According to a new report, the federal case against Trump involving the alleged mishandling of classified documents has just gotten a lot more interesting, as a Trump employee has now flipped.
Politico reports that the employee, Yuscil Taveras, has retracted prior testimony to the grand jury, now saying that Trump did push for tapes to be erased and for evidence to be tampered with.
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 aide — described as “Trump Employee 4” in public court filings but identified elsewhere as Yuscil Taveras — held the title of director of information technology at Mar-a-Lago. He 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.
According to the report, it was Tavera’s flip that led to the superseding indictment with new charges last month. News of the change dropped in June, mere hours after FBI Director Wray granted the House Oversight Committee access to the FD-1023 form from 2020 detailing bribery allegations made against Joe Biden.
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Trump has long insisted that no tapes were ever deleted.
“MAR-A-LAGO SECURITY TAPES WERE NOT DELETED,” he wrote in a July 30 post on Truth Social. “THEY WERE VOLUNTARILY HANDED OVER TO THE THUGS, HEADED UP BY DERANGED JACK SMITH. WE DID NOT EVEN GO TO COURT TO STOP THEM FROM GETTING THESE TAPES. I NEVER TOLD ANYBODY TO DELETE THEM. PROSECUTORIAL FICTION & MISCONDUCT! ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”
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