The real reason Donald Trump isn’t bothering to pay his co-defendants’ legal fees anymore

| 9:00 pm EDT September 7, 2023
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When Donald Trump realized awhile back that he was getting indicted for stealing classified documents, he made the strategic decision to pay for attorneys to represent his co-defendants. But when Trump more recently saw that he was about to get indicted in Fulton County, he reportedly didn’t bother to pay for lawyers for his co-defendants in that case. We’re now seeing why.

On Wednesday we got official confirmation of previous reports that “Trump Employee 4” Yuscil Taveras has indeed cut a cooperation deal with Jack Smith to testify against Donald Trump. The kicker is that Trump had been paying for Taveras’ attorney. Then at some point Taveras decided to flip, severed from that attorney, and got his own representation.

In other words, footing the bill for Taveras’ attorney didn’t help. Trump had to pay all that money for all those months of Taveras’ legal bills, and in the end Taveras still flipped on Trump. Trump is still paying the legal bills for Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, but now that Taveras has flipped, these two may decide they have to flip as well. If so, Trump will once again have spent a lot of money for nothing.

So it’s not a surprise that Donald Trump isn’t even bothering to pay the legal bills of his co-defendants in Fulton County. He’s learning the hard way that the people who are going to flip on him are going to flip on him. He can’t stop that just by throwing money at the problem.

Of course Trump is coming under deeper and deeper financial constraint. Letitia James is on the verge of getting the courts to take $250 million from Trump, which could send his entire financial house of cards tumbling. So it’s not a small thing for him to pick up the tab for all these co-defendants. And now he’s seeing that it doesn’t work anyway.