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On Thursday, Donald Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran was seen entering the Washington, D.C. federal courthouse where grand jury disputes are heard. By all accounts, he was there to take one more swing at Trump’s executive privilege claims, this time as they apply to former Vice President Mike Pence’s testimony in the special counsel’s Jan. 6 investigation.
Corcoran was again seen entering that same courthouse on Friday — but he was expected to wear a very different hat this time, serving as a witness before a grand jury in the special counsel’s Mar-A-Lago records investigation.
While Corcoran has represented Trump since April 2022, when the Justice Department began investigating Trump’s potential records-related violations, he is perhaps best known for drafting a June 3 certification signed by another Trump lawyer stating that all classified documents at Mar-a-Lago had been returned to federal authorities. The FBI’s search last August, which turned up more than 100 additional classified documents, revealed that statement to be blatantly false.
How did Corcoran even find himself in this position, you ask? Corcoran testified to the grand jury in early January, but declined to answer some questions on grounds of attorney-client privilege. So in early February, special counsel Jack Smith asked then-Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to force Corcoran to testify about those subjects under the “crime-fraud exception,” a legal rule that attorney-client privilege cannot apply when a client uses a lawyer, with or without that lawyer’s knowledge, to further a crime or fraud.
On March 17 — Howell’s last day as chief judge — she not only ordered Corcoran to testify, but also reportedly ruled that Corcoran would have to turn over by Wednesday documents, including “handwritten notes, invoices and transcriptions of…
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