How do we know Walt Nauta didn’t secretly flip on Donald Trump already?
When Donald Trump was arraigned in federal court this week, the magistrate judge ordered Trump not to directly communicate about the case with any witnesses, including his co-defendant Walt Nauta. If Trump violates this, he could face penalties up to and including pretrial detention.
Various observers have pointed out that it’s not exactly practical to enforce this. Nauta is still, bizarrely, Trump’s valet. They’re around each other all the time. There would be numerous opportunities for them to discuss the case while no one is around. It would be almost too easy for the two of them to plot some obstruction strategy together, without anyone knowing it. But that’s the thing: too easy.
This revelation took me back to the same question I’ve asked everyone to keep in mind whenever something happens in this case that seems kind of dumb: is Jack Smith an idiot? Because unless Smith is an idiot, he’s probably not going around doing a series of dumb things.
Does Jack Smith strike you as the kind of person who would be too oblivious to realize that if he indicted Trump and Nauta together, they’d try to discuss the case while awaiting trial? If this is such an obvious thing that you and I can see this coming from the cheap seats, then Smith certainly saw it coming when he made the decision to indict them together. And he’s certainly planned for it in some way.
We have no idea what that plan looks like, of course. But one way or another, Smith knew that Trump and Nauta were going to be sitting around Mar-a-Lago discussing the case with each other after the arraignment. So what did he put in place to circumvent that?
The most poetic scenario would be that Smith already cut a cooperation deal with Nauta – and that Nauta’s entire arrest and arraignment were a ruse so that Trump would end up discussing the case with Nauta, who could then sell him out. Such a scenario might be too cute. But there are other scenarios that aren’t quite so on the nose. How many times has it been reported that Smith cultivated multiple unidentified cooperators within Mar-a-Lago? Perhaps those cooperators have now been tasked with catching Trump and Nauta discussing the case.
These aren’t novel, hypothetical ideas. This isn’t some 3D chess. These are simply the kinds of tactics that prosecutors – particularly on the federal level, in these kinds of organized crime style cases – often use to catch targets in the act. We see it time and again. It’s why so many federal criminal targets end up with additional charges such as witness tampering tacked on by the time they get to trial. Such charges have a higher conviction rate, and help ensure that the target goes to prison even if the jury doesn’t like the original charges.
For instance, after Paul Manafort was indicted, prosecutors fairly quickly managed to catch him trying to tamper with a witness, and used it against him as part of the criminal proceedings. This is how the Feds like to operate. It’s how things work.
In that sense, it’s ludicrous to suggest that Jack Smith – one of the smartest and savviest and most successful prosecutors the DOJ has ever put in charge of a case – is too naive to realize that Trump might talk to the witnesses, and too helpless to do anything about it.
If anything it’s Donald Trump who’s too naive and helpless to have any idea what he’s up against. This guy was sitting there with boxes of classified documents in his bathroom. That’s how little of a plan or a clue he had about what he was even trying to do. He doesn’t suddenly have a magical plan now. Trump is precisely the kind of overconfident idiot who would think he can get away with tampering with witnesses. And Jack Smith is precisely the kind of prosecutor who would let Trump walk into that trap.
Jack Smith isn’t going to telegraph to us what he has in place to keep tabs on Donald Trump, because then Trump would know. But just look at what all was in Smith’s indictment text. He was that savvy, that thorough, that far ahead of the game. There’s no world in which Smith is now just naively and helplessly letting Trump tamper with witnesses.
