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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
Judge Howell’s finding that “the government had made a prima facie showing that the former president committed criminal violations” did not mean prosecutors necessarily had enough evidence to charge Mr. Trump. Rather, it was enough to justify setting aside attorney-client privilege and requiring Mr. Corcoran to divulge information about his interactions with Mr. Trump.
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As part of her decision, she ordered Mr. Corcoran to turn over most of the legal documents he had tried to withhold and return to the grand jury to more fully answer the prosecutors’ questions. Her order also outlined a half-dozen areas of inquiry that the Justice Department wants Mr. Corcoran to answer questions about.
But on Tuesday night, as Mr. Corcoran began preparing to comply with the judge’s order, lawyers for Mr. Trump asked the appeals court to stay the ruling as they sought to reverse parts or all of her decision. The appeals court granted an initial temporary stay of the ruling and set an unusually aggressive schedule for the case, telling Mr. Trump to file papers by midnight and the government to file a response by 6 a.m. on Wednesday.
The appeals court’s decision concerning Mr. Corcoran left open a lingering threat to the government’s case. While the court allowed Judge Howell’s ruling compelling Mr. Corcoran to provide information to prosecutors to stand for now, it also permitted the underlying appeal of the decision to move forward.
That move opened the possibility that if the appeals court — or the Supreme Court — ultimately ruled that the government’s arguments about the crime-fraud exception were wrong, prosecutors would be barred from using the information Mr. Corcoran had provided as evidence to seek any grand-jury indictment or in any trial.
Depending on the stage of any case, that could prove fatally damaging. Prosecutors will therefore have to weigh that risk in deciding whether to make any use of the evidence before the merits of the dispute are fully resolved.
Even though the case has now passed through two different courts and generated several dueling rounds of papers, it still remains unclear precisely what crime the government believes might have been committed — or who, other than or in addition to Mr. Trump, might have committed it.
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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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