MIAMI — There are thousands of criminal defense lawyers in South Florida.
But a day before a third scheduled hearing in Miami federal court, an aide to Donald Trump appears still to be without one to represent him on charges of conspiring with the former president to obstruct the U.S. government’s efforts to retrieve classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, according to court records.
Walt Nauta, a Navy veteran who served as a Trump aide in the White House and now works for him as his personal valet, is scheduled yet again for a formal initial arraignment during a court hearing Thursday.
But Nauta, 40, can’t enter his plea, as Trump did on June 13, without a permanent lawyer with credentials to practice in federal court in South Florida. He didn’t have one for the first hearing and missed the second because of bad weather. And, according to court filings, as of Wednesday he had either not picked one or found an attorney willing to represent him in the high-profile and politically divisive criminal case.
His Washington, D.C., defense attorney, Stanley Woodward, told a magistrate judge last week that he would try to resolve the matter by this week, but so far no local attorney’s name has appeared on the case docket. Woodward, who has represented Nauta during the Trump documents probe led by the Justice Department’s special counsel, did not return messages inquiring about his client’s choice for a local lawyer.
Veteran South Florida defense attorneys said there could be any number of reasons for Nauta’s delay in selecting a local lawyer, including the unprecedented case of a former president being charged with a federal crime.
“The fact that he’s in this case gives him a lot of leeway in granting him time to pick a local attorney,” said Kenneth Swartz, a Miami lawyer who represented a defendant in the national security case involving former “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla. “It has not been a long time — not in a case like this. It’s not just high profile — it’s about getting an attorney that he trusts and is free of any conflicts of interest.”
Miami attorney Henry Bell, who has been an advocate for court-appointed lawyers representing indigent defendants over the past decade, said that he thought it would be less challenging for Nauta than Trump to find a permanent South Florida lawyer.
“Nauta is different from Trump — for one thing, he’s not running for president,” Bell said, noting the persistent issue of controlling what a client says about his criminal case in public, on social media and on cable TV news channels.
“I’m a little surprised he hasn’t been able to find anybody to represent him,” Bell said. “He doesn’t carry any of the dynamics that former President Trump does.”
Trump, who is running again for the GOP nomination for president in 2024, routinely turns to the campaign stump, his social media platform, Truth Social, and Fox News to speak his mind about what he has described as the U.S. government’s “witch hunt” against him.
For his defense in the classified documents case, Trump has hired New York lawyer Todd Blanche, a who represented former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and Miami-based Florida attorney, Chris Kise, who served as the solicitor general during the Republican administration of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Other local lawyers who were approached to represent Trump are David O. Markus, Jon Sale, Ben Kuehne and Bill Barzee, according to sources familiar with the process.
According to The New York Times, Trump has begun diverting more money from his 2024 presidential campaign into a political action committee to pay his personal legal fees.
Last week, Nauta’s Washington, D.C., attorney, Woodward, told Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres that his client could not attend his arraignment June 27 because of bad travel weather in the Northeast, but that Nauta expects to hire a local lawyer for his arraignment Thursday and to appear in court.
Torres found a “good cause” for Nauta’s absence last week. He also told Woodward that if Nauta cannot afford to hire a lawyer and needs a court-appointed attorney, “I can discuss that with him.”
The magistrate judge then reset his arraignment for Thursday in Miami federal court — eight days before a federal judge assigned the national security case plans to discuss the protocol for handling the sensitive evidence of classified documents that form the basis of the 38-count indictment against Trump and Nauta.
Nauta has been charged with conspiring with the former president to obstruct justice by hiding classified documents, withholding government records and lying to federal authorities.
Nauta appeared with Trump at the former president’s arraignment in Miami federal court June 13 but was unable to enter a plea because he had not yet hired a local attorney.
While that first appearance generated a media and political circus outside the downtown courthouse, the June 27 arraignment for Nauta was more subdued, drawing a few dozen reporters and photographers instead of the hundreds who attended Trump’s arraignment.
Nauta, a valet for Trump, faces trial with the former president in the Fort Pierce division of the Southern District of Florida. But a tentative trial date of Aug. 14 is likely to be postponed until at least December or even next year because of the complexity of the case, which involves volumes of classified and unclassified documents, according to court filings by Justice Department prosecutors. Special counsel Jack Smith has asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to set the trial for Dec. 11, but Trump’s lawyers are expected to push for a later date.
Trump, 77, is charged with willfully retaining national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act, conspiring to obstruct justice and making a false statement to authorities after they had issued a subpoena for the sensitive materials that he moved from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence and club.
According to the indictment, Trump directed Nauta to move dozens of boxes containing classified documents from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago to other areas of the property and then to return some of them to the storage room. He was allegedly told to conceal them from Trump’s attorney and the FBI after the Justice Department obtained a grand jury subpoena for them in May 2022.
Nauta was seen on surveillance video removing the boxes from the storage room before the FBI carried out a search of the former president’s Palm Beach estate last August, according to the special counsel and his team. Federal agents found more than 100 classified materials during the raid, including top secret defense, weapons and nuclear information.
Prosecutors also allege that, in a May 2022 interview with the FBI, Nauta lied that he did not know how the boxes had arrived at the Palm Beach estate, where they were being stored or whether Trump had kept any of them.
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