A witness who was represented by a lawyer also representing Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, two of Donald Trump’s co-defendants in his Mar-a-Lago documents criminal case, changed his grand jury testimony in the case after ditching the lawyer and getting independent counsel, new documents filed in the case reveal.
In a response to a Garcia hearing to alert defendants about their lawyer’s potential conflicts of interest, lawyers from the Special Counsel’s office note that a client, known in court filings as Trump Employee 4 and represented by Stanley Woodward, Jr. “recanted his prior false testimony” after consulting with an independent lawyer.
Trump Employee 4 has been identified independently as Yuscil Taveras, an IT worker at Mar-a-Lago who reportedly was asked to help delete recordings of people, presumably Nauta and De Oliveira, moving boxes of government documents around the facility after they had been subpoenaed for return to the National Archives.
Woodward had been the subject of significant interest given that he’s representing the two men standing with Trump and the fact that he’s likely being paid either by Trump or organizations loyal to the indicted transplanted New Yorker. Earlier this month, he was profiled in a New York Times piece titled “Divided Loyalties” focusing in on potential conflicts of interest he may hold by representing two individuals in the same case while being paid by the third.
It should also be noted that Cassidy Hutchinson, Mark Meadow’s assistant at the White House, also changed her lawyer during the House January 6th Select Committee investigation, opting to get her own lawyer rather than one paid for by Team Trump, and she ultimately cooperated with the investigation, even explaining that her former lawyer encouraged her to “not remember” things.