Former President Trump is facing some additional legal challenges, according to new filings from special counsel Jack Smith. One of Trump’s employees at Mar-a-Lago has now flipped and apparently is testifying against the former president.
The Daily Wire reported:
The employee — identified in court documents as “Trump Employee 4” — quickly changed his grand jury testimony after a meeting with a lawyer from the federal defender’s office in Washington, D.C., in which he decided that he no longer wanted to be represented by a lawyer paid for by Trump’s political action committee and who was recommended to him by Trump’s lawyer.
The revelation was made in a court filing from Smith’s team in response to U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, the federal judge overseeing the case, who demanded to know why prosecutors continued to collect grand jury evidence in Washington, D.C., for the case in Florida. Smith also notified Cannon that the grand jury in Washington, D.C., finished its work last week.
“During these investigations, the Government gathered evidence that Trump employee Carlos De Oliveira tried to enlist the director of information technology for Mar-a-Lago (identified in the superseding indictment as Trump Employee 4) to delete Mar-a-Lago security footage after the grand jury in the District of Columbia had issued a subpoena for the footage,” the court filing said.
The U.S. government approached Stanley Woodward, the lawyer representing Trump Employee 4, to notify him that he had a potential conflict by representing him and Walt Nauta, the Trump aide accused of conspiring with Trump to obstruct the grand jury investigation into Trump’s handling of classified material.
“Mr. Woodward responded that he did not have a reason to believe that his concurrent representation of Trump Employee 4 and Nauta raised a conflict of interest,” the filing said. “When Trump Employee 4 testified before the grand jury in the District of Columbia in March 2023, he repeatedly denied or claimed not to recall any contacts or conversations about the security footage at Mar-a-Lago. In testimony before the same grand jury, De Oliveira likewise denied any contact with Trump Employee 4 regarding security footage.
Apparently, the government evidence indicated that this testimony was false. Prosecutors informed the Trump employee he was the target of the grand jury investigation, and he seemingly didn’t want to go to jail. So now, he is flipping lawyers and plans to testify that people were destroying the security footage at Trump’s direction.
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Meanwhile, Trump’s legal team is experiencing a number of setbacks. David Shafer, former chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and one of the 19 defendants in the Georgia election interference case, is now claiming in court filings he and other Republican electors who tried to certify Trump as the winner in Georgia were acting directly at Trump’s behest.
This may signal that more people who are in Trump’s orbit are ready to flip on him legally to avoid jail time themselves, which is one of the things that comes into play when Trump does not pay your legal bills.
That is a major danger for the former president.