Evan Corcoran: You’re the Next Contestant on Trump’s Crime-Fraud Reality Show
Multiple outlets are reporting that Judge Beryl Howell, in what may be her last ruling as Chief Judge, has ruled that Evan Corcoran must testify about his conversations with Trump.
This follows the news, from ABC, that Jack Smith’s team is particularly interested in a conversation Trump and Corcoran had on June 24, 2022, after prosecutors sent a subpoena to Trump Organization for surveillance footage that would show Walt Nauta moving boxes out of the storage room where the FBI would later find 70 classified documents. As I noted last year, in the early weeks of Trump’s efforts to stall the investigation, there was a discrepancy about what date this subpoena was served, which I suspected might suggest DOJ had to file subpoenas to two different entities before Trump agreed to comply.
So now we’ve ended up where it was clear we were going to end up in September, with another of Trump’s lawyers whose communications with him are found to be crime fraud excepted.
Corcoran is in good company. He is probably at least the fourth Trump lawyer whose comms were deemed crime-fraud excepted in the last five years. The others are:
- Michael Cohen, April 2018
- Rudy Giuliani, January 2022
- John Eastman, March 2022
Indeed, the first such instance, the conversation Cohen recorded of Trump agreeing to a hush payment, will likely lead to the first (or possibly second, depending on what Fani Willis is doing) indictment of Trump, perhaps early next week.
With both Cohen and Rudy, the lawyers withdrew objections after Special Master Barbara Jones deemed the comms not to be privileged.
Corcoran should feel pretty good, though. He may be the first Trump crime-fraud contestant who manages to avoid legal exposure himself.
That’s got to count for something in the Trump Crime-Fraud Reality Show, right?