'Hot potato': Legal experts explain how Trump lawyers are 'turning against each other' in DOJ document probe

11 October 2022

In June, according to Law & Crime, Christina Bobb — an attorney for former President Donald Trump — signed a letter stating that Trump had returned all government documents that had been subject to a grand jury subpoena in May. But when FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound in Palm Beach, Florida on Monday, August 8, the documents they confiscated reportedly included government documents — among them, according to the Washington Post, highly classified documents pertaining to nuclear weapons.

Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush of the New York Times reported, on September 16, that the letter Bobb signed in June was allegedly authored by another Trump attorney: Evan Corcoran. And NBC News reported that Bobb told U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys that Corcoran “drafted it and told her to sign it.”

In an article published on October 11, Law & Crime’s Colin Kalmbacher discusses Bobb, the June letter she signed, and legal reactions to it.

“Legal Twitter was abuzz over recent reports that one of former President Donald Trump’s attorneys recently spoke with federal prosecutors about various details regarding allegedly classified documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago during an August FBI raid,” Kalmbacher explains. “According to an NBC News report citing ‘three sources familiar with the matter,’ that attorney, Christina Bobb, a one-time talking head on the right-wing network One America News Network, ‘named two other Trump attorneys involved with the case’ during a recent talk with the U.S. Department of Justice…. There is no indication by the latest developments that Bobb is being threatened with prosecution to move higher up the ladder.”

A source told NBC News, “(Bobb) is not criminally liable. She is not going to be charged. She is not pointing fingers. She is simply a witness for the truth.”

On October 10, former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti tweeted, “Christina Bobb spoke to the Feds and told them that another Trump lawyer, Evan Corcoran, was the source of the false info in the certification she made regarding the Mar-a-Lago documents. If true, she is likely right that she has no liability. But now *he* is in the hot seat.”

Mariotti also tweeted, “Prosecutors will want to know why he directed Bobb to make a false statement to the DOJ and what the source of his false information was. (Potentially, that was Trump.) I expect Corcoran to refuse to be interviewed, claim he believed the info was true, and assert privilege.”

Just Security’s Ryan Goodman, a professor at New York University Law School, tweeted, on October 10, that “Trump lawyers” were “turning against each other.”

Andrew Weissmann, who worked closely with former Special Counsel Robert Mueller during the Russia investigation, also discussed Bobb and Corcoran on October 10, tweeting, “Bobb has passed the hot potato squarely to Corcoran to now tell DOJ how HE knew responsive docs had all been provided pursuant to the subpoena. It’s a crime to intentionally not comply with a subpoena.”

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