Trump now in an 'unusual and very dangerous' legal situation: analyst

Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti this week said that former President Donald Trump is now in an "unusual" and "very dangerous" legal predicament.

Writing on Twitter, Mariotti broke down the significance of Judge Beryl Howell finding evidence that the former president misled his own lawyers about his possession of top-secret government documents stashed at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

What Mariotti found particularly intriguing about the judge's order was what she told Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to turn over to prosecutors.

"She... ordered him to produce handwritten notes, invoices, and transcriptions of personal audio recordings," he wrote. "That is really important... Regardless of who he recorded, the Judge found that those recorded conversations constitute evidence of what she called Trump's 'criminal scheme.' That could be extremely powerful and important evidence."

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Mariotti called Judge Howell's ruling "remarkable" and said that it frees up Corcoran, who faces his own potential criminal liability for purportedly writing a statement last year that falsely asserted Trump had already returned all requested documents to the DOJ, to spill the beans about his conversations with Trump.

"In my experience, the crime-fraud exception is often discussed but rarely ever invoked," he writes. "I can't remember an actual invocation of crime-fraud in my roughly 20 years of criminal law practice. This is an unusual situation and a very dangerous one for Trump."