The special counsel is seeking answers from Trump’s lawyer about the classified documents

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When investigators on January 6 asked for answers from John Eastman, the Republican lawyer responded with predictable pushback: He argued that he could not testify because his work related to keeping Donald Trump in power after his defeat in 2020 is protected by attorney-client privilege.

It was at that point that the political world received a useful legal primer on the limits of legal protection: Communications between lawyers and clients are not protected if they discuss the commission of crimes. (Eastman eventually took the Fifth.)

This week, the same issue will come up in ways the former president won’t like — not as part of the Jan. 6 investigation, but rather, as part of other federal criminal investigations he faces. NBC News reported overnight:

The special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents is seeking to compel a lawyer for the former president to testify before a grand jury, a source familiar with the matter said. Prosecutors say in a sealed filing that they have evidence that some of Trump’s conversations with the lawyer were in furtherance of a crime, the source said.

The attorney in question is Evan Corcoran, who special counsel Jack Smith is apparently eager to speak to as part of the ongoing criminal investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified materials.

At this point, I imagine some readers are asking, “It all seems important, but who is Evan Corcoran?”

The lawyer may not have a very high national profile, but he is a highly relevant player in the former president’s documents scandal.

Let’s take a look back at our previous coverage and review how we got to this point. Last June, Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterespionage section of the Justice Department’s national security division, went to Mar-a-Lago with several FBI agents in hopes of obtaining documents improperly seized by the former president and refuse to give voluntarily. back.

As part of that meeting, Christina Bobb signed a certification statement, stating that the former president fully complied with a grand jury subpoena and no longer has any material of any kind at his venerable country club. That claim, of course, was false: As the FBI discovered during a search two months later, Trump still had many 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 his own lawyer — told investigators he didn’t draft the statement he signed. Instead, Bobb said it was another Trump lawyer, Corcoran, who both drafted the statement and told him to sign it.

It was against this backdrop that The New York Times reported last week that Corcoran appeared before a federal grand jury probing the scandal. We still don’t know what he said, but the fact that Smith seems to want to force Corcoran to testify suggests that (a) there are at least some questions that Trump’s lawyer doesn’t want to answer; (b) Corcoran mentions the attorney-client privilege; (c) prosecutors believe that the attorney-client privilege does not apply in this case; and (d) the special counsel’s office has reason to believe that a crime has been committed.

If the former president throws another online tantrum today, targeting Smith and downplaying his scandals in the documents, at least we’ll know why.

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