A longtime Mar-a-Lago employee who is a key figure in the classified documents case against Donald Trump is speaking publicly — so that the public can hear the truth before the November election about his former boss and the case being delayed by a Florida judge.
Brian Butler, also known as “Trump Employee 5,” was employed at Mar-a-Lago for 20 years, and worked alongside some of his closest friends at the club. Carlos De Oliveira, a property manager at Mar-a-Lago, had been Butler’s closest friend until recently. De Oliveira is the third defendant to the MAL classified documents case, and has pleaded not guilty.
Butler, 41, has not been previously named publicly.
Butler says he told investigators that Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt repeated classified submarine secrets following a conversation with Trump in spring 2021.
Butler said he unknowingly helped Walt Nauta, also a defendant in the case, deliver boxes of classified information from Mar-a-Lago to Trump’s plane in June 2022 – the same day that Trump and his attorney were meeting with the Justice Department at Mar-a-Lago about the classified documents.
“They were the boxes that were in the indictment, the white bankers boxes. That’s what I remember loading,” Butler added.
Three months after the FBI removed hundreds of government records from Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Butler left his job as a club valet and manager, in part due to a growing restlessness to move on.
Disillusioned with how the club had grown into a more transactional environment for Trump during his presidency, Butler quit Mar-a-Lago in November 2022. That year, he watched his friends and former co-workers’ lives become disrupted because of the developing criminal case.
CNN has the complete story, and the full video is below.
