Co-defendant in Trump case alleges DOJ retaliation over classified documents

Walt Nauta, a co-defendant in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case, is asking a judge to dismiss his charges over claims the Department of Justice unfairly targeted him, according to recently unsealed court filings.

Nauta’s defense attorneys said their client’s decision to exercise his Fifth Amendment rights at one point during the initial stages of the investigation had prompted the DOJ to punish Nauta by prosecuting him, when others had engaged in the “same type of conduct” that Nauta did, the attorneys wrote.

Nauta made the dismissal request in February, but it had been sealed until Friday evening. The Florida court docket shows Trump filed a similar argument that his charges should be dismissed on the grounds that they were “selective and vindictive,” but the actual filing remains sealed.

Judge Aileen Cannon has over the past week unsealed several previously nonpublic filings, and she has indicated that three of Trump’s dismissal arguments, including the selective and vindictive one, will be unsealed by May 2.

Cannon has not yet ruled on whether she will dismiss any of Nauta’s or Trump’s charges based on the selective and vindictive argument. Trump was charged with illegally retaining national defense information, while both Trump and Nauta were charged with obstructing a federal investigation.

Nauta, for his part, detailed in his argument that he had been extensively cooperative with federal investigators but that the DOJ turned on Nauta because of one casual meeting that occurred in May 2022 between Nauta’s attorney and David Raskin, who worked on behalf of special counsel Jack Smith.

Raskin invited Nauta’s attorney Stanley Woodward to “grab a coffee or something” in a manner that made the meeting seem informal, according to an unsealed email.

At the meeting, however, Raskin demanded Nauta’s “full cooperation” in the classified documents investigation.

“In particular, Mr. Raskin declined any such proposition to proffer by Mr. Woodward,” Nauta’s attorneys wrote, noting that while they discussed one charge that could be brought against Nauta at the meeting, more charges surprisingly surfaced in a target letter Nauta later received.

Defense attorneys said this “animus” caused special counsel Jack Smith to bring charges against Nauta even though others had engaged in the “same type of conduct” as Nauta regarding moving Trump’s boxes.

“The current discovery in the present case also reveals that several individuals were involved in the same type of conduct — moving the boxes — in the same or similar time, manner, and place as Mr. Nauta, but they themselves were not criminally investigated themselves for that conduct,” the defense attorneys wrote.

In a newly unsealed response, prosecutors countered that Nauta’s “claim of selective prosecution is grounded in comparison to two individuals who, like Nauta, were employed by codefendant Donald J. Trump but whose conduct was not remotely similar to his own.”

Other recently unsealed filings revealed that the indictment was a product of a collaboration between the Biden White House, the DOJ, and the National Archives and Records Administration.

The filings show that months before February 2022, when NARA referred its classified documents concerns to the DOJ, NARA was communicating with DOJ and White House officials about the matter.

Former Archivist David Ferriero, who was in charge of NARA at the time, wrote a draft letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland in September 2021 seeking “assistance” with what he described as “suspected removal or destruction of Presidential records.”

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The unsealed documents also revealed that NARA’s counsel had a meeting that same month about the matter with then-White House chief of staff Ron Klain and Biden counsel Dana Remus.

Trump has argued that NARA and the Biden administration colluded to prosecute him unfairly for political purposes.