Left: M. Evan Corcoran, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, leaves federal court in Washington, Friday, March 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File). Right: Donald Trump awaits the start of a pre-trial hearing with his defense team at Manhattan criminal court, Monday, March 25, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, Pool)
Attorney Evan Corcoran, a longtime attorney for Donald Trump who is widely expected to be a witness for the prosecution in the former president’s classified documents case in Florida, is reportedly off Trump’s legal team.
CNN was first to report the shake-up to the array of attorneys representing Trump in civil and criminal matters. Trump spokesperson Steve Cheung did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday to Law&Crime but denied that Corcoran had departed Trump’s legal team.
Corcoran is expected to be a witness against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago case. He recused himself as Trump’s counsel in that specific matter a year ago this month but stayed aboard on others, including Trump’s four-count felony indictment in Washington, D.C., for allegedly conspiring to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
Citing multiple unnamed sources, CNN reported that Corcoran made his exit quietly months ago.
Hired by Trump in 2022 to take on the Espionage Act case against the former president, Corcoran quickly found himself seemingly at the center of it.
Corcoran was a prolific note-taker and recorded a bevy of voice memos detailing his exchanges with Trump around this time and those ended up proving hugely useful to special counsel Jack Smith. Ultimately, Corcoran recused himself from representing Trump last April, fresh on the heels of testimony he gave to a federal grand jury after Trump had tried and failed to invoke attorney-client privilege over their communications about what had allegedly unfolded around the documents at Mar-a-Lago.
With a crime-fraud exception to that privilege too large an obstacle for Trump to overcome, Corcoran’s notes and voice memos apparently helped provide prosecutors with their proverbial road map to indict, allegedly showing them how Trump misled the attorney about how classified and sensitive documents were being handled and how he tried to evade subpoena.
When Trump finally goes on trial before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — whom he appointed — it is widely expected that Corcoran will be called as a witness for the government. The attorney, according to prosecutors, found dozens of classified documents illegally retained at the property and took direction from the former president to sort through them and pick out “anything really bad in there,” according to Corcoran’s memorialized notes.
Trump is accused of trying to obstruct the FBI and grand jury investigations in multiple ways, including by allegedly directly his accused co-conspirator Waltine Nauta of moving boxes of documents in order to conceal them from Trump’s lawyer, the FBI and others. When Trump was indicted in June 2022, the charges alleged that Trump’s bid to hide the records spurred another one of his attorneys to submit a false disclosure stating that classified records had been returned to the federal government as requested. Corcoran signed that disclosure along with attorney Christina Bobb.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Brian Butler, a former Mar-a-Lago staffer, has said that he recalled seeing Corcoran meeting with FBI investigators briefly before the property was searched with a warrant. Butler has also said that from what he had seen, “it’s very possible” that he witnessed “part of a cover up” at Mar-a-Lago.
Corcoran did not immediately respond to request for comment.
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