A valet of former president Donald Trump is due to appear in a Florida court on Thursday accused of hiding classified documents after an earlier appearance was scheduled because of a cancelled flight.
Walt Nauta was charged alongside Mr Trump in June over the mishandling of classified documents and is due to be arraigned before a federal magistrate in Miami.
Mr Trump pleaded not guilty on June 13 to charges including willful retention of national defence information when Mr Nauta’s hearing was postponed because he did not have a defence attorney authorised to practise in Florida.
It was pushed back again last week when a flight from New Jersey he was to have taken was cancelled after being delayed on the tarmac for hours.
The indictment filed by special counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors accuses him of conspiring with the former president to conceal records taken from the White House after this term ended in January 2021.
Prosecutors allege Mr Nauta, at the former president’s direction, moved boxes of documents bearing classification markings so they would not be found by a Trump lawyer searching the home for classified records to be returned to the government.
Mr Nauta is a Navy veteran who fetched Mr Trump’s Diet Cokes as his valet at the White House before joining him as a personal aide at Mar-a-Lago.
He is regularly by Mr Trump’s side, even traveling alongside him in a motorcade to the Miami courthouse and accompanying him afterwards at the city’s famed Cuban restaurant Versailles, where he helped usher supporters eager to take selfies with the former president.
