Walt Nauta, the only other person indicted along with former President Donald J. Trump, served as his personal assistant after previously working for him in the White House.
A native of Guam, Mr. Nauta enlisted in the military at one point and was a military aide working as a White House valet while Mr. Trump was president.
White House staffers are unusually close to the commander-in-chief, confronting them at moments of vulnerability, including during meals and on foreign trips.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta developed a relationship during the Trump administration, and when the term ended, Mr. Nauta retired and went to work personally for Mr. Trump.
He was one of the few members of Mr. Trump’s post-presidential cabinet when Mr. Trump first returned to his private life at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. There, Mr. Nauta resumed the kind of personal duties with which he helped Mr. Trump while he was president.
Mr. Nauta is considered deeply loyal to Mr. Trump by other aides.
But he caught the government’s attention with the emergence of security camera footage from the club, which was subpoenaed by prosecutors, moving boxes in and out of a basement storage room after a grand jury subpoena.
In interviews with government officials, according to the indictment, he gave false testimony about whether he had moved boxes to Mr. Trump’s residence earlier in the year. In fact, according to the indictment, Mr. Nauta brought several boxes to Mr. Trump’s residence from the storage room at a time when National Archives officials wanted the return of presidential materials, but he told investigators that he did not he did it.
In another memorable moment noted in the indictment, on December 7, 2021, Mr. Nauta discovered that some of the boxes in the storage room had fallen and their contents were all over the floor, “including a document marked ‘SECRET// REL’ TO USA, FVEY’, which meant that the information in the document could only be released to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain and the United States.”
Mr Nauta texted a colleague and wrote: “Opened the door and found this…”
Prosecutors had been considering indicting Mr. Nauta since the fall, but pressured him to cooperate with their investigation. He refused.