Everyone knows about Trump’s addiction to fast food and diet coke. But I had no idea Trump had a personal diet coke valet. Who could have predicted that; but he did. The man responded every time Trump wanted a coke; he would push the “diet coke” button to alert his valet. The valet served him twelve diet cokes daily from a hallway refrigerator just steps from the Oval Office and dining room.
When confronted with security video evidence of moving documents out of the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, that man told untruths to the FBI, but he eventually reported the traitor to the FBI with solid evidence that TFG had top-secret documents at the Mar-a-Lago residence.
In addition to fetching the ex-president a soda over and over, he was tasked with doing internal errands, including being ordered to move the boxes of illegally held secret documents from the storage room of the Palm Beach mansion to Trump’s residence. Ruh-roh.
The valet was a Navy man who worked himself up from cooking at the white house mess to being Trump’s trusted aide and gopher. Trump trusted him completely.
H/T to Margaret Hartmann at The Intelligencer for breaking this story for those of us behind the Washington Post paywall.
Not long after Trump took office, Nauta left the mess to become one of Trump’s valets, spending some of his workday in a small passageway that connects the West Wing to a private dining room. From there, he had access to a small refrigerator stocked with Diet Cokes, which he brought to the president in the Oval Office when Trump pressed a call button on his desk, said a former White House staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss activities inside the White House.
Nauta frequently served as a kind of gofer, fetching any items the president might need throughout the day and tidying up the room, the former staffer said. When Trump left the Oval Office for the night, it was Nauta who brought his coat. Their daily proximity meant that the two developed a close professional relationship, and Trump “trusted him completely,” this person added.
Serious question; was he the staff cleaning up the ketchup off the dining room wall? It seems likely since he was stationed close enough to see the cheeseburger slide down to the carpet.
When FBI agents first interviewed Nauta, he denied any role in moving boxes or sensitive documents, the people familiar with the situation said in interviews before Nauta’s name became public. But as investigators gathered more evidence, they questioned him a second time and he told a starkly different story — that Trump instructed him to move the boxes, these people said.
Hartmann noted that the valet would be sitting with investigators again for misleading them.
I did a Kos search to see if somebody here mentioned this story. I didn’t find any. Of course, we already knew the story of the valet, but a personal diet coke valet paid 150k per year.
By the way, I voted for my first Democrat after relocating to North Carolina in 2021, Cheryl Beasley.