A member of failed, one-term former president Donald Trump’s legal team has lawyered up and told the Justice Department she’s ready to “cooperate” with prosecutors investigating the ex-president for allegedly taking classified documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago resort in violation of federal law, according to The Washington Post.
Christina Bobb, has told other Trump allies that she is willing to be interviewed by the Justice Department about her role in responding to the subpoena, according to people familiar with the conversations. Another, M. Evan Corcoran, has been counseled by colleagues to hire a criminal defense lawyer because of his response to the subpoena, people familiar with those conversations said, but so far has insisted that is not necessary.
When asked if she had indeed agreed to assist the DOJ with the ongoing investigation, Bobb responded:
“I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to talk about it.”
Another attorney Trump recently hired, former Florida Solicitor General Christopher Kise, is trying to get the former president to find an “off ramp” to avoid facing criminal charges.
Kise told others he wanted to de-escalate the Trump team’s pugilistic approach to federal prosecutors, according to three people familiar with his comments.
Continuing to attack the Justice Department and the FBI, he argued, was likely to cause federal authorities to be more aggressive. Kise has suggested to other Trump advisers that the best solution would be to try to find an “off-ramp” with the Justice Department before a possible indictment or trial; he has said he thinks Trump can avoid criminal charges.
But if Bobb is ready to tell what she knows to the Justice Department, it seems unlikely that Kise’s rosy scenario of avoiding charges will come to pass.
Bobb also denies that she was ever actually defending Trump on the documents case, which is odd since she did a majority of the interviews in the weeks after the ex-president’s Palm Beach club was searched by FBI agents:
Despite giving numerous interviews in the days immediately after the FBI search in which she was identified as a lawyer for Trump, Bobb told a fellow RSBN anchor during a Sept. 23 broadcast that she was not acting as a Trump attorney while serving as custodian of the records in responding to the subpoena. The difference is important: The Justice Department team investigating the handling of the documents would face few hurdles to compel her to testify if she had not been serving as Trump’s lawyer at the time.
“I think people were a little bit confused,” Bobb told her fellow anchor. “I am on President Trump’s legal team. I do work for him on election issues. I was never on the legal team handling this case, just to be clear on that. Which is why I came in as the custodian of records — because I wasn’t on that team.”
