One of the very funny recurring themes to Donald Trump’s little classified-documents scandal is that he keeps telling lies about the top secret material and federal investigation, and his lawyers keep refusing to repeat those lies in official court documents, thereby underscoring that he’s full of shit.
Last month, for example, the special master assigned to his case instructed his legal team to provide actual evidence to back up the ex-president’s claims that (1) he had already declassified everything the FBI recovered during its August 8 search of his Mar-a-Lago residence, and (2) agents had additionally planted incriminating evidence while they were there. And because members of said legal team didn’t want to potentially get disbarred or something, they wouldn’t do it. Similarly, last week The Washington Post reported that in early 2022, Trump asked attorney Alex Cannon to tell the National Archives that all the materials requested by the agency had been turned over. Cannon refused since he “was not sure the statement was true,” with other Trump advisers reportedly “encourag[ing] Cannon not to make such a definitive statement” that could later come back to bite him in the ass. Which it obviously would have, given that in the following months, the government uncovered hundreds of documents that Trump had not, in fact, returned.
Unfortunately, it appears that not every lawyer working for Trump considered the possibility of his being constitutionally incapable of telling the truth and that taking him at his word might come back to haunt them. Take, for instance, One America News Network pundit turned Trump attorney Christina Bobb.
Per The New York Times:
This spring, one of the lawyers representing former president Donald J. Trump made an urgent, high-stakes request to Christina G. Bobb, who had just jumped from a Trump-allied cable network to a job in his political organization.
The former president was in the midst of an escalating clash with the Justice Department about documents he had taken with him from the White House at the end of his term. The lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, met Ms. Bobb at the president’s residence and private club in Florida and asked her to sign a statement for the department that the Trump legal team had conducted a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago and found only a few files that had not been returned to the government.
Ms. Bobb, a 39-year-old lawyer juggling amorphous roles in her new job, was being asked to take a step that neither Mr. Trump nor other members of the legal team were willing to take.
That, of course, was because what the statement said was a lie, and it’s possible that the people unwilling to take the “step” of attaching their name to it knew as much. And while she apparently had an inkling that that might be the case—as the Times notes, Bobb “insisted on adding a written caveat” that “the above statements are true and correct to the best of my knowledge”—she nevertheless went ahead and put her John Hancock on the document anyway. Which, as it turned out, was not a great idea.
