- Evan Corcoran is one of Donald Trump's most recent legal hires.
- The Baltimore attorney previously represented Steve Bannon and January 6 defendants.
- Corcoran has since found himself embroiled in Trump's most recent drama: the Mar-a-Lago raid.
M. Evan Corcoran, a once little-known, low-profile defense lawyer, has emerged in recent months as a key figure in the ongoing Mar-a-Lago raid saga as one of Donald Trump's most recent legal hires.
Corcoran joined the embattled former president's legal team in April — Trump offered Corcoran the job without ever having met him, according to The Washington Post — and quickly entrenched himself in his client's myriad legal troubles.
But Corcoran himself has become headline fodder in the aftermath of the FBI's August 8 raid on Trump's South Florida residence, during which agents seized 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked top secret, from the former president's residence and private club.
A former federal prosecutor turned white collar criminal defense attorney, Corcoran is a partner at the Baltimore law firm Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin & White. According to his webpage on the site, Corcoran represented an insurance company in a $4 billion insurance coverage case stemming from the World Trade Center collapse, and defended corporate officials in the Justice Department's cartel investigations.
The lawyer apparently made a name for himself in complex business litigation and government enforcement actions before becoming ensnared in the legal woes of Trumpworld.
Previous MAGA clients
Corcoran joined Trump's legal team with prior experience representing bombastic figures.
Most notably, Corcoran represented Steve Bannon, former chief strategist for the Trump administration, in his contempt of Congress case. Earlier this summer, A jury in Washington, DC, found Bannon guilty of the charges against him, despite Corcoran's appeal that the case was unjustly fueled by politics.
Corcoran found himself defending Bannon after nearly taking a top role in the same US attorney's office that would later go on to prosecute the War Room host.
In early 2020, Corcoran was in line to become the second-ranking official in the federal prosecutor's office under Tim Shea, a top Trump-era Justice Department official whom then-Attorney General William Barr had appointed as the acting US attorney in Washington. 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, according to people familiar with the offer.
But, within months, Shea was forced out of the US attorney role amid outcry over the Justice Department leadership's interventions in the prosecutions of Roger Stone and former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, ultimately ruining Corcoran's would-be return to the office.
Beyond his experience with Bannon, Corcoran also waded into the world of the Capitol riot, representing the longtime Capitol police officer who was indicted on charges of obstructing the DOJ's investigation into the siege, as well as defending a Pennsylvania man who pleaded guilty last year to participating in the riot.
A fateful conference call
Now Corcoran finds himself defending perhaps the most notorious legal client the country has seen in recent history.
A person familiar with Corcoran's interaction with Trump told The Post last month that the former president offered his newfound attorney the job without ever meeting him after being introduced via a conference call by another Trump advisor.
Corcoran has since found himself embroiled in Trump's most recent legal drama and could theoretically be implicated in the mess, as 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.
Corcoran did not respond to Insider's request for comment.