Former President Donald Trump's attorney Evan Corcoran told associates that he was "waved off" from searching Trump's Mar-a-Lago office where the FBI found classified documents, suggesting he was "materially misled" by the former president's team, according to The Guardian.
Corcoran, whose claims of attorney-client privilege were pierced earlier this year after a judge agreed with the Justice Department that it was more likely than not that Trump used his services in furtherance of a crime, told associates that several Trump aides told him to search the storage room where he found 38 classified documents, according to the report. When he asked whether he should search any other locations he was steered away.
The FBI ultimately executed a court-approved search of Mar-a-Lago months later and found 101 classified documents in Trump's office and elsewhere. The office was "where the most highly classified documents had been located," according to The Guardian's Hugo Lowell.
It's unclear who dissuaded Corcoran from searching the office or whether it was Trump himself.
Corcoran testified to the grand jury examining evidence in that case that Trump "did not personally convey that false information," according to The New York Times. But he said that Trump also did not tell his lawyers of any other locations where the documents were stored, which may have "effectively misled the legal team," according to the report.
"This is completely false and rooted in pure fantasy," a Trump spokesperson told The Guardian. "The real story is the illegal weaponization of the Justice Department and their witch-hunts targeted to influence an election in order to try and prevent President Trump from returning to the White House."
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But some legal experts expressed skepticism that the order did not come from above.
"Hard to imagine a lawyer being 'waved off' by anyone but the client," tweeted former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance.
Investigators have focused on why Trump failed to comply with a subpoena for the return of the documents last year and whether Trump asked for documents to be moved out of the storage room so he could keep them.
Trump aide Walt Nauta told prosecutors that Trump personally instructed him to move boxes from the storage room before and after the subpoena was issued. Two of Trump's employees moved boxes of papers the day before a June 2022 visit by the FBI and even carried out a "dress rehearsal" for moving sensitive papers even before he received the subpoena, The Washington Post reported last week.
Corcoran turned the 38 classified documents he found in the storage room to the DOJ, telling investigators that "records that came from the White House were stored within one location at Mar-a-Lago, the storage room … [and] he was not advised there were any records in any private office space."
Legal experts questioned Corcoran's account.
"What lawyer worth their salt would have agreed to this wave off, knowing that the lawyers would be signing off on the sufficiency of the search?" tweeted national security attorney Bradley Moss.
"Question is why everyone didn't immediately assume ALL THE REALLY CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS MUST THEREFORE BE IN THE OFFICE," added former FBI agent Pete Strzok.
"Seriously?" wrote conservative attorney George Conway, a frequent Trump critic. "Even if your client says he is the most honest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, and that many people, often very big, strong men, have told him this with tears in their eyes?"
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