Evan Corcoran, a lawyer to Trump who’s also an ex-federal prosecutor and has dealt with portions of the classified documents case, has testified to a grand jury working on the investigation into the handling of those materials. The probe is among what’s now the responsibility of Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Corcoran has been closely involved at key junctures of the progression of the case. He drafted a statement for federal authorities after a subpoena in the middle of last year demanding that Trump return classified documents he held. That statement, which was eventually signed by another Trump lawyer, Christina Bobb, who doubles as a conservative media host, claimed everything covered by the subpoena was getting returned to officials, which the later raid of Mar-a-Lago by the FBI proved to be false. Bobb has already also answered investigators’ questions. (She’s apparently done so twice.)
Corcoran was also present when Justice Department officials visited Mar-a-Lago in the aftermath of that subpoena to personally retrieve a trove of classified documents made available by the Trump team. The Justice Department has claimed Corcoran was resistant to allowing those officials to themselves look inside boxes in a storage area on the property.
CNN had some details of the questions with which Corcoran was faced when he answered investigators’ queries last month. Investigators inquired “about what had occurred up until the August 8, 2022, search of Mar-a-Lago,” an area of interest including interactions with Trump, as CNN summarized the session. Predictably, Corcoran cited attorney-client privilege in refusing to answer some of the questions directly relating to his communications with the ex-president, although there is still the option that the Justice Department tries to get more information from Corcoran through court action. The department went to court after Trump ally and former administration official Kash Patel declined to answer some questions, and he subsequently reappeared for questioning. As for Corcoran, he has also handled communications between Trump’s team and federal authorities related to the disputed documents.
A separate report revealed that even more classified materials were found at Trump’s southern Florida resort and provided to investigators in recent weeks (although not this month). Those were in addition to the materials previously found at a storage unit in southern Florida associated with the Trump team. This time, the former president’s representatives also gave the government a computer and thumb drive used by an aide who worked at a Trump political action committee (PAC) and copied some of the materials, ostensibly without knowledge of their protected nature. How might these government secrets have been recklessly distributed in Trump’s circles? How on earth was someone who worked at a PAC gaining access?
