Many games are afoot, my friends. A lot of news broke late yesterday that appears to send Trump’s legal issues into new trajectories.
Among these: Today Rudy Giuliani will be meeting with Fani Willis and her team, says the Daily Beast. Nobody knows what this meeting is about. He doesn’t need to meet with them just to surrender and post bail, I don’t think. Should Trump be worried? Michael Cohen thinks so:
Donald Trump is an “idiot” for not paying legal expenses incurred by his attorney the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani in the Georgia election subversion case, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said. …
… Cohen suggested Giuliani would be wise to “flip” on Trump.
“Allegedly from Rudy’s own mouth, he claims that he has a smoking gun, information about Donald,” Cohen said. “Well, if that’s true … I don’t have to suggest anything to Rudy. He’s the one that basically came up with this concept of strong-arming when he was head of the southern district of New York. He’s going to need to speak and he’s going to need to speak before everybody else does.”
Giuliani’s work for Trump also included digging for political dirt in Ukraine, efforts which contributed to Trump’s first impeachment.
Cohen said: “The job that Rudy did for Donald, I don’t know if I would pay either. But at the end of the day, when your life is basically hanging on the line once again, you just don’t really want to throw another lawyer under the bus.”
By all accounts Rudy is in a desperate financial situation and is watching the shabby remnants of his personal fortune and career circle the drain. And it was widely reported that Trump recently rebuffed Rudy when Rudy begged for a financial lifeline. Rudy surely has insider information on the fake electors scheme, for example, that Fani Willis might find useful. This is all speculation, of course.
But speaking of fllipping — this was revealed in a court filing late yesterday —
A key witness against former President Donald Trump and his two co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago documents case recanted previous false testimony and provided new information implicating the defendants after he switched lawyers, special counsel Jack Smith’s office said in a new court filing.
Yuscil Taveras, the director of information technology at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Florida, changed his testimony last month about efforts to delete security camera video at the club after he changed from a lawyer paid for by Trump’s Save America PAC to a public defender, Tuesday’s filing says.
David Kurtz at TPM breaks it down more:
In March 2023 testimony to the DC grand jury, Taveras and De Oliveira perjured themselves by denying having any conversations about the security footage at Mar-a-Lago.
In June 2023, Smith advised Woodward that Taveras was a target of its investigation and sought a hearing with the chief judge in DC over Woodward conflict of interest. Woodward was repping both Nauta and Taveras.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg provided Taveras with a public defender to confer with about the conflicts of interest Woodward had. On July 5, Taveras informed Boasberg that he was changing lawyers from Woodward to the public defender.
Soon after, Taveras recanted his prior false testimony to the grand jury and implicated Trump, Nauta, and De Oliveira. The superseding indictment soon followed.
Possibly related, but I’m not sure — earlier this month Smith filed additional grand jury information from the D.C. grand jury in the documents case, and Loose threw a fit over it.
Cannon said there was not “sufficient legal or factual basis to warrant” the “secrecy” — and ordered a clerk to remove both of Smith’s filings from the South Florida docket.
Cannon also asked Trump’s legal team to respond to allegations from those grand jury proceedings that attorney Stanley Woodward — representing Trump valet Waltine Nauta — has conflicts of interest in the documents case, since three of his clients may be called to testify as government witnesses.
The potential witnesses include Mar-a-Lago IT director Yuscil Taveras and two others who worked in the Trump White House and followed the 45th president to Florida, filings show.
Loose threw this fit shortly after the superseding indictment had been filed, or at least it was reported on after the superseding indictment had been filed, but I suspect there’s a connection. Back to David Kurtz:
Smith is hitting back hard on three main points: (1) his use of the grand jury in DC was proper; (2) Woodward is deeply conflicted for all the above reasons but also because he was provided to Taveras and paid for by Trumpworld entities; and (3) there is zero precedent for resolving this kind of conflict by barring the testimony of a key witness, which is what Woodward proposed.
The legal expert bobbleheads on MSNBC have been saying all along that there is nothing at all wrong with having two grand juries in two places, considering that the alleged criminal activity was taking place in two places. Loose is just incompetent.
And then there’s Mark Meadows, who seems to be trying to have it all different ways at once. See How Mark Meadows Pursued a High-Wire Legal Strategy in Trump Inquiries by a bunch of people at the New York Times (no paywall).
In brief, Meadows appears to be cooperating, at least partly, with Jack Smith, but he’s resisting cooperation with Fani Willis. Regarding Georgia, Meadows wants his case moved to a federal court. He’s got a hearing on this next week, but his deadline for surrender to Fulton County is this Friday. And Fani Willis refused Meadows’s request for an extension. So he’s asking a judge to protect him from being arrested.
[Update: A judge told Meadows and Jeffrey Clark he can’t stop Fani Willis from having them arrested if they don’t surrender by Friday.]
But we learned this week that Meadows told federal prosecutors he doesn’t recall former President Trump “ordering, or even discussing, declassifying broad sets of classified materials before leaving the White House,” for example. So he’s not totally stonewalling Jack Smith. He appears to be trying to avoid a criminal conviction while not becoming a rage target of the Trump base. Good luck with that.
Word is that Trump plans to turn himself in at the Fulton County jail on Thursday night to get maximum television coverage.
In other news: Tonight is the first Republican presidential nomination debate. A lot of commentators are saying that if Ron DeSantis doesn’t do especially well tonight he might as well drop out. That’s probably true.
The eight finalists who are eligible and expected to debate are DeSantis, Asa Hutchison, Tim Scott, Doug Bergum, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and Vivek Ramaswamy. But Bergum (and who is he, again?) was injured playing basketball yesterday and may not be able to be there. So they can’t hook the guy up on Zoom or something?
In other other news: There are reports that Trump’s big idea for the economy is a “universal baseline tariff” on virtually all imports to the United States; something in the neighborhood of 10 percent. Even the mouth breathers at Power Tools are appalled and talking about Smoot-Hawley II. WaPo:
On Fox Business on Thursday, the former president called for setting this tariff at 10 percent “automatically” for all countries, a move that experts warn could lead to higher prices for consumers throughout the economy and could likely lead to a global trade war.
“I think we should have a ring around the collar” of the U.S. economy, Trump said in an interview with Kudlow on Fox Business on Thursday. “When companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay, automatically, let’s say a 10 percent tax … I do like the 10 percent for everybody.”
In brief, after all this time he still doesn’t understand how tariffs work.
