On March 12, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro claimed that former President Donald Trump was not charged with obstruction in his classified documents case. Unfortunately for Pirro, special counsel Jack Smith’s sprawling indictment proves otherwise.
During a discussion on The Five about Tuesday’s congressional hearing in which former special counsel Robert Hur defended his decision not to charge Joe Biden in his investigation into the president’s handling of classified documents, the Fox host complained that “the Democrats spent the whole day saying, ‘Donald Trump obstructed.’ Well, news flash, Donald Trump is not charged with obstructing.”
Pirro is incorrect; Trump, his aide Walt Nauta, and Mar-a-Lago worker Carlos De Oliveira have been charged with one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice in the former president’s classified documents case.
From CNN’s report on the July 2023 superseding indictment:
The indictment accuses Trump of being part of the effort to delete security footage from Mar-a-Lago after it was subpoenaed, saying that Trump “requested” that a resort employee delete footage in order “to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.”
The newest defendant in the case places the former president in the middle of the attempts to delete the security footage. According to the indictment, De Oliveira told another Trump employee, who was director of IT at Mar-a-Lago, “that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” according to the indictment.
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Trump and Nauta had already been charged with obstruction over the moving of boxes, but now the latest charges add a new dimension to the obstruction case that goes beyond hiding the documents themselves.
