A Trump employee who monitored security cameras at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate abruptly retracted his earlier grand jury testimony and implicated Trump and others in obstruction of justice just after switching from an attorney paid for by a Trump political action committee to a lawyer from the federal defender’s office in Washington, prosecutors said in a court filing Tuesday.

The security aide – described as “Trump Employee 4” in public court filings but identified elsewhere as Yuscil Taveras – initially testified to a grand jury in Washington, D.C. that he was unaware of any effort to erase the videos, but after getting the new attorney “immediately … retracted his prior false testimony” and detailed the alleged effort to tamper with evidence related to the investigation of the handling of classified information stored at Trump’s Florida home, the new submission said.

[Of all the indictments Trump faces, this is the only really serious threat. Obstruction is a very big deal, and it looks like Smith will get another witness on the inside to substantiate it. — Ed]