Lawyer told Trump that defying a subpoena would be a crime

Not long after federal prosecutors issued a subpoena last year for all the classified documents that former President Donald J. Trump had taken from the White House to his South Florida estate, one of his lawyers told him in no uncertain terms that it would be a misdemeanor if he failed to comply, a person familiar with the matter said.

The lawyer, Jennifer Little, this year gave the account of her conversation with Mr. Trump to a grand jury overseen by special counsel Jack Smith. She is one of several witnesses prosecutors were told had advised Mr. Trump to cooperate.

A few months after Ms. Little testified before the grand jury, Mr. Smith accused Mr. Trump of violating the subpoena for the documents and obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to recover nearly three dozen classified documents that he removed from the White House.

As part of her appearance before the grand jury, Ms. Little told prosecutors that the former president clearly understood her warning, the person familiar with the matter said.

Her sworn testimony that Mr. Trump was aware that ignoring the subpoena would be a criminal offense could serve as important evidence of his sense of guilt if she is ultimately called as a witness when the case eventually goes before a jury.

The details of her testimony were ABC News reported this earlier.

The comments from Ms. Little, who was already working for Mr. Trump in connection with a criminal investigation in Georgia and was called in to help advise him on how to comply with the subpoena because she was one of the few people around him who it erases the criminal justice system, were made at a critical meeting in the spring of 2022. At Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, she and another lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, advised the former president that he had to comply with the government’s demand that he return the classified material.

The indictment filed by Mr. Smith in June accuses Mr. Trump of illegally withholding 32 classified national security documents and then conspiring to cover up his actions with two of his aides at Mar-a-Lago. The case will be heard in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida, in late May.

While Mr. Corcoran has received outsized attention in the case — largely because Mr. Smith’s team managed to get a court order to obtain the audio notes of his conversations with Mr. Trump — Ms. Little has so far kept a lower profile .

It was unclear what else Ms. Little testified about during her grand jury appearance.

On Wednesday evening, Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, denounced “misleading leaks” about the case that showed “utter disregard” for attorney-client privilege.

“President Trump has consistently been fully cooperative, personally telling the top DOJ official, ‘Anything you need from us, let us know,’” he said.

Ms. Little was initially subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury of the Federal District Court in Washington on January 25. Both she and Mr. Corcoran initially tried to avoid giving evidence, arguing that their dealings with Mr. Trump were protected by a lawyer. -client right.

But in March, Judge Beryl A. Howell, then Washington’s top federal judge, forced them both to appear before the grand jury under what is known as the crime-fraud exception. This provision allows prosecutors to bypass the attorney-client privilege when they have reason to believe that legal advice or services were used in furtherance of a crime.

Several of Mr. Trump’s aides told him to comply with the subpoena for the classified documents, which was issued to him in May 2022. According to Mr. Smith’s complaint, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Corcoran what would happen if he did that. not cooperating with federal prosecutors.

“What happens if we don’t respond at all or don’t play along with them?” the indictment quotes him as follows.

Ms. Little was no longer directly involved in the documents case not long after that conversation, according to two people familiar with the matter, but she remains involved with Mr. Trump.

She is currently helping represent him in a criminal case in Fulton County, Georgia, where he faces state charges for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.