MIAMI (AP) — A court docket look was postponed Tuesday for a Donald Trump valet who’s charged with serving to the previous president cover labeled paperwork that the Justice Division wished again.
A lawyer for the valet, Walt Nauta, informed a decide that Nauta had been unable to discover a Florida-based legal professional and that he was caught in Newark, New Jersey, and unable to fly down for the arraignment due to a flight that sat for hours on the tarmac earlier than being canceled.
The lawyer, Stanley Woodward, mentioned Nauta expressed his apologies to the court docket for not being current.
“Mr. Nauta takes very critically the fees that he's dealing with,” he mentioned.
Because of this, a decide pushed Tuesday’s scheduled arraignment again till July 6.
Nauta was charged earlier this month alongside Trump in a 38-count indictment filed by Justice Division particular counsel Jack Smith. Trump, a Republican, pleaded not responsible earlier this month to 37 counts associated to the alleged mishandling of labeled paperwork saved at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Seaside, Florida. Nauta’s arraignment was postponed to offer him time to discover a Florida-based lawyer.
The indictment accuses Nauta of conspiring with Trump to hide data that he had taken with him from the White Home after this time period led to January 2021.
Prosecutors allege that Nauta, on the former president’s route, moved packing containers of paperwork bearing classification markings in order that they might not be discovered by a Trump lawyer who was tasked with looking the house for labeled data to be returned to the federal government. That, prosecutors mentioned, resulted in a false illustration to the Justice Division that a “diligent search” for labeled paperwork had been performed and that each one paperwork aware of a subpoena had been returned.
Nauta is a Navy veteran who fetched Trump’s Weight loss plan Cokes as his valet on the White Home earlier than becoming a member of him as a private aide at Mar-a-Lago. He's commonly by Trump’s facet, even touring in Trump’s motorcade to the Miami courthouse for his or her look earlier this month and accompanying him afterwards to a cease on the metropolis’s famed Cuban restaurant Versailles, the place he helped usher supporters wanting to take selfies with the previous president.
In the meantime, on Monday, U.S. District Choose Aileen Cannon denied a Justice Division request to file underneath seal the names of 84 potential witnesses it needs Trump to be ordered to haven't any contact with because the case strikes ahead. She mentioned that, in her view, the Justice Division didn't clarify why it wanted to file the record with the court docket or why it was essential to seal the record from public view.
She additionally scheduled a pretrial convention for July 14 to debate issues associated to the Categorised Data Safety Act.
And final week, the Justice Division proposed a Dec. 11 trial date for Trump, requesting a postponement from a decide’s preliminary date in August.
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