Christina Bobb, a lawyer for Donald Trump and a commentator on right-wing media, has answered questions before a federal grand jury as Special Counsel Jack Smith investigates Trump’s handling of classified documents originating with his time in office.
It’s unclear there is any substantive evidence at all that Trump took action to declassify the materials in dispute before exiting the White House, although the classification status of the documents isn’t the only lingering question. There are also matters like obstruction of justice and perhaps the possible mishandling of the materials no matter their technical status, considering the sensitivity of some of the information. It’s even come out that a Trump aide working for his Save America PAC made digital copies of some of the classified information that the ex-president retained, ostensibly without prior knowledge of the protected status of what they were scanning. As for Bobb, she infamously signed a statement for federal investigators in the middle of last year that everything covered by a subpoena for classified docs Trump had was getting returned. That was false.
Evan Corcoran, another lawyer for Trump who has also made an appearance before a grand jury in Smith’s investigation, drafted the statement Bobb signed, although Bobb wanted the addition of language that qualified exactly what she was claiming, making it less of a definitive statement and more of an attestation to simply what she knew at the time. Bobb told investigators in an earlier sit-down last year that Corcoran assured her a comprehensive search was conducted at Mar-a-Lago for the documents, although it’s not as though it seemed it was particularly difficult for FBI agents raiding the premises to later uncover dozens and dozens of additional classified documents over the course of a raid completed in just a day. Corcoran and Bobb’s appearances before a grand jury reportedly took place last month. The earlier occasion on which Bobb answered queries from investigators wasn’t in front of a jury.
She and Corcoran were also both involved with the reception for Justice Department officials who made a brief visit to Mar-a-Lago to collect some classified documents in between the contested subpoena and the eventual raid. The defenses from Trump’s corner, as pushed by Corcoran and others, have been all over the place. Supposedly, according to both Trump and at least some of Corcoran’s own contentions, the ex-president was cooperating — and yet, Trump has also insisted on the return of materials agents seized from Mar-a-Lago. You could imagine various scenarios here, from that Trump was intentionally harboring known quantities of classified documents to that he simply didn’t care enough to actually comply to the point of completing a more thorough search. Whatever the scenario, it doesn’t seem promising for the ex-president, who could eventually face charges.
