Cannon gets her answer and Trump's lawyers push the envelope

A Trump employee who monitored security cameras at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate abruptly retracted his earlier grand jury testimony and implicated Trump and others in obstruction of justice just after switching from an attorney paid for by a Trump political action committee to a lawyer from the federal defender’s office in Washington, prosecutors said in a court filing Tuesday.

The security aide – described as “Trump Employee 4” in public court filings but identified elsewhere as Yuscil Taveras – initially testified to a grand jury in Washington, D.C. that he was unaware of any effort to erase the videos, but after getting the new attorney “immediately … retracted his prior false testimony” and detailed the alleged effort to tamper with evidence related to the investigation of the handling of classified information stored at Trump’s Florida home, the new submission said.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team revealed the details of the employee’s about-face as part of a filing demanded by Florida-based U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the classified records case against the former president.

She had questioned why prosecutors continued to collect evidence from a grand jury empaneled in Washington, D.C., even after Smith obtained a grand jury indictment in Florida in June charging Trump with more than 30 counts of retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

[...]

In an apparent bid to assuage any continuing concerns by Cannon about a grand jury hundred of miles away working on matters related to the case she is handling, Smith’s team informed her that the D.C. grand jury officially completed its work Aug. 17.

  Politico

The very humorous part of this deal is that a Trump lawyer (Stan Woodward) was paid for to represent several people involved in the documents fiasco, and when Taveras began cooperating with Smith's office, the special counsel appealed to the court to have Woodward removed from Taveras' representation considering the obvious conflict. Woodward's suggested proposal to take care of the conflict problem was - get this - to not call on Taveras to testify at trial!

“The Government is unaware of one, in which a court has excluded evidence to avoid a conflict on facts remotely similar to this case, where the Government put Mr. Woodward on notice long ago about potential conflicts,” Harbach wrote, “and he is now seeking to affirmatively use those conflicts to gain a tactical advantage at trial by excluding highly incriminating evidence to the benefit of not only his own client but also a co-defendant [Trump] whose PAC is paying his legal fees.”

Ordinarily you'd recognize this was a crazy suggestion and sure to go nowhere, but remember, this case is before Judge Aileen Cannon, so why not give it a try?

UPDATE 05:33 pm:

UPDATE 07:17 pm:

UPDATE 08/23/2023 11:46 am:

I have to assume that Trump's team will be saying Smith would still be ILLEGALLY using the DC Grand Jury if Judge Cannon hadn't made him stop.

UPDATE 08/24/2023:

UPDATE 08/31/2023:

A fuller explanation of the latest in the Georgia documents case with the news of a change in testimony from Yuscil Taveras is laid out in this article from Public Notice.