Former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal thinks that Donald Trump is going to jail – and his thoughts are backed up by two of Trump's former lawyers.
Speaking to MSNBC's Katie Phang on Monday, Katyal addressed the recent revelations that Trump's lawyer Evan Corcoran kept about 50 pages of notes from the early days of the document scandal. Those notes are now exposing possible obstructions of justice when a subpoena for them was issued to the DOJ and FBI.
The documents piece of the DOJ probe is one that many legal experts believe has the potential to damage the former president.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr is among those who have said, "of the cases out there right now, the one I'd be most concerned about, if I were the president, is the Mar-a-Lago document case." He made the comments Thursday while speaking to CBS News' Catherine Herridge. Katyal agreed.
"I've thought for a long time this was the strongest potential criminal case against Donald Trump. And it gets stronger and stronger every day. It's always been clear and easy. And, you know, remember, we've always known that Trump had these highly sensitive documents long after he was subpoenaed. So, the current investigation is not as much about did he have the documents. They know Trump kept them. But [it's about] whether he knew he was doing something illegal when he kept them."
Katyal explained that it isn't unusual for a target to "play dumb" by saying things like, "I didn't know I was doing anything wrong." In the past, it's worked for Trump. But now, he said, things have changed.
"In this case, his own lawyers' notes show he needed to hand the documents over and that it looks like he was manipulating them, according to Hugo [Lowell's] phenomenal reporting. And if true, it makes the obstruction case, as you say, pretty easy," Katyal explained.
All of this points to the possibility that Trump could end up in jail, he said.
Phang asked about the piercing of attorney-client privilege, and Katyal explained that it's such a high threshold that "the judges have already determined it to be a crime."
The following steps, he said, are to uncover whether "it's Trump or someone else that the attorney-client privilege was pierced for, and I suspect there is one probably pretty answer to that question."
The comments from Katyal come on the heels of a piece by Aaron Blake in The Washington Post that cited Timothy Parlatore and Ty Cobb as two Trump lawyers that pointed to "the dissension and alienation that have plagued Trump’s legal effort for years."
Parlatore spoke out on CNN over the weekend, revealing a crisis among the Trump lawyers where they're effectively playing against each other rather than representing the client. He specifically cited long-time Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn as the source of a lot of problems.
Cobb took the comments a little further, saying Trump will "go to jail” for his role in the classified documents case. He also attacked the Trump legal team for their handling of the case.
"The real reason is that there are certain individuals that made defending the president much harder than it needed to be,” Parlatore told CNN. "In particular, there is one individual who works for him, Boris Epshteyn, who had really done everything he could to try to block us — to prevent us from doing what we could to defend the president.”
"And the many other misrepresentations that he and others have made on his behalf with regard to his possession of classified documents,” Cobb said, also appearing on CNN. "So, I think this is — I think this obstruction case is a tight case. And, yes, I do think he’ll go to jail on it."
Last month, Cobb went so far as to describe Smith's case as a "slam dunk."
See the comments from Katyal below or at the link here.
Former White House lawyer predicts Donald Trump is going to jail www.youtube.com
