Trump’s former lawyer, Tim Parlatore, acknowledged that the accusation, if you assume it’s all true, doesn’t look great. But Parlatore noted that as a criminal defense attorney, he often looks at allegations and the evidence doesn’t always match up the way the Justice Department says it does.
“CBS Evening News” anchor and editor-in-chief Norah O’Donnell asked Parlatore if former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s assessment that this is a “very, very damning allegation” is incorrect
“Well, I think the problem is that you look at the indictment and if you read it yourself and you assume that everything in it is true and you ignore a lot of the conduct of the DOJ team to get it. , it may seem that way,” Parlatore said. “However, as a criminal defense attorney, one of the things I do for a living is I take documents like this, look at them a little more skeptically. Then I review the evidence to see if it really matches. And often , it doesn’t. The DOJ will often file allegations where, when we get to discovery, we realize they’re not true, or they’re certainly not watertight.
“Just because it looks doomed” doesn’t mean it is, Parlatore said.
Parlatore questioned the Justice Department’s handling of the case, particularly the criminal fraud exception that a judge granted to pierce the attorney-client privilege and allowed records of a conversation between Trump and Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, appear before the grand jury.
Corcoran argued that Judge Beryl Howell “got it wrong.” Beyond his claim that Trump’s legal team was “unable to fully litigate the motion,” in response to the special counsel’s motion to break the privilege, Parlatore cast Trump’s comments to Corcoran as to questions that it would be reasonable for a customer to do: What am I required to do? What can we do?
He argued that one item that hasn’t gotten much mention is Trump’s comment, Parlatore said, “where he specifically says, ‘I read when Hillary Clinton got subpoenaed and David Kendall deleted 33,000 emails.’ Are we allowed to do the same because they didn’t get in trouble?” “You want customers to ask you those kinds of questions,” he argued, so they can understand what their rights are and they should be able to ask those questions in an environment of attorney-client privilege.
Trump, according to notes included in the indictment, said: “I don’t want anybody to look, I don’t want anybody to look through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you to look through my boxes.” He also said, “What if we, what if we don’t respond at all or we don’t play ball with them?” and “Well look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”
Parlatore said, ultimately, that he believes the testimony will be suppressed because Howell “made a mistake.”
