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BREAKING: Donald Trump did not get indicted today. But it was still a rough one for the former president, whose lawyers stayed up all night trying to convince the DC Circuit to nix Judge Beryl Howell’s order for Evan Corcoran to give the grand jury documents relating to his representation of Donald Trump.
On Friday, Judge Beryl Howell, in her last act as chief judge of the District Court in DC, found that the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege applied to certain aspects of Corcoran’s relationship with Trump, and she ordered him to testify to the grand jury investigating the wrongful retention of government documents at Mar-a-Lago. She also ordered him to hand over certain communications, including transcripts of recordings, immediately.
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Trump appealed to the DC Circuit, which granted an administrative stay last night, ordering briefing from the former president at midnight and the DOJ’s response at 6 a.m. It was clear from the blistering schedule that Judges Pan, Pillard, and Childs were not going to deliberate at length, and indeed they did not.
In a short minute order this afternoon, the panel denied the motion to stay, dissolved the administrative stay, and directed the parties to comply with Judge Howell’s Friday order. So unless Trump manages to get SCOTUS to intervene right now and impose an administrative stay, he’s going to be shit outta luck.
And normally we’d expect that emergency petition any second, but it took Trump’s lawyers from Friday until Tuesday night to get themselves over to the DC Circuit. And their delay in appealing another of Judge Howell’s rulings last summer meant it was too late to block Mike Pence’s aides Greg Jacob and Marc Short from testifying to the grand jury investigating the events of January 6. So … whether these guys get their act together to ask Uncle John to bail them out here is anyone’s guess.
In re Sealed Case [Docket via Court Listener]
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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.