, CNN is reporting, citing two sources.

In other justice department news, the Guardian’s Erum Salam reports that it will investigate Memphis’s police department after the beating death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of officers earlier this year:

The US Department of Justice has announced an investigation into the city of Memphis and the Memphis police department over its policing practices to examine if they are discriminatory.

The civil pattern or practice investigation will determine if Memphis police violated federal laws or the US constitution. The announcement comes after the police department came under scrutiny for its use of force, stops, searches and arrests that often targeted people of color.

One of these instances involved Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died on 10 January, three days after an encounter with Memphis police during a traffic stop in which he was violently beaten.

Republican senator Ted Cruz gave a taste of how Donald Trump’s defenders could react if special counsel Jack Smith indicts the former president over his involvement in the January 6 insurrection:

Here are his comments to the conservative Newsmax network:

In the House, Republicans vowed that today would be the day they vote to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt, but then changed their mind. The Guardian’s Mary Yang reports on why:

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, is no stranger to Capitol Hill, where he has sparred with Republicans and Democrats over how he runs his platforms. A Republican-led panel was set to vote on Thursday on a resolution to hold him in contempt of Congress, for allegedly failing to turn over internal documents on content moderation.

However, House judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, temporarily suspended the vote.

Jordan announced on Twitter that the committee “decided to hold contempt in abeyance. For now” and posted a series of tweets of alleged internal communications among Meta executives hours ahead of the hearing.

A day after Hunter Biden’s agreement with prosecutors to resolve federal charges was upended by a judge, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Joe Biden would not consider pardoning his son, CNN reports:

Yesterday, federal judge Maryellen Noreika unexpectedly rejected a deal that would have seen Hunter Biden plead guilty to charges related to failure to pay taxes, and enter a diversion program to resolve lying in a background check to purchase a firearm. Prosecutors and Biden’s attorneys are now expected to negotiate a new agreement that will address concerns Noreika raised about the orgininal’s scope, and present it to the judge within 30 days.

Republicans have for years seized on Biden’s history of addiction and troubled business dealings to argue that both he and his father are corrupt, though they have struggled to find proof of their allegations.

The wait to find out whether Donald Trump will be charged over the January 6 insurrection continues, as Politico reports that the federal court in Washington DC says no indictments are expected to be filed today: