In May of last year, shortly after the Justice Department issued a subpoena to former President
Donald Trump for all classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump's then-lead attorney on the matter, Evan Corcoran, warned the former president in person, at Mar-a-Lago, that not only did Trump have to fully comply with the subpoena, but that the FBI might search the estate if he didn't, according to Corcoran's audio notes following the conversation.
Only minutes later, during a pool-side chat away from Trump, Corcoran got his own warning from another Trump attorney: If you push Trump to comply with the subpoena, "he's just going to go ballistic," Corcoran recalled. ... "that there's no way he's going to agree to anything, and that he was going to deny that there were any more boxes at all," Corcoran recalled on his recordings.
Corcoran's recollections, captured in a series of voice memos he made on his phone the next day, help illuminate Trump's alleged efforts to defy a
federal grand jury subpoena, and appear to shed more light on his frame of mind when he allegedly launched what prosecutors say was a criminal conspiracy to hide classified documents from both the FBI and Corcoran, his own attorney.
Corcoran provided special counsel Smith's team with his recordings after, as previously reported by ABC News, the now-former chief judge of the federal court in Washington ordered him to do so, finding that Smith's office had made a "
prima facie showing that the former president had committed criminal violations" by deliberately misleading his attorneys about his handling of classified materials, sources familiar with the matter said at the time.