Trump campaign refutes attorney Evan Corcoran’s departure

A spokesman for the 2024 Trump campaign is denying reports that an attorney for the former president’s legal team, Evan Corcoran, is no longer representing him.

Corcoran was tapped by former President Donald Trump to ward off charges in the classified documents investigation, but he became a core witness after the former president allegedly misled him about the location of presidential records stored at his Mar-a-Lago resort home. Multiple sources told CNN on Thursday that the attorney made the decision to depart quietly from the Trump legal team in recent months.

However, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Corcoran “remains on the legal team and is continuing to help fighting the Biden Trial witch-hunts,” adding, “Any assertion otherwise is fake news peddled by uninformed sources and untruthful reporting that seeks to leak disinformation and misinformation.”

The Washington Examiner contacted Corcoran. Cheung did not respond to a request for comment.

Reports of Corcoran’s departure come nearly one year after he was forced to appear before a grand jury investigating the case because a district judge said he could not rely on attorney-client privilege to shield notes and voice memos about his conversations with Trump, contending that prosecutors with special counsel Jack Smith’s office met the crime-fraud exception threshold.

Corcoran’s voice memos helped Smith indict Trump on 32 counts of willful retention of national defense information. The attorney opted not to represent Trump in the classified documents case but continued to represent him in other investigations and even joined him when he was arraigned in August last year on federal charges in Smith’s separate indictment of an alleged 2020 election subversion effort.

Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, told the Washington Examiner the biggest problem from Corcoran’s apparent departure is that “his experience and knowledge leaves with him.”

“Corcoran already recused himself from the classified documents case because he may be called as witness and a D.C. judge ruled that his communications fell under the crime-fraud exception and were not privileged,” Rahmani added. “Corcoran currently being on the legal team or not doesn’t change that analysis.”

The former federal prosecutor said the question now is whether U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee presiding over the classified documents case, is willing to deem Corcoran’s communications with Trump admissible in the same way the federal judge in Washington, D.C. did.

Prosecutors say Corcoran personally searched through some remaining documents at Mar-a-Lago and that Trump discussed what to do with the 38 documents marked as classified that the attorney had discovered.

“Did you find anything? … Is it bad? Good?” Trump allegedly said, according to the indictment.

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Cannon has yet to set a trial date in the classified documents case and recently set new deadlines for pretrial filings in early May, a strong sign that a trial won’t get underway until possibly late summer. Still, questions remain as to whether this case will head to trial before the Nov. 5 presidential election.

If Trump were reelected, he would likely seek to remove both of Smith’s federal criminal cases against him. He has pleaded not guilty in both federal cases and in two other state-level indictments in New York and Georgia.