Ex-NYPD commissioner pardoned by Trump agrees to deal with Special Counsel Jack Smith in 2020 election probe
Fox News
The legal team for former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik reportedly secured a deal with Special Counsel Jack Smith to hand over thousands of documents related to the investigation into former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Kerik’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, was quoted by The Daily Beast and CNN Monday as having agreed to turn over nearly 2,000 pages of material describing how Kerik investigated allegations of voter fraud.
Kerik’s legal team had initially refused to turn over the documents to the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. They had cited attorney-client privilege, given that Kerik worked with Trump’s attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on the probe.
Parlatore said Kerik had agreed to turn over the documents to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign for review in recent weeks, and the campaign waived the attorney-client privilege on Friday, ultimately allowing Kerik’s team to turn over the documents to Smith’s office on Sunday.
“From the time he received a subpoena from the January 6 Committee, Mr. Kerik has believed that full disclosure is the best policy so that the public can understand how extensive the legal team’s efforts to investigate election fraud were,” Parlatore told The Daily Beast.
Kerik’s attorney noted that the documents could include exculpatory evidence for Trump, suggesting the former president’s investigators acted in good faith.
“I have shared all of these documents, appropriately 600MB, mostly PDFs, with the Special Counsel and look forward to sitting down with them in about two weeks to discuss,” Parlatore told CNN.
Parlatore is reportedly scheduled to sit down with federal investigators some time in mid-August.
Last week, Trump announced that he received a letter from Smith notifying him that he was the subject of a Jan. 6 grand jury investigation, suggesting the former president could soon be indicted. Trump had similarly reported receiving a letter ahead of his federal indictment in connection to classified documents found during an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
Newsweek noted that Kerik, who served as the NYPD commissioner from 2000 to 2001, pleaded guilty in 2009 to felony charges of tax fraud and making false statements to the government. He spent about three years in prison before transitioning to home confinement and eventually supervised release. Trump pardoned Kerik for his past convictions in early 2020.
Fox News Digital reached out to Parlatore on Tuesday seeking comment.