Federal Appeals Court Rejects Trump Stay Request, Ordering His Lawyer to Provide Information on Mar-a-Lago to Special Counsel

Earlier this afternoon, we posted my column on a federal judge’s ruling that a lawyer for Donald Trump in the special counsel’s investigation of his illegal retention of classified intelligence must testify and surrender key documents, including notes of conversations he had with Trump before he and another Trump lawyer provided a grand jury and investigators with what turned out to be a factually false representation that Trump had surrendered all documents marked classified. As explained in the column, the former president sought an emergency stay in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which granted it very temporarily but appeared poised to rule against Trump given the jaw-droppingly tight schedule set by the three-judge panel.

Now, as expected, the appellate court has ruled that Trump’s lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, must comply with the grand-jury subpoena issued by the Biden Justice Department–appointed special counsel, Jack Smith, as directed by District Judge Beryl Howell. That includes surrendering the documents, which are said by the Washington Post to include “notes, transcripts of recordings, and invoices in [Corcoran’s] possession.” The ruling came Wednesday afternoon.