(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Since the Donald Trump documents case landed on Judge Aileen Cannon’s docket, court watchers on both sides of the aisle have been waiting for her to tip her hand. Last year, she seized control of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant on a ridiculous theory of anomalous jurisdiction, before getting humiliatingly slapped down by the 11th Circuit. So the safe money was on her finding a way to bone this round for the defendant sooner or later.
On August 7, it looked like Judge Cannon was getting ready to do her thing. The government had moved for a Garcia hearing to discuss potential conflicts inherent to attorney Stanley Woodward, Jr. representing co-defendant Walt Nauta when he previously represented Mar-a-Lago’s IT head Yuscil Taveras, the star witness in this case.
Taveras, known in the documents indictments as “Trump Employee 4,” testified to the DC grand jury in March 2023 that he had no knowledge of efforts to delete security camera footage of the storage locker where Trump was storing stolen government documents. When Taveras got new counsel in July, he recanted and admitted that he had resisted entreaties by Nauta and co-defendant Carlos De Oliveira to destroy the surveillance footage at the behest of “the boss.” That testimony formed the basis of a whole new section in the superseding indictment filed August 1 in the Southern District of Florida.
Cross examining Taveras would appear to present an undeniable conflict for Woodward, who is being paid by Trump’s PAC and represents at least six other witnesses interviewed by the special counsel. But when the government raised the issue with the court earlier this month, filing two sealed documents in support of its Garcia motion, Judge Cannon reacted by striking sealed filings and instructing the defendants to “address the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate and/or to seek post-indictment hearings on matters pertinent to the instant indicted matter in this district.”
At the same time, Trumpworld looked to be gearing up for a push to discredit the work of the DC grand jury.
“This Department of Justice has no compunction about destroying the rule of law because of their political interest being the ones that got President Trump,” Trump’s former lawyer Jim Trusty vamped to Fox’s Mark Levin, speculating that the grand jury in Florida had been presented “a much sanitized version of what was presented over the course of a year in DC” and we’d be hearing soon about how the DC grand jury was “used or abused.” Then for good measure, he pretended there was something nefarious about the Justice Department “shift[ing] an investigation last minute to an entirely different venue” — i.e., the one in which the crime was committed.
Woodward responded on Nauta’s behalf by demanding that the court exclude Taveras’s testimony entirely as a tacit sanction of the government for improperly using an out-of-district grand jury in DC to investigate the already-charged conduct in Florida.
Yesterday, the government came out swinging in its reply, noting that Taveras’s false testimony in March obstructed the grand jury in DC, as did similar false claims by De Oliveira. And only a grand jury in DC could investigate that obstructive conduct.
In late June, prosecutors sent Taveras a target letter, which “crystallized” the conflict, since his only two options were to (1) continue to perjure himself and get indicted, or (2) correct his false testimony and implicate Woodward’s other client Nauta. The DOJ moved for a conflicts hearing in DC before Chief Judge James Boasberg.
Woodward’s response to that request was … notable:
Mr. Woodward raised no objection to proceeding in the District of Columbia regarding Trump Employee 4. In fact, he responded that he “welcome[d] the Court’s inquiry into [his] representation of” Trump Employee 4, but asserted that he had no “information to support the Government’s claim that [Trump Employee 4] has provided false testimony to the grand jury,” and that “even if [Trump Employee 4] did provide conflicting information to the grand jury such that could expose him to criminal charges, he has other recourse besides reaching a plea bargain with the Government. Namely, he can go to trial with the presumption of innocence and fight the charges as against him.” According to Mr. Woodward, if Trump Employee 4 “wishes to become a cooperating Government witness, he has already been advised that he may do so at any time.”
Judge Boasberg made a federal public defender available to Taveras, after which the witness immediately changed his story. This would appear to be an implicit rebuke of Judge Cannon, who knew about the DC conflicts hearing in real time and is now affecting to be confused about the problem.
“Mr. Woodward’s successive representation of Nauta and Trump Employee 4 squarely implicates his ethical obligations. Even if Mr. Woodward was ‘unaware’ at the time he represented Trump Employee 4 that his client might give testimony that would incriminate Nauta, he is certainly aware now,” the government writes, adding that it would be “error” (read: reversible error) for the court to grant Nauta’s motion to exclude Taveras’s testimony as a remedy this very obvious conflict.
Finally, the government objects to Woodward’s motion to hold the Garcia hearing ex parte. Prosecutors already tried to do this the quiet way, filing documents under seal and giving Woodward every opportunity to leave inconspicuously. He and Judge Cannon are the ones who forced this issue into the open by making such a fuss about it. So now they can have a public discussion about whose interests are really being represented by all those lawyers subsidized by Trump and his PACs.
Bluff: CALLED.
US v. Trump [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.
