Attorney-client privilege is an important legal principle, which is protected in nearly all instances, but it is not absolute. As the criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s classified documents scandal advances, the former president and his team are discovering that those limits can be highly problematic. The New York Times reported overnight:
A federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday that a lawyer representing former President Donald J. Trump in the investigation into his handling of classified material had to answer a grand jury’s questions and give prosecutors documents related to his legal work. The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was a victory for the special counsel overseeing the investigation and followed Mr. Trump’s effort to stop the lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, from handing over what are likely to be dozens of documents to investigators.
I can appreciate why Corcoran’s name may be unfamiliar to much of the public, especially with so much recent focus on Trump’s unrelated legal dilemma in New York. But Corcoran is quickly becoming one of the most important figures in the former president’s classified documents scandal.
Revisiting our earlier coverage, it was last June when a leading Justice Department official went to Mar-a-Lago with a few FBI agents in the hopes of retrieving documents Trump improperly took and refused to voluntarily give back.
As part of that meeting, one of the Republican’s lawyers, Christina Bobb, signed a certification statement, indicating that the former president had fully complied with a grand jury subpoena and no longer had any classified materials at his glorified country club. That statement, we now know, wasn’t true: As the FBI discovered during a search two months later, Trump still had plenty of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
In the fall, Bobb decided it was time to pass the buck: NBC News reported in October that the lawyer — who had to hire her own lawyer — told…
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