witness to change their testimony into something false. for instance, to have two witnesses align their testimony improperly. it doesn t matter if you re a lawyer or non-lawyer. the reporting is very careful as it seems to say they re being asked whether a lawyer did this outside of a joint defense privilege. now if that is going on, that same sort of coaching, that improper coaching is going on within a joint defense agreement or just from a lawyer speaking to their own client without other clients being involved, that would also be improper, but the issue is in order to ask those questions, what s going on between a lawyer and a client or what s going on in a joint defense agreement, you would have to get a judge to approve that because if you can t show that that s in furtherance of something like crime of fraud, you won t be able to pierce the attorney-client privilege. we ve heard about that exact kind of motion being made by jack smith to be able to ask
went beyond what you re allowed to do. can you flesh that out for us? is. yeah, nicole, i m glad you raised this. it is completely legal and appropriate for lawyers to feel around to other witnesses who do have a shared interest in having some sort of joint defense agreement, but these questions that prosecutors have been asking witnesses, people like jesse binnell who works with boris epstein, you know, those questions imply in some way that they feel like there might have been inappropriate lines of questioning when it came to forming some sort of joint defense agreement but, you know, we do not have reporting on what exactly the answers were to this line of questioning, we just know that is something that has come up in those conversations between prosecutors and these lawyers. i m going to bring in andrew weissman in on this one. do you read it the same way,
the former president s bidding. so, you got to just come clean. and are they allowed to coordinate testimony. is he allowed to find out what was told to the grand jury? yes, he is. so, as joyce and i know from many an investigation, it is totally legal to for witnesses and lawyers to talk about what they have said and what their interviews have been. what you re not allowed to do is make up testimony and to tailer your testimony falsely. but it is commonplace where there are groups of people under investigation to have something called a joint defense agreement where lawyers frequently talk about what happened. it is a huge problem when it is used for illicit purposes. it obviously could be a totally appropriate way to defend a case. but it can lead to what i used to refer to as sort of legal obstruction of justice. meaning, that it appears to be