In more bad news for Don, att’y testifies in docs case
A top lawyer for former President Donald Trump on Friday testified about the classified documents he stashed at his Mara-Lago resort in a major legal breakthrough for prosecutors.
Attorney Evan Corcoran may have been forced to reveal what Trump told him about the scores of sensitive government documents he kept in defiance of a subpoena.
The senior lawyer arrived at the federal courthouse in Washington D.C. around 9 a.m. and left around lunch time without commenting to reporters.
Corcoran was ordered to answer questions from prosecutors without invoking attorney-client privilege after federal appeals court judges ruled that Trump likely sought to use the lawyer to lie about the documents.
Prosecutors believe Trump lied to Corcoran to get him to sign off on a letter to prosecutors that asserted lawyers had mounted a “diligent search” and found no documents covered by the subpoena.
That letter proved to be a brazen lie, leaving Corcoran exposed to significant legal peril if he didn’t have good reason for making the claims.
If Corcoran has now told the grand jury that Trump falsely told him that all the documents had been returned, legal experts say it would be a smoking gun proving that the former president obstructed justice in the documents case.
The grand jury operates in secret so no information about Corcoran’s explosive appearance was immediately divulged publicly.
Special counsel Jack Smith, a former Brooklyn federal prosecutor, is investigating Trump’s role in the documents scandal as well as his effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Biden, which culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The investigations are unrelated to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s probe into hush money Trump paid to porn star Stormy Daniels.
There is no known time frame for any of the investigations. But analysts believe the push to obtain Corcoran’s full testimony is a powerful signal that the documents probe is in the final stages.
Trump improperly took hundreds of classified documents with him when he left the White House in 2021 after being forced to accept that he lost to Biden.
He returned some of the documents when asked by officials. He returned another batch after the feds got a judge to issue a subpoena.
But Trump defied the subpoena’s demands to return all remaining classified documents.
Prosecutors recently sought to question Corcoran about his role in engineering the false statement about the documents, but he invoked attorney-client privilege to refuse to answer.
A top federal judge ruled last week that the so-called crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege applies to Corcoran’s discussions about the issue with Trump.
A three-judge panel quickly rejected Trump’s appeal of the order, setting the stage for Corcoran’s appearance.