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Appeals Court Orders Trump Lawyer to Hand Over Records in Documents Inquiry [1]

['Alan Feuer', 'Ben Protess', 'Maggie Haberman']

Date: 2023-03-22  

In particular, prosecutors have been focused on a document that Mr. Corcoran drafted last spring stating that a “diligent search” had been conducted at Mar-a-Lago and that no further classified material remained there — an assertion that would be proved false. Prosecutors have been seeking to learn what Mr. Trump knew about that statement, according to people briefed on the matter.

The case involves a balancing act between attorney-client privilege, which generally protects lawyers from divulging private communications with their clients to the government, and a special provision of the law known as the crime-fraud exception. That exception allows prosecutors to break through attorney-client privilege when they have reason to believe that legal advice or legal services have been used in furthering a crime, typically by the client.

The spat began last month when the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, sought to pierce assertions of attorney-client privilege that Mr. Corcoran and Mr. Trump had made in the documents inquiry. In an initial appearance before a grand jury investigating the case, Mr. Corcoran had asserted the privilege as a way to limit the scope of the questions he would have to answer as well as the number of legal records he would have to turn over.

But in seeking to obtain as much information from Mr. Corcoran as it could, Mr. Smith’s office invoked the crime-fraud exception in a filing to Judge Beryl A. Howell, who sits in Federal District Court in Washington. Prosecutors working for Mr. Smith wanted Judge Howell to set the attorney-client privilege aside and compel Mr. Corcoran to give them what they wanted.

On Friday, Judge Howell issued a ruling saying that the government had indeed met the threshold to invoke the crime-fraud exception and that prosecutors had made a preliminary case that Mr. Trump had violated the law in the documents case.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/us/politics/trump-lawyer-classified-documents-investigation.html

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