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If you talk about what happened it doesn't magically mean all the punishment falls on the other side. If Levendowski admits to breaking the law he'll be punished, no matter if he is or isn't friends with Uber at the time.

Depends. If the story is how Waymo pictured it (the entire acquisition was an orchestrated plan with Uber to take IPs out of Google), if I were Levandowski I'd be reaching out to Waymo and propose a deal. I'll give you information to crucify Uber but you let me go. I guess Waymo is after Uber more than a single engineer.

The only issue is Levandowski could still face criminal charges and, under the circumstances can he trust Waymo not to take every drop of that information and hand it over to the most proximate prosecutor?

This will probably be a case study eventually.

Only if Uber knew they had done something wrong. If not, bailing on him now just places the blame squarely on him.