Appeals court sides with Justice Department in Trump lawyer fight

Corcoran is regarded as relevant to the investigation in part because last year he drafted a statement to the Justice Department asserting that a “diligent search” for classified documents had been conducted at Mar-a-Lago in response to a subpoena. Months later, though, FBI agents searched the home with a warrant and found roughly 100 additional documents with classified markings.

Good. This is all about the obstruction of justice charge - that Trump directed his lawyer to lie in an official memo to the FBI declaring "no additional classified materiel remains at Mar-A-Lago" - then they find 100 more documents two months later.

You think he's going to go to jail for lying to the FBI rather then dime out his client who directed him to send the memo?

Hope Weisselberg has an additional bunk ready.

If you work in any corporation long enough, you'll get a "retention" request from the legal department which says to search all your paper and electronic documents for anything related to XYZ matter/company and to take steps to retain that information. The lawyers usually ask you to send a count of documents, but they don't want copies. I've never seen a "this case is over" communication from the lawyers, so, in theory, those documents from each lawsuit are still being "retained".

Of course, since we'd get new laptops every 3 yrs, I'd only pull my active projects over to the new storage ... and I didn't tell the lawyers about the lost data. And storage fails from time to time too - causing data loss.

I can completely understand if the corporate lawyers, after sending out the message to 25K employees, might make the claim that a search was being performed with instructions to retain any related documents. The follow up would be a completely different matter. It isn't like anyone from legal came to my office to validate I'd done anything. My projects had only spent maybe $5M total with the relevant vendor(s), so our documentation wasn't that important. On a $100M total project budget it wasn't that important.

We'd been on the other side too - being sued by a tiny company. After a year of acting like we'd rather go to court, the chief counsel decided to settle. I think they'd spent more on internal legal costs than the settlement. BTW, we weren't guilty of what the other people said we were guilty of - copyright infringement. We had plenty of proof from our in-house artists proving the art was created originally.

Anyway, the company lawyers thought everyone would do what they were told and reported that.

OTOH, when the FBI asks questions, most people go out of their way to be truthful and double check.