Former US President Donald Trump has faced fresh charges, which alleged that asked an employee to delete camera footage at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida in a bid to obstruct the federal investigation into his possession of classified documents, AFP reported.
US prosecutors published the new indictment against Trump on Thursday. The prosecutors also harged a maintenance worker at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, Carlos De Oliveira, with conspiracy to obstruct justice by accusing him of helping the former president to hide documents.
De Oliveira has also been accused of lying to the FBI during an interview, falsely claiming he had no involvement in moving boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Reuters reported.
Trump, who has thrown his hat into the ring for the 2024 presidential elections, will go on trial in the case in May next year.
Trump, however, has dismissed the fresh charges in the documents case, calling it nothing but a desperate attempt by "the Biden Crime Family and Department of Justice to harass" him and the people around him.
"Deranged Jack Smith (procesutor) knows that they have no case and is casting about for any way to salvage their illegal witch hunt," he told BBC in a statement.
The documents case is being led by special prosecutor Jack Smith, who on Thursday met Trump's lawyers over a separate investigation into an alleged effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The prosecutors claimed that de Oliveira told another employee, who was the director of information technology, that "the boss" wanted the server deleted. The property manager told the employee that their conversation has to remain private and then proceeded to pressure him into obliging his request even after the employee told de Oliveria that he did not have the authority, BBC reported.
Aside from this, the indictment also alleged that Trump knowingly discussed a top-secret document with biographers who visited Mar-a-Lago – also called the Winter White House during his regime – to interview him.
Trump is the first former US president to face criminal charges and has already been indicted twice this year -- once over hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and once already over the classified documents case.