Jussie Smollett’s attorney Nenye Uche is accused of contacting two key witnesses of the case the actor is defending against the Chicago police. The actor was accused by the Chicago police of lying to them during an interrogation.

During the hearing on Tuesday, Judge James Linn said that he needs to determine if Nenye Uche talked to Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundario in the days after Smollett reported that two masked men attacked him in downtown Chicago. The two witnesses were determined as crucial to the case because of the fact that they told the authorities Jussie Smollett paid a Black and an openly gay man from the “Empire” to orchestrate the racist and homophobic attack in January 2019.

Gloria Rodriguez, the attorney who is representing the brothers, and Special Prosecutor Dan Webb argued before the court that Nenye Uche should be kicked off the case because he spoke to the key witnesses and tried gathering confidential information from the brothers when they thought he might represent them.

“You cannot have the person who had a confidential conversation with you now cross-examining you,” Webb said. It is a conflict of interest to attack the credibility of the brothers using information gathered from them in what they believed were confidential conversations with an attorney who they thought was going to represent them. I don’t know who was there, where she was calling from and who was there,” he told the judge.