Is the Jack Smith Special Counsel pivoting again?

After pivoting from the classified document probe to Jan 6th probe, they seem to be pivoting back to "obstruction" over the classified document probe...

The special counsel appointed by the Biden Justice Department to investigate Donald Trump’s illegal retention of national-defense information at his Mar-a-Lago estate is pursuing testimony from a Trump lawyer on the theory that the former president is guilty of obstruction.

The previous statement from the recent Andrew McCarthy column underscores what recent development have suggested. Apparently Smith has gone to a judge to try to compel Trump attorney M. Evan Corcoran to testify about the affidavit provided to the FBI regarding classified documents. Generally, Corcoran would not be required to testify about anything that is attorney client privilege, unless those communications are part of a narrow exception regarding specific criminal behaviors.

This would require Smith to convince a Judge that the attorney client communications he seeks would be related to a crime committed by Corcoran and therefor worthy of an exception under the law. To be clear, this would mean that the Judge would have to be convinced that Corcoran was part of the criminal conduct, or was aware that the ongoing conduct was criminal. So it would not be enough for Smith to show a crime was committed, but rather he would have to show some evidence that Corcoran knew there was a crime committed and therefor participated at least as an accomplice.

Now the affidavit in question was signed by another attorney named Christina Bobb. Bobb was the attorney responsible for the handling of the Presidential records. Bobb, however is pointing at Corcoran as the main author of the affidavit and the one responsible for the search in question. So this sounds like passing the buck.

• I signed the affidavit, but only because I was told to.

• I am not the one who signed the affidavit, so I am not responsible.

Obviously, the goal from Smith is to get Bobb to turn on Corcoran and then Corcoran to turn on Trump. But as far as anyone can tell, neither Bobb or Corcoran are implicating that Trump had anything to do with the search or the letter in question. I mean, if we are being perfectly honest here, do we really think that Trump had any real clue what was in the dozens of boxes of documents that were being stored there? Do you think we wandered down to the storage locker himself to look through anything? My guess is that he left it up to the attorneys, and ultimately that could be part of his defense.

Moreover, if Smith already had the proof he needs for Trump, then he would not be attempting this sort of legal maneuvering to put Corcoran on the spot. Seems like this has been the pattern all along with these legal investigations into Trump. They invariably come down to believing that someone will just "confess" to conspiring with Trump to commit a crime, or otherwise providing the smoking gun evidence that otherwise is missing. These sort of criminal issues are generally proven with paper trails and physical proof. Not by one person "turning" on another like you see on every television crime drama.

But it feels like the assumption is that Trump is guilty no matter how much he did or didn't know. Just the documents being there is nefarious and criminal all by itself. But if there is no evidence of Trump directly telling his attorney to lie about the contents of the storage locker, then under the laws, he is probably not guilty himself of any obstruction. The attorney is generally held responsible for illegal acts they did independently, even in behalf of a client. The client is only held responsible for attorney actions if he ordered or agreed to what the attorney was doing.

My last point on all of this was that it seems rather pointless that the Trump team would have handed over the original documents while specifically hiding the rest. According to all leaks, the 100 or so documents "seized" from the Trump estate at Mar-a-Lago did not contain anything of any substance, and it was unclear why these documents would have been any different from those they did turn over. Seems equally likely that this was just a lot of documents to go through and that perhaps some things got missed that would not get missed when you send a couple dozen agents to search through everything. Proving any of this was an underlying crime of obstruction? Well... time will tell.