Court orders Don’s attorney to testify on Mar-a-Lago secret docs
A panel of federal appeals judges quickly ruled Wednesday that a lawyer for former President Donald Trump must testify more fully in the probe of classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort home.
In a major blow to Trump, the three-judge panel took just a few hours to order Evan Corcoran to answer questions about what Trump told him about scores of secret government documents that Trump kept in defiance of a federal subpoena.
Corcoran is now expected to testify to the grand jury probing the documents case Friday and will not be permitted to invoke attorney-client privilege about most of Trump’s claims.
The judges affirmed the decision of Washington, D.C., Circuit Court Judge Beryl Howell, who ruled that prosecutors presented sufficient evidence that Trump broke the law and improperly sought to use Corcoran to shield himself.
The panel ruled with remarkable speed just a few hours after a midnight filing from Trump’s team and a 6 a.m. counterfiling from special counsel Jack Smith’s team of prosecutors.
Trump’s legal team has conceded defeat on the issue and will not seek to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, CNN reported.
Corcoran reportedly instructed another lawyer last spring to claim she had “diligently” searched Mara-Lago for documents after Trump handed over a cache of them in response to a subpoena.
It turned out there were more than 100 of the documents remaining in a basement storage room and Trump’s own desk, including top-secret assessments of another country’s nuclear weapons, effectively proving that the lawyers lied to the feds.
The lawyer will now be forced to answer prosecutors questions about the false statement, potentially forcing him to incriminate Trump. Corcoran could still invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating himself but that could lead to him being criminally charged for obstruction.
It is extremely rare for judges to approve prosecutor claims to invoke the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, which requires compelling evidence that a suspect used his lawyer to carry out a crime or fraud.