The government witness known in court documents as “Trump Employee 5” and now known publicly to be longtime former Mar-a-Lago valet Brian Butler shed more light on what went on behind closed doors when he sat for interviews with the Special Counsel’s Office and testified before the grand jury that went on to indict the former president.

Revealing that he met with special counsel Jack Smith’s office up to five times over a period of months, Butler told NBC News that the grand jury setting was a “dark” closet-like room filled with roughly 20 grand jurors. Prosecutors “were interested in everything” he had to say during interviews, Butler added.

That may not have been the case for at least one of the grand jurors, however. Butler said he “could see their eyes shut.”

Butler also appeared Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber,” where he revealed that he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but will not do so in 2024.

The erstwhile Mar-a-Lago employee of two decades, as he said in his first public interview with CNN, stated his belief that Trump wanted surveillance video deleted because he knew he wasn’t supposed to have national defense information and knew that the Presidential Records Act didn’t protect him.

“The way I see it, if these were his personal documents or he’s allowed to have these by the PRA, why would you need to ask questions about video footage?” Butler asked. “Why would you possibly move the documents when they are coming to retrieve them. To me, it just doesn’t make any sense. On top of that, why would you put two low-level employees in the position they’re in if he you did nothing wrong and these were your personal documents?”

Pressed as to whether he had witnessed “part of a cover-up,” Butler said: “I think it’s very possible.”

“From what I saw, the questions — why would they ask about video footage, how long it’s deleted for?” Butler asked. “Those are conversations Carlos [De Oliveira] told me he was asked with finding out prior to Walt [Nauta]’s arrival on a secret trip.”

Here, Butler was recounting the details as they appeared in the indictment.

Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira on June 25, 2022, allegedly told Trump Employee 5 that valet Walt Nauta was en route from Bedminster, N.J., to Mar-a-Lago but asked the witness not to tell anyone about the “secret” trip that related to surveillance camera footage.

“DE OLIVEIRA also told Trump Employee 5 that NAUTA wanted DE OLIVEIRA to talk to Trump Employee 4 to see how long camera footage was stored,” the indictment said. “Shortly after arriving in Palm Beach on the evening of June 25, NAUTA went to The Mar-a-Lago Club and met with DE OLIVEIRA at 5:46 p.m. At The Mar-a-Lago Club, NAUTA and DE OLIVEIRA went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors, walked with a flashlight through the tunnel where the Storage Room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.”

Two days later, De Oliveira told another employee — “Trump Employee 4” — that “the boss” wanted the video footage server deleted, the indictment further alleged.

On CNN, Butler recalled helping Nauta load boxes of documents onto a Trump plane headed for New Jersey, documents the witness said he later realized “were the boxes that were in the indictment, the white bankers boxes.” Before he left Trump’s employ and became a witness for the prosecution, Butler counted De Oliveira as one of his “best friends.” Now, he said, they don’t talk anymore.

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U.S. Supreme Court

Did ‘grand bargain’ fail to materialize in Trump ballot case? Metadata leads to speculation

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 5, 2024, 10:07 am CST

The U.S. Supreme Court left “a big clue dangling in the metadata” about potential negotiations when it issued a unanimous decision Monday that kept former President Donald Trump on the ballot in Colorado, according to an article in Slate.

Although all the justices agreed that Trump should remain on the ballot, four justices said the majority should not have gone further by ruling that Congress had the exclusive power to enforce the constitutional ban on insurrectionists holding office.

The four justices expressed their views in two separate concurrences. One was jointly written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—the high court’s liberal justices—and the other was written by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The liberal concurrence was angrier in tone than Barrett’s, who emphasized unanimous agreement on the ballot issue and stated that “this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency.”

But the metadata shows that Sotomayor was initially a partial dissenter, according to Slate, Above the Law and Law360.

One way to see the metadata, on some computers, is by copying and pasting the top of the liberal justices’ concurrence that says “Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson J.J., concurring in judgment” into a Microsoft Word document. The pasted version reads “Sotomayor, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part.” The same metadata shows when you search for the word “dissent.”

“What happened?” Slate asks. “Most obviously, the Supreme Court rushed out this opinion and forgot to check the metadata. … The deeper question remains, of course: Why was an opinion originally authored by a lone justice as a partial dissent transformed into a concurrence authored by all three liberals together?”

Paul Schiff Berman, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, thinks that Sotomayor’s opinion may have become a concurrence in an attempt to emphasize unanimity.

“I think they really wanted to try to make this a unanimous opinion in order to say this is not about ideology and it’s not about politics,” he told Law360.

Slate offers further speculation. One explanation is that Kagan and Jackson “were keeping their votes fluid” in the hopes of joining with Barrett to seek a fifth vote for a narrow holding that did not address whether Congress had exclusive authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. When Kagan and Jackson failed in that quest, they teamed up with Sotomayor.

“Broaden the scope of the potential negotiations, though, and things get more interesting,” Slate says. “After oral arguments, many smart court watchers mused that the justices might reach a grand bargain that tied this case to a separate dispute involving Trump’s claim of immunity from criminal prosecution for election subversion. The liberal justices might agree to keep Trump on the ballot if the court also refused to take up the immunity case.”

If the Supreme Court had refused to hear the immunity case, the federal appeals court decision holding that Trump did not have immunity from prosecution would remain in place. And that would mean that his criminal trial in the federal election-interference case might take place before the presidential election.

“That, of course, didn’t happen,” Slate says. “The court sided with Trump on the ballot issue and took up his immunity case last week on a less-than-speedy timeline, helping him run out the clock to November.”

Slate raises other possibilities, including that Barrett agreed to hear the immunity case “on a marginally expedited basis” this term, rather than push the case onto the docket for next term.

Or maybe evidence of a bargain will turn up when the Supreme Court issues its opinion in the Trump immunity case, according to Above the Law.

“Perhaps buried in the metadata,” Above the Law says.

See also:

“SCOTUS agrees to hear Trump’s presidential immunity claim”

“What happens next after Supreme Court agrees to hear Trump immunity case”

A man with a lengthy arrest history stabbed two teenage girls after he tried to sit in the area of a cafe in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, according to cops in New York City.

Steven Hutcherson, 36, is charged with attempted murder in the second degree as a hate crime, assault in the first and second degree as a hate crime, attempted assault in the first degree as a hate crime, and endangering the welfare of a child, according to New York ABC affiliate WABC.

“I want all the white people dead,” Hutcherson yelled, police sources told The New York Post. “I want to sit next to the crackers.”