Timothy Parlatore, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, said Thursday that he testified before a grand jury investigating classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago for several hours in December 2022 about additional searches for classified documents at Trump properties.
“I chose to go in there because I felt that it was a good opportunity as a trial lawyer for me to go in and be able to speak directly to the grand jury to explain to them what we did, to explain to them how we had complied with the subpoena, how there was no obstruction,” Parlatore told CNN.
ABC News first reported on his grand jury testimony.
Parlatore organized searches for additional classified documents last year at Trump Tower, Trump’s property in Bedminster, Mar-a-Lago, an office in Palm Beach and a Florida storage unit.
He testified before the grand jury as Trump’s team and the Justice Department were embroiled in a dispute in which the Justice Department unsuccessfully sought to hold Trump in contempt for failing to hand over all classified documents after receiving a subpoena in May 2022.
Parlatore appeared before the grand jury to respond to a battery of questions about how subsequent document searches were conducted. He was not subpoenaed to appear.
Parlatore said he had provided the government copies of reports his team wrote on each of the searches of Trump properties. Prosecutors went over the reports with him in front of the grand jury, as well as details such as who conducted the searches, which properties were searched, how those locations were chosen and what was found.
The Trump attorney took issue with some of the questions prosecutors asked him during his roughly seven-hour appearance on December 22, 2022.
“They repeatedly tried to ask me about my conversations with President Trump, which is totally outside the scope of what I was there for,” Parlatore said.
Source: www.cnn.com