Justice Department prosecutors investigating the mishandling of classified documents at Donald Trump’s Florida estate are seeking to pierce the attorney-client privilege and want to again question one of the former president’s lawyers before a grand jury, a person familiar with the matter said Tuesday night.
The privilege protects lawyers from having to tell prosecutors about confidential conversations with their clients. But prosecutors can get around that privilege if they can convince a judge that the communications they want information about were made in furtherance of a crime - a doctrine known as the crime-fraud exception.
The request from prosecutors working with special counsel Jack Smith is expected to lead to closed-door arguments before the chief judge of the District of Columbia federal court about whether prosecutors can compel Corcoran to answer their questions about his conversations with Trump. It remains unclear whether Trump or anyone else will be charged, though the move is a notably aggressive act by Smith’s team. A war crimes prosecutor who previously led the Justice Department’s public corruption section, Smith is separately investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election and recently subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence as part of that probe.
Trump’s lawyers and representatives have featured prominently for months in the investigation into the retention by Trump of roughly 300 documents with classified markings at Mar-a-Lago. The Justice Department issued a subpoena last May to recover classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, but officials who visited the property were given a folder containing only about three dozen records.
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