Bernard Kerik, a former New York police commissioner who was once pardoned by Donald Trump, has reportedly made a deal with special counsel Jack Smith to hand over records related to the 2020 election.
Kerik previously served as the 40th commissioner of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) from 2000 to 2001. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to eight felony charges of tax fraud and making false statements to the federal government. He served a little over three years in prison from 2010 to 2013, transitioning to five months of home confinement and finishing out his sentence on supervised release until October 2016. In early 2020, former President Trump issued a pardon for his past convictions.
Later that year, Kerik would aid Trump in his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, searching for evidence to back up false claims of widespread election fraud. Now, according to a report from the Daily Beast, Kerik is set to turn over 2,000 pages of documents detailing his investigatory efforts to Smith as part of the federal criminal investigation into Trump's efforts to overturn the election. Kerik's investigations reportedly focused on conspiracy theories about instances of ballot stuffing and fake voters.
Smith and the Department of Justice (DOJ) previously attempted to acquire those documents from Kerik but were blocked when his legal team cited attorney-client privilege, owing to the fact that he had been conducting the investigations on behalf of Trump's personal lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. According to Kerik's lawyer, Tim Parlatore, Trump himself waived the privilege on Friday, allowing for the transfer of the documents.
As noted by the Daily Beast's report, Kerik's documents will be key to Smith's ongoing investigation, as they are expected to help illustrate the former president's mindset and decision-making processes as he attempted to gather evidence for his false claims of election fraud. Such evidence would help investigators determine whether or not Trump earnestly believed the falsehoods he spread in the aftermath of the election.
Parlatore also argued that the documents might help prove that Trump and his associates engaged in a "good faith" investigation into fraud allegations, according to the Daily Beast's report.
Smith and the DOJ's investigation is believed to be reaching its endgame, as Trump himself recently confirmed that he had received a "target letter," naming him as one of the targets for criminal charges in the case. Trump made a similar announcement about such a letter only a few weeks before he was indicted on federal criminal charges in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigations.
Newsweek reached out to Trump's office via email for comment.
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Thomas Kika is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in upstate New York. His focus is reporting on crime and national ... Read more
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