The superseding indictment then describes in detail what happened next. Another Trump employee told Nauta, who’d worked as Trump’s valet, body man, and longtime aide over the years, that Trump wanted to see him in person in Bedminster, New Jersey. Shortly after that meeting, Nauta canceled a planned trip to Illinois and flew to Florida instead. He then reached out to De Oliviera and to the unnamed head of Mar-a-Lago’s I.T. department—the indictment refers to him as “Trump Employee 4”—to see if they were working that weekend.
When Nauta arrived in Palm Beach on June 25, he went straight to Mar-a-Lago and met with De Oliviera. The two men then toured the resort’s surveillance room and server space. In the morning of June 27, De Oliviera pulled aside Employee 4 to speak to him privately. He brought the employee to a small “audio closet” in the Mar-a-Lago basement, where De Oliviera told him that the conversation “should remain between the two of them,” according to prosecutors’ paraphrasing. What happened next sounded like something that a henchman from The Sopranos would say.
“De Oliviera told Trump Employee 4 that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” prosecutors said in the indictment. “Trump Employee 4 responded that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that. Trump Employee 4 told De Oliviera that De Oliviera would have to reach out to another employee who was a supervisor of security for Trump’s business organization. De Oliviera then insisted to Trump Employee 4 that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted and asked, ‘what are we going to do?’”