A sloppy cover-up: New Mar-a-Lago documents charges show Donald Trump is a poor mob boss

Going all the way back to Richard Nixon's inexplicable decision to record himself committing crimes and then getting his secretary, Rosemary Woods, to take the fall for erasing the most incriminating segment, American political scandals have been defined by a simple credo: It's not the crime that gets you, it's the cover-up.

In the Iran Contra affair, for instance, Lt. Colonel Oliver North enlisted his secretary, Fawn Hall, to help him shred damaging documents and President Bill Clinton notoriously dispatched his secretary, Betty Currie, to retrieve gifts that he had given to former White House aide Monica Lewinsky during Independent Counsel Ken Starr's investigation. Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards persuaded a campaign worker to take responsibility for fathering the child Edwards had with his mistress while his wife was dying of cancer. In every case, these attempts to cover up their misdeeds by dispatching an underling to do their dirty work were eventually discovered. But these privileged, powerful leaders just can't seem to help themselves.

The latest in this long line of such cover-ups is, naturally, Donald Trump. The indictment in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case was for 37 felonies including violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice. The Espionage Act charges apply to his willful withholding of national defense information while the obstruction charges apply to his attempts to cover up what he'd done when the federal government asked for them back.

His loyal manservant Walt Nauta was charged, along with Trump, with five counts of concealing or withholding documents and taking part in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. The government alleges that Nauta moved boxes containing classified documents on Trump's orders and then lied to federal investigators about it.

On Thursday, another sad Trump employee. Mar-a-Lago maintenance man Carlos de Oliveira found himself named in a superseding indictment. The charges include "Corruptly Altering, Destroying, Mutilating or Concealing a Document, Record, or Other Object," and "Altering, Destroying, Mutilating, or Concealing an Object." The indictment alleges that the day after investigators had requested "[a]ny and all surveillance records, videos, images, photographs and/or CCTV from internal cameras" at Trump's beach club, Nauta told de Oliveira to meet with a Mar-a-Lago IT employee to tell him that the employee that "the boss" wanted the server containing security footage of the storage room where the documents had been held to be "deleted." De Olivera did as he was told and the employee replied that he didn't know how to do that and wasn't sure he had the "rights" anyway. He told de Oliveira to discuss it with his supervisor.  

The indictment has records showing that the maintenance man talked to Trump personally numerous times on the phone during this period and CNN reported earlier that de Oliveira was seen in surveillance footage helping Nauta move boxes out of the storage room.

De Oliveira is also charged with lying to the FBI when he told them he'd never seen anything to do with the boxes and although it's not mentioned in this indictment the prosecutors had some very serious suspicions that de Oliveira had been involved in yet another attempted cover-up:

Trump actually did that gambit decades ago during a tax audit, claiming that important records were destroyed in a flood. This time the computer servers were intact and the federal government got them, offering proof that the records were moved in and out at certain times correlating to the subpoena.

The feds also have all kinds of text and phone records, even a Signal chat, that shows that Trump and his accomplices checking to make sure de Olveira was loyal, as CNN reports:

The new superseding indictment alleges that a little more than two weeks after the FBI's August search of Mar-a-Lago, Nauta called another unidentified employee and said something to the effect of, "someone just wants make sure Carlos is good." The employee, prosecutors alleged, assured Nauta of De Oliviera's loyalty.

On the same day, the employee confirmed in a Signal chat group with Nauta and a representative of Trump's political action committee — whom CNN has previously identified as Susie Wiles — that the maintenance worker was loyal. 

That same day, "Trump called De Oliveira and told De Oliveira that Trump would get De Oliveira an attorney," the new indictment says.  

Susie Wiles is a very important figure in Trumpworld and it seems odd that she would be involved in loyalty tests for Mar-a-Lago maintenance men. But then all of this is very mob-like behavior and she is a top consigliere so I guess it makes sense in that context.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

It should be noted that Trump's additional count pertains to that infamous Iran military document that Trump is on tape showing around to a couple of writers at his Bedminster Golf Club. I know this will come as a shock but it appears that Trump was lying when he said this:

The feds have the document.

After all this, as if to prove once again that he is completely clueless and without the slightest understanding of the depth of trouble he is in, Trump had the gall to request that he be allowed to discuss the classified documents they seized at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster instead of an official sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) as anyone else would have to do. He literally wants to keep blabbing about these sensitive documents in the unsecured scene of the crime. Maybe they could arrange to do it in that shower stall where he originally kept them. 

The funny thing is that this superseding indictment wasn't even the big Trump indictment story on Thursday. All day long, the media attention was focused on the Washington, D.C. courthouse where the January 6 case's grand jury met for over 7 hours as Trump's lawyers were talking to the prosecutors.

According to CNN's Kaitlin Collins:

Former President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social saying his lawyers met on Thursday to appeal to special counsel Jack Smith that "an indictment would only further destroy the country."  Trump's attorneys went into their meeting with the special counsel Thursday not to argue the facts of the case against indicting Trump, but instead with a broader appeal that indicting him would only cause more turmoil in the country's political environment, two sources familiar with the meeting said. 

Basically, that's Trump, as is his wont, once again issuing a veiled threat that charging him would be "dangerous" — saying in so many words, "nice little country you have here, be a shame if anything happened to it." It no doubt fell on deaf ears. The consensus among the legal observers is that the indictment in the January 6 case is imminent and might even be coming down today.

So far, none of the indictments have provoked anything more than some kooks and goofballs milling around courthouses but an indictment in the January 6 case might be different. Or it might not. In any case, Donald Trump knows that the White House is his ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card and he will do anything to ensure that he wins it. And that's why he's in this mess in the first place.