Saturday Rewind: Scrutinizing Trump DOJ's No. 3
Stan Woodward's ex-clients could benefit from Trump's slush fund. That's a conflict of interest, a bar complaint alleges.
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the third most powerful official in the Trump Justice Department, has taken the lead in key cases involving Donald Trump’s now-blocked $1.776 billion slush fund.
Woodward represented Trump’s co-defendant Walt Nauta in the classified documents case, along with multiple witnesses who appeared before the grand jury, including Kashyap Patel before his FBI director tenure. Woodward was also a go-to attorney on the Jan. 6 docket. He represented Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro over their defiance of Jan. 6th Committee subpoenas and several high-profile rioters, including Oath Keepers Kelly and Connie Meggs, former State Department official Federico Klein, and Ryan Samsel, who was believed to be the first to breach the barricades at the U.S. Capitol.
That’s a conflict of interest because many of those former clients stand to be enriched by the fund, according to a bar complaint filed by the Campaign for Accountability.
“This is not merely a case in which a former advocate later happened to agree with a prior client’s legal arguments,” the complaint to the D.C. Bar states. “Rather, as the sole signatory to the agreement, Mr. Woodward personally exercised governmental authority in a substantially related matter to validate and institutionalize positions he had previously developed and advanced while representing private clients in closely connected proceedings.”
In a video interview, the Campaign for Accountability’s president Michelle Kuppersmith quipped that Woodward is a “Forrest Gump”-like figure of the MAGA bar, whose firm has collected $1.4 million from Trump’s political action committee Save America.
“If you're getting 10 times what your annual DOJ salary is from a PAC, then you know that's going to happen probably when you're out of government as well,” she noted.
Kuppersmith’s description of her new complaint leads off this week’s “Saturday Rewind,” a compilation of videos from the All Rise News playlist on Legal AF.
In other interviews:
Investigative journalist Phil Williams digs deeper behind a salacious New York Post headline to discuss how a Southern Poverty Law Center informant exposed the financial secrets of a neo-Nazi group.
Former federal prosecutor and FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann discusses the special counsel probe requested in the Broadview Six case.
Free subscribers can watch the interview with Richer on YouTube here — or all of the other videos on the All Rise News playlist of Legal AF.
All Rise News paid subscribers can watch this video and others ad-free below.
