The new charges against Donald Trump carry overtones of Richard Nixon and the Mafia, NBC justice correspondent Ken Dilanian said Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” (Watch the video below.)
Dilanian called the additions to special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of the former president in the classified documents case “mind-boggling.”
Two new charges allege the former president ordered the deletion of a computer server holding incriminating security camera footage from Mar-a-Lago, where the secret files were kept. Meanwhile, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property manager was charged with attempting to keep the video from being viewed by a grand jury.
“These allegations rival anything that Richard Nixon was accused of,” Dilanian said, referring to the Watergate break-in and coverup scandal that forced Nixon’s resignation. “These are two additional counts of obstruction of justice. And this indictment reads like a Mafia case.”
Noting that prosecutors’ burden of proof would be difficult without direct witnesses, Dilanian added: “This is a scheme to destroy evidence. Three days after a grand jury subpoena lands on Mr. Trump, it’s mind-boggling. And as Chuck said, it involves very low-level employees whose lives are about to be ruined unless they cut a deal with prosecutors.”
The new counts arrived as the third defendant, Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira, was charged. The superseding indictment alleges that Trump and valet Walt Nauta, both of whom have pleaded not guilty, and De Oliveira attempted to “delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.”
On Thursday, former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks also likened the growing case against Trump to the predicament of Nixon before he resigned.
It “reminds me of what happened in Watergate,” she said. “The obstruction, the concealment, a cover-up — it’s all happening.”