Prosecutors Charge Mar-a-Lago Worker in Trump Documents Case

Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald J. Trump on charges of illegally handling classified documents unsealed charges on Thursday against a new defendant — a maintenance worker at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, according to court records.

The worker, Carlos De Oliveira, who is the head of maintenance at the property and also once parked cars there, was charged with conspiracy to obstruct efforts to retrieve the documents. He was joined to a pre-existing indictment filed in Florida last month accusing Mr. Trump and the aide, Walt Nauta, of a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to retrieve the material.

Mr. De Oliveira’s lawyer, John Irving, declined to comment.

The charges came as Mr. Trump’s lawyers met in the Washington office of Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the inquiries into the former president, to discuss a target letter suggesting that the former president might soon face a second indictment related to a separate case: his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Mr. De Oliveira first came to the attention of prosecutors as they investigated the response by Mr. Trump to repeated efforts by federal officials to retrieve reams of presidential records and classified material, including national defense material, that Mr. Trump had taken with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago.

Mr. De Oliveira was caught on a surveillance camera moving boxes into a storage room at Mar-a-Lago at a crucial moment of the investigation: in the days between the issuance of a grand jury subpoena demanding all remaining classified material in Mr. Trump’s possession and a visit by federal prosecutors to see Mr. Trump’s lawyers and enforce the subpoena.

Phone records show that Mr. De Oliveira also called an information technology worker at Mar-a-Lago last summer. The call caught the government’s attention because it was placed shortly after prosecutors issued a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, demanding the footage from the surveillance camera near the storage room.

The footage was sought in order to have a clearer sense of movements in and out of the storage area. But there were gaps in some of the footage, a person familiar with the matter said, and prosecutors had scrutinized whether someone deliberately paused recording or whether there were technological issues at play.