Christina Bobb, who has served as a lawyer for Trump and is also involved with right-wing media, has spoken with federal investigators amid the ongoing federal probe into the handling of classified records from the Trump administration, according to a new NBC report. She answered questions on Friday.
The report says she didn’t appear before a grand jury, although it adds she provided investigators with details about the involvement of two other lawyers associated with Trump. At issue is a statement she signed this summer insisting that all documents marked with an array of classification identifiers that Trump still harbored were getting returned to federal authorities, which was not actually true. Evan Corcoran, a former federal prosecutor, apparently originally drafted the ultimately false statement Bobb signed, and she apparently told investigators as much in her recent communications with department personnel. Corcoran was also physically present when high-ranking Justice Department officials visited Trump’s southern Florida Mar-a-Lago resort in June, at which time they recovered dozens of documents marked classified that were covered by a grand jury subpoena that led to Bobb’s statement.
Corcoran blocked federal personnel from personally examining boxes in a storage area at Mar-a-Lago he said was the last repository at the property of records from the government — a claim that was also proven untrue with the subsequent recovery in the FBI’s August raid of Mar-a-Lago of classified documents from a personal office for Trump. According to NBC’s recap of what sources revealed, Bobb also told investigators Boris Epshteyn “did not help draft the statement but was minimally involved in discussions about the records.” Federal investigators have seized his personal cellphone. According to sources, Bobb also told investigators of her insistence that a disclaimer be added to her disputed statement indicating that she was attesting to the statement’s contents based on information she received — passing off responsibility elsewhere. Bobb was recently reported to have retained her own legal counsel, although Corcoran was around that time reportedly resisting hiring his own lawyer despite encouragement to do so from colleagues.
Bobb is largely uninvolved with presently unfolding work by the Trump legal team. Trump has presented a range of sometimes contradictory arguments in trying to defend himself, including the idea the FBI potentially planted evidence and that he declassified items in his possession — something he suggested was possible, when still president, just by thinking about it. Separately, investigators have reportedly asked questions about the possibility of Trump having harbored more documents the government would want returned at other properties, including Trump Tower in Manhattan. The classification status of the documents is not foundational to their investigative relevance. Among other examples of such a thing, obstruction — which is among the potential offenses under scrutiny — doesn’t depend on it. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals also challenged arguments about the classification status as a “red herring,” noting declassification wouldn’t have changed the documents’ contents or made them personal.
