Donald Trump indicted: Aide Walt Nauta stands by his boss (literally) during busy weekend
Jerry Dunleavy
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Walt Nauta, the “body man” for Donald Trump who has been indicted alongside the former president in Jack Smith’s special counsel case, stood by his boss, figuratively and literally, over the weekend on the campaign trail.
Nauta joined Trump on his post-indictment swing in Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday.
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Smith unsealed an unprecedented indictment Friday, alleging Trump unlawfully kept classified documents, including on nuclear secrets and military vulnerabilities, and stored the sensitive material in boxes in his bathroom, shower, and elsewhere in his Florida home. Both Trump and Nauta were ordered to appear at a Miami federal courthouse Tuesday afternoon.
Nauta has stayed loyal to Trump, following him to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
On Saturday, he was pictured getting out of the SUV and onto the plane with Trump at Newark Liberty International Airport on the way to the Georgia rally.
Subsequently, during a stop at a Waffle House in Georgia, Nauta was captured on video accompanying Trump and helping him sign things for fans. As Nauta stood nearby, Trump said of the charges, “The whole thing is a witch hunt, it’s a disgrace, it should never happen, it’s hurting our country.”
Trump contended that “the ridiculous and baseless indictment of me by the Biden administration’s weaponized ‘Department of Injustice’ will go down as one of the most horrific abuses of power in history” during his Georgia GOP speech.
Nauta was also photographed with Trump when he arrived in North Carolina.
Smith’s indictment said, “Trump and Nauta hid, concealed, and covered up from the FBI Trump’s continued possession of documents with classification markings at the Mar-a-Lago Club.” The indictment also said Trump and Nauta conspired with each other from May to August of 2022, and that “the purpose of the conspiracy was for Trump to keep classified documents he had taken with him from the White House and to hide and conceal them from a federal grand jury.”
Nauta, whose full name is Waltine Torre Nauta, is from Guam and joined the Navy in 2001. Despite urging from the Justice Department, he declined to cooperate with Smith on the investigation into Trump.
He was charged with six criminal counts — conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding of a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and a false statements charge.
Following the announcement of Nauta’s indictment, Trump launched a full-throated defense of his valet, writing on Truth Social: “I have just learned that the ‘Thugs’ from the Department of Injustice will be Indicting a wonderful man, Walt Nauta, a member of the U.S. Navy, who served proudly with me in the White House, retired as Senior Chief, and then transitioned into private life as a personal aide. He has done a fantastic job! They are trying to destroy his life, like the lives of so many others, hoping that he will say bad things about ‘Trump.’ He is strong, brave, and a Great Patriot.”
Nauta worked in the Trump White House as a “Senior Chief Culinary Specialist.” His records show his duty station was the Presidential Food Service — part of the White House Military Office — from November 2012 to May 2021. He retired from the Navy in September 2021.
Reports have claimed that among Nauta’s many White House duties was bringing Trump a Diet Coke after he pushed a red button on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
The Trump body man was reportedly added to the payroll of Trump’s Save America political action committee in August 2021, receiving $176,000 over the next year and a half, and he worked as an executive assistant in the Office of Donald J. Trump. Nauta was then added to the Trump campaign payroll after it launched in November 2022.
Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward, has reportedly filed a letter under seal with Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging prosecutorial misconduct.
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Woodward reportedly alleged that, during a November visit to the Justice Department, DOJ’s chief of the counterintelligence section, Jay Bratt, said that the DOJ wanted Nauta to cooperate against Trump, and then told Woodward that “I didn’t take you for a Trump guy” and that “he would do the right thing” before bringing up Woodward’s application to serve as a judge at the superior court in the nation’s capital.
Nauta’s lawyer apparently took this to be inappropriate pressure from Bratt and DOJ prosecutors. Nauta’s lawyer declined to comment to the Washington Examiner.