The unnamed employee who recently changed his
testimony has entered into an agreement with special counsel Jack Smith’s team to become a key witness in a case against former President Donald Trump after he received threats of prosecution, according to a new court filing by his former attorney.
Mr. Smith is prosecuting a case against President Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents in a case that also names his valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira as co-defendants.
Stanley Woodward had been
representing unnamed “Trump Employee 4” as well as Mr. Nauta, and prosecutors filed a motion for a conflict of interest hearing, saying the employee’s testimony could incriminate Mr. Nauta, and that President Trump’s PAC was paying Mr. Woodward.
They had also raised conflict of interest concerns with attorney John Irving, who is
representing Mr. De Oliveira as well as three possible witnesses.
New Testimony
In an August filing, the prosecution cast the new testimony from Employee 4, the director of information technology at Mar-a-Lago, as a “flip” that occurred “immediately after receiving new counsel.”
In March, the employee had told the grand jury he did not have conversations about deleting security footage at Mar-a-Lago, but later he provided information that “implicated Nauta, De Oliveira, and Trump in efforts to delete security camera footage,” Mr. Smith’s office
wrote.
According to the filing, the employee has now testified in Florida court saying he was not coached to give his earlier testimony to the grand jury that convened in Washington, and no one had suggested or influenced what he said.
“To that end, Trump Employee 4 did not retract false testimony and provide information that implicated Mr. Nauta, ‘[i]mmediately after receiving new counsel,’”
wrote Mr. Woodward and Sasha Dadan, attorneys for Mr. Nauta. They wrote in the new filing that the change in testimony did not come because of a change in the lawyer representing him, as the prosecution suggests.
“Rather, after the Special Counsel’s Office issued a target letter on June 20, 2023, threatening Trump Employee 4 with prosecution ... at the hearing, Trump Employee 4 expressed a desire for counsel to advise him in navigating the threatened prosecution against him,” they wrote.
The motion quotes transcripts in which the employee was appointed a public defender to represent him, which Mr. Woodward was not against.
Mr. Smith’s office then “immediately offered Trump Employee 4 a Non-Prosecution Agreement,” Mr. Woodward wrote.
He argued in an earlier filing that his former client had not lied under oath, and even if he had provided conflicting information “that could expose him to criminal charges” he had “other recourses besides reaching a plea bargain with the government.”
Use of DC Grand Jury in Florida Case
The attorneys now allege that the conflict of interest motions filed in Washington were meant to influence the case now being tried in federal court in Florida. They claim the prosecution’s “manipulation” of the Washington court and grand jury investigation “achieved its penultimate goal” in diminishing the Florida court’s authority.“The argument of the Special Counsel’s Office, that it did not use the D.C. grand jury for the purpose of adding to the store of witnesses in the instant case, is unpersuasive,” they wrote.
The special counsel had previously
agreed to end the grand jury investigation in Washington to use in the Florida case after District Judge Aileen Cannon
questioned Mr. Smith about it. The August filing argued that Employee 4’s testimony and alleged perjury showed the use of an out-of-state grand jury was “proper.”
