President Donald Trump’s co-defendant in a now-dropped criminal case over his alleged refusal to return classified documents after leaving office has been given a new role overseeing the U.S. Naval Academy.
On Friday, Trump announced on his social media platform that Walt Nauta, who was Trump’s aide for several years, will serve on the U.S. Navy’s board of visitors, which is officially tasked with overseeing “the state of morale and discipline, curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, academic methods, and other matters relating to the Naval Academy.”
You may remember Nauta as the man who was allegedly caught on surveillance footage moving boxes out of a Mar-a-Lago storage room before and after the National Archives and Records Administration asked Trump to return boxes that contained classified documents. Nauta pleaded not guilty to federal charges that he conspired to conceal classified documents, and the Trump Justice Department dropped the case against him in January.
Trump’s announcement last week said Nauta will serve alongside former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer; former White House physician and scandal-plagued Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson; and Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who attended Trump’s pre-insurrection rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and was seen close to the outbreak of violence that occurred as rioters stormed the Capitol to stop certification of Trump’s election 2020 election loss. (Van Orden has claimed he stood “on the perimeter” of the Capitol grounds and left “when it became clear that a protest had become a mob.”)
The U.S. Naval Academy’s mission statement says that its goal is to help students develop “morally, mentally and physically” and learn the ideals of “duty, honor and loyalty.” Needless to say, the president’s co-defendant in a criminal case; his former press secretary, best known for falsely claiming huge crowd sizes at his inauguration; his former physician, who once claimed Trump had “incredible genes” and a lawmaker who was near the Capitol on Jan. 6 don’t seem like the type of people to oversee that mission.
