DOJ: After 180 on Testimony, Employee Implicated Trump

DOJ says Trump employee switched lawyers and immediately retracted prior testimony
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 23, 2023 1:06 AM CDT
DOJ: After 180 on Testimony, Employee Implicated Trump
FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a visit to the Iowa State Fair, Saturday, Aug. 12, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa.   (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)

Lawyers in the classified documents case against former President Trump say that one of Trump's employees, a potential witness in the case, changed his grand jury testimony to be more incriminating for Trump. The witness, described in court documents only as Mar-a-Lago's director of information technology, has been identified by the New York Times' and Politico's sources as Yuscil Taveras, whose name has come up in the case before. Taveras, who is not charged in the case, allegedly originally told the grand jury he didn't recall any conversations about security footage from Mar-a-Lago, but in its statement on the witness' reversal, the Justice Department says that was "false testimony."

The witness' new testimony, the DOJ says, implicated Trump and the two others charged alongside him in the case, and helped to form the basis of the revised indictment against them, the AP reports. The 180 came about after prosecutors warned Taveras he was a target of the probe and could be at risk of perjury charges if he gave false testimony; they also advised him that since his then-lawyer represented others involved in the investigation as well (and is being paid by a Trump-aligned super PAC), he may have a conflict of interest and may not be giving Taveras the best legal advice. Taveras then got a new attorney from the federal defender's office and immediately retracted his prior testimony. (More Mar-a-Lago indictment stories.)

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