Donald Trump’s valet and co-defendant in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case pleaded not guilty at his rescheduled arraignment on Thursday after retaining a defense lawyer admitted in the southern district of Florida the night before, according to a person close to the matter.
The valet, Walt Nauta – indicted on charges including conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements to the FBI – appeared in federal district court in Miami with his Florida lawyer, Sasha Dadan, and his longtime Washington defense lawyer, Stanley Woodward.
Nauta was previously unable to enter his not guilty plea, a necessary step to start pre-trial proceedings, when Trump was arraigned last month and at a rescheduled hearing last week because he had been unable to find a Florida-based lawyer to represent him.
The completion of Nauta’s arraignment means the justice department can start the complex statutory process known as Cipa, which governs the discovery of classified materials to the defense. Trump and Nauta’s lawyers are next due at a hearing before US judge Aileen Cannon on 14 July.
For weeks, Nauta had struggled to find a suitable Florida-based lawyer after he was forced to abandon his top choice over a dispute about legal fees and because of the need for any potential candidate to satisfy certain unique conditions, a person familiar with the situation said.
The conditions: an ability to gel with Nauta and his team, who had specifically not wanted a former prosecutor because of differences in style and strategy, such as not pressuring Nauta to take a plea deal.
Nauta was comfortable with Dadan, a former assistant public defender in the 19th judicial circuit in Florida who has limited federal trial experience but has argued cases before Cannon, and formally retained her the day before his rescheduled arraignment, the person said.
Nauta was charged by federal prosecutors earlier this month after he helped Trump remove boxes out of a storage room at the Mar-a-Lago club before Trump’s lawyer could search them for classified documents demanded by a grand jury subpoena, according to the indictment.
The steps Trump took to have those boxes removed from the storage room, an episode now at the heart of the obstruction charge, caused Corcoran to certify a false certification to the justice department confirming that no further documents were at the property, the indictment said.
Separately, according to the indictment, Nauta lied to the FBI when he allegedly said he was unaware about how boxes of classified documents were taken to Trump’s residence before Trump agreed to return 15 boxes to the National Archives in January 2022.
“When asked whether he knew where Trump’s boxes had been stored, before they were in Trump’s residence and whether they had been in a secure or locked location, Nauta falsely responded, ‘I wish, I wish I could tell you. I don’t know. I don’t – I honestly just don’t know,’” the indictment said.
The indictment alleged Nauta lied to the FBI because he and another Trump employee at Mar-a-Lago moved the boxes.
“Nauta did in fact know that the boxes in Pine Hall had come from the storage room, as Nauta himself, with the assistance of Trump Employee 2, had moved the boxes from the storage room to Pine Hall; and Nauta had observed the boxes in and moved them to various locations,” it said.
