Ex-NYPD commissioner pardoned by Trump agrees to deal with Special Counsel Jack Smith in 2020 election probe

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The legal team for former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik 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, Fox News Digital confirmed through Kerik's lawyer. 

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.  Reached by Fox News Digital Tuesday, Parlatore said he turned over to Smith's office 600 megabytes of material, the vast majority of which were PDFs. 

"I think it's probably a lot more than 2000 pages," he said. 

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. 

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Former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik discusses his book "From Jailer to Jailed" at AOL Studios on April 6, 2015, in New York City. Kerik worked with former President Trump's team to investigate election fraud allegations. ( Mireya Acierto/Getty Images)

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. 

An email excerpt from Bernard Kerik to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows appears on a video screen above members of the Jan. 6 House Select Committee hearing on July 12, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

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Kerik’s attorney noted that the documents could include exculpatory evidence for Trump, suggesting the former president’s investigators acted in good faith. 

Parlatore told Fox News Digital he recently convinced the Trump campaign that "full disclosure is the best defense here, because the reality is whether there was or was not fraud, the fact that they were actively investigating it in good faith, which these documents demonstrate is exculpatory. It is the defense to any case by Jack Smith." 

"I'm not contesting legitimacy of the election, but from the perspective of a criminal lawyer who asking should Jack Smith indict somebody the answer is no, because this proves that they were investigating fraud at the time," Parlatore told Fox News Digital. "Even if you look at the CNN article where it says, you know, this stuff was all into ‘debunked claims.’ So assuming for a second that that is true, that they've actually been debunked as opposed to just the narrative that everybody's been told to say that they're all debunked, they weren't debunked on the night of Jan. 5." 

Parlatore said that he and Kerik are scheduled to sit down for an interview with federal investigators some time in the next two weeks regarding the documents. 

Washington Post Live Editor Lois Romano interviews former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik on Feb. 10, 2016, in Washington, D.C. Kerik's legal team has recently turned over documents in Special Counsel Jack Smith's 2020 election probe. (Kate Patterson for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

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.

"Rushing to an indictment before you've concluded your investigation to figure out whether a crime has actually been committed is completely imbecilic and runs counter to all the principles of justice," Parlatore told Fox News Digital Tuesday, referencing Smith's probe. "So I think that if he were to indict before interviewing this next set of witnesses, the Trump campaign will likely seize upon the timing as evidence that this is motivated by politics as opposed to justice." 

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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.