The prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith had asked for conflict-of-interest hearings for Nauta’s lawyer Stanley Woodward and De Oliveira’s lawyer John Irving, due to the fact they might be constrained at trial because of divided loyalties to their current and former clients.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
US district judge Aileen Cannon abruptly postponed the hearing after getting the request to prevent the lawyer from doing cross-examination and closing arguments of a former client at trial – which came after prosecutors had first said they would not seek disqualification.
She added she was “disappointed” that David Harbach, one of the prosecutors, had raised the request without warning, and without citing supporting cases from the southern district of Florida.
The hearing was the second in a pair of proceedings scheduled so Trump’s co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, could be told of their lawyers’ prior representation of witnesses during the grand jury investigation who could testify against them at trial.
The complication emerged at the hearing for Nauta, when prosecutors said they could not be sure how Woodward might cross-examine “Trump Employee 4”, identified by the Guardian as the IT director of Mar-a-Lago, Yuscil Taveras.
But asking to preclude Woodward from doing closing arguments was a new request in the eyes of Cannon, who pressed Harbach on why it was being raised for the first time at the hearing.
De Oliveira’s language skills have been a topic of discussion inside the Trump legal team for months, according to people familiar with the matter.
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