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U.S. Politics

Trump lawyer testifies on classified documents in

breakthrough for prosecutors
By Dave Goldiner
New York Daily News • Mar 24, 2023 at 2:39 pm

A top lawyer for former President Donald Trump on Friday testified about the classified
documents he stashed at his Mar-a-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.

In this photo illustration, pages are viewed from the government’s released version of the F.B.I. search warrant affidavit for
former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate on August 27, 2022 in California. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

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-
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
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That letter proved to be a brazen lie, leaving Corcoran exposed to significant legal peril
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Five kids died in the
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Matthew Evan Corcoran, a lawyer for former U.S. President Donald Trump. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

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.

Former President Donald Trump (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

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. He left some of the documents, including at least one that described an
unnamed foreign nation’s nuclear weapons capacity, in a basement storage room.

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-
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. He also was ordered to hand over notes and documents related
to his talks with Trump..

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