M. Evan Corcoran, a once-unknown, low-profile defence lawyer, has emerged as a key figure in the ongoing Mar-a-Lago raid saga as one of Donald Trump’s most recent legal hires in recent months.
Corcoran joined Trump’s legal team in April — Trump offered Corcoran the job without ever meeting him, according to The Washington Post — and quickly became immersed in his client’s numerous legal problems.
Corcoran, on the other hand, has become headline fodder in the aftermath of the FBI raid on Trump’s South Florida residence on August 8, during which agents seized 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked top secret, from the former president’s residence and private club.
M. Evan Corcoran, a once-unknown, low-profile defence lawyer, has emerged as a key figure in the ongoing Mar-a-Lago raid saga as one of Donald Trump’s most recent legal hires in recent months.
Corcoran joined Trump’s legal team in April — Trump offered Corcoran the job without ever meeting him, according to The Washington Post — and quickly became immersed in his client’s numerous legal problems.
Corcoran, on the other hand, has become headline fodder in the aftermath of the FBI raid on Trump’s South Florida residence on August 8, during which agents seized 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked top secret, from the former president’s residence and private club.
Corcoran is a partner at the Baltimore law firm Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin & White and a former federal prosecutor turned white collar criminal defence attorney. Corcoran represented an insurance company in a $4 billion insurance coverage case arising from the World Trade Center collapse, according to his website, and defended corporate officials in Justice Department cartel investigations.
Before becoming entangled in Trumpworld’s legal woes, the lawyer apparently made a name for himself in complex business litigation and government enforcement actions.
Corcoran, who previously represented controversial figures, joined Trump’s legal team.
Most notably, Corcoran represented Steve Bannon, the former Trump administration’s chief strategist, in his contempt of Congress case. Despite Corcoran’s appeal that the case was unfairly fueled by politics, a jury in Washington, DC found Bannon guilty of the charges against him earlier this summer.
Corcoran found himself defending Bannon after almost assuming a top position in the same US Attorney’s office that would later prosecute the War Room host.
Corcoran was set to become the second-ranking official in the federal prosecutor’s office under Tim Shea, a top Trump-era Justice Department official appointed as acting US attorney in Washington by then-Attorney General William Barr. According to people familiar with the offer, Shea arrived as an outsider and turned to Corcoran, a law school friend who had served as a federal prosecutor in the office in the 1990s, for the role of first assistant US attorney.
However, Shea was forced out of the US Attorney role within months due to outrage over the Justice Department leadership’s interventions in the prosecutions of Roger Stone and former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, effectively ruining Corcoran’s return to the office.
In addition to his work with Bannon, Corcoran has represented a long-time Capitol police officer who was indicted on charges of obstructing the DOJ’s investigation into the siege, as well as a Pennsylvania man who pleaded guilty last year to participating in the riot.
Corcoran is now defending possibly the most notorious legal client the country has seen in recent memory.
According to a person familiar with Corcoran’s interactions with Trump, the former president offered his newfound attorney the job without ever meeting him after being introduced via conference call by another Trump advisor last month.
Corcoran has since become embroiled in Trump’s most recent legal saga, and he and another Trump lawyer, Christina Bobb, both communicated with the DOJ during the months-long effort by government officials to retrieve boxes of classified documents from Trump’s resort.
