Among the records Judge Cannon is releasing in the Florida case is a mention of the threat made to Mr. Woodward, the attorney for Walt Nauta, Trump’s valet and bodyguard.
Mr. Nauta is accused of conspiracy to obstruct justice, attempted document concealment, and making false statements. The Navy veteran hired a Florida-based lawyer, Stanley Woodward, to represent him.
According to Mr. Woodward, “Upon Mr. Woodward’s arrival at Main Justice, he was led to a conference room where Mr. Bratt awaited with what appeared to be a folder containing information about Mr. Woodward.”
“Mr. Bratt thereupon told Mr. Woodward he didn’t consider him to be a “Trump lawyer,” and he further said that he was aware that Mr. Woodward had been recommended to President Biden for an appointment to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
“Mr. Bratt followed up with words to the effect of “I wouldn’t want you to do anything to mess that up.”
The DOJ put it this way: “Bratt also informed Woodward that the Government was interested in obtaining Nauta’s potential cooperation and resolving this situation.”
Attorney Bratt referred it for disciplinary review, where it will die.
The DOJ finagled obstruction charges out of his “vague” answers when he said he didn’t remember.
Another classic “voluntary interview” with the FBI, the kind where they just casually swing by and ask for some help. Bodyman happy to oblige. Ends up charged with “conspiracy to obstruct justice” because he didn’t think to have a team of lawyers prepare his answers in advance pic.twitter.com/IMaq33X5ss
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 9, 2023
As Sentinel reported, this threat is one of the items that Jack Smith wanted hidden. This report is from January.
THE STANLEY WOODWARD CASE
The reference to attorney Stanley Woodward and his bodyguard, Walt Nauta, is interesting. It involved a case of probable DOJ corruption.
Piercing Attorney-Client Privilege.
Timothy Parlatore, who served as a criminal defense attorney for former President Donald Trump until May 2023, said that he “believes strongly the [Justice Department] team is engaging in misconduct to pursue an investigation of conduct that is not criminal.” He believes it could end the case before trial.
According to the New York Times, unsealing the attorney’s notes gave the prosecution a road map to build a case.
Parlatore harshly criticized the DOJ for charging Trump with criminal counts for simply asking his attorney questions during a privileged conversation. “It should have never been a crime-fraud exception, and once it was, it should never have been the evidence for a charge… It’s insane.”
The former Trump defense attorney went on to say that this was followed by a series of wrongdoings by prosecutors during the grand jury process, during which prosecutors frequently asked about privileged attorney-client communications while telling the jury that for Trump’s team to invoke privilege was a sign of guilt. This alone would mean “that the entire grand jury process was flawed,” Parlatore said.
Prosecutorial Misconduct
There is also “prosecutorial misconduct.” There was “the attempted extortion or witness tampering of one of the attorneys,” One of Trump’s lawyers alleged that Justice Department counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt had attempted to exert inappropriate pressure on Trump co-defendant Walt Nauta and his attorney Stanley Woodward. Bratt threatened to charge Nauta if he didn’t help them. He also told the lawyer that it would help with his judgeship application if he helped.
Parlatore also was the lead author of a 10-page letter sent last month to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio). The letter offered the most detailed public defense of Trump’s conduct in the documents case to date, arguing that the former president didn’t know what was in boxes of material shipped to Mar-a-Lago and that the entire controversy would have been avoided if the National Archives and Records Administration had properly assisted him after he left the White House.
In the wake of Peter Navarro’s sentence of four months in prison for not participating in an obviously illegitimate investigative panel, one can safely assume Democrat operatives in the prosecutors’ offices are serious about sending him to prison for the remainder of his life.