I’ve said it so many times before… There truly is no end to the corruption. There truly is no low on earth that Donald J. Trump won’t sink to in an effort to serve himself and his interests.
Former federal prosecutor Jim Walden issued a reaction to the recent news from the Washington Post revealing that the former president’s Save America political action committee (PAC) appears to be engaged in a serious conflict of interest, due to the fact that the Save America PAC has been consistently footing the bill for the legal fees of multiple key witnesses in the ongoing investigation regarding the stolen Mar-a-Lago document case with the Department of Justice.
According to the Post, Trump’s PAC is financially providing legal representation to not one, but two individuals who are connected to the DOJ’s investigation into whether or not the scandal-ridden former US president knowingly mishandled the top-secret, highly-classified government documents and materials that were ultimately recovered from his Palm Beach compound turned post-presidential personal residence during an FBI search and seizure warrant raid earlier this year, as well as allegations that Donald Trump purposefully obstructed justice when he repeatedly lied to the National Archives and Records Administration throughout their multiple attempts to recover said materials from his golf club.
The newspaper revealed that the Save America PAC, owned and backed by the former president, has thus far paid upwards of $120,000 to the Brand Woodward Law firm — the same law firm that currently represents key witnesses in the Mar-a-Lago document case, Kash Patel and Mar-a-Lago valet driver Walt Nauta.
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Nauta serves as a particularly crucial witness in the case, as Trump has been credibly accused of telling the valet driver to move boxes of documents into a storage room at his Mar-a-Lago country club following a May government subpoena to return the materials to NARA.
According to reports, the FBI has since obtained security footage from Trump’s resort that shows Nauta moving the boxes from the storage room both before and after the subpoena was issued by the Department of Justice.
Speaking to the Post on the matter, former federal prosecutor Jim Walden said the fact that Trump is footing the bill for Kash and Nauta’s legal representation means it’s highly likely that their cooperation and testimonies in the case will be swayed by the former president.
“It looks like the Trump political action committee is either paying for the silence of these witnesses, for them to take the Fifth, or for favorable testimony,” Walden said. “These circumstances should look very suspicious to the Justice Department, and there’s a judicial mechanism for them to get court oversight if there’s a conflict.”
Stan Brand, the top attorney at Brand Woodward Law, also spoke with the newspaper and unsurprisingly claims that there’s nothing of concern about the financial situation at hand.
“There’s no bar against third parties paying for legal fees as long as it’s disclosed to the client. The ethical obligation of the lawyer is to the client,” Brand said. “This is a tempest in a teapot and another cheap shot at these people because of who they work for.”
You can read more from The Washington Post here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
