Posted on 04/09/2018 1:12:01 PM PDT by Hojczyk
The F.B.I. on Monday raided the office of President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, seizing records related to several topics including payments to a pornographic-film actress. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan obtained the search warrant after receiving a referral from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, according to Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, who called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.” The search does not appear to be directly related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation, but likely resulted from information he had uncovered and gave to prosecutors in New York. “Today the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York executed a series of search warrants and seized the privileged communications between my client, Michael Cohen, and his clients,” said Stephen Ryan, his lawyer. “I have been advised by federal prosecutors that the New York action is, in part, a referral by the Office of Special Counsel, Robert Mueller.” Mr. Cohen plays a role in aspects of the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also recently said he paid $130,000 to a pornographic-film actress, Stephanie Clifford, who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump. Ms. Clifford is known as Stormy Daniels. Mr. Ryan said Mr. Cohen has cooperated with authorities and turned over thousands of documents to congressional investigators looking into Russian election meddling. The payments to Ms. Clifford are only one of many topics being investigated, according to a person briefed on the search. The F.B.I. also seized emails, tax documents and business records, the person said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This whole thing INFURIATES me! I’m praying for God to confound the wicked and promote His people.
See, this is 4-D underwater zero-gravity invisible chess being played by the genius Sessions. All will soon be revealed!
*spit*
DiGenoa said it.appears to be FEC related.
Geez, this witch hunt needs to stop NOW.
In your dreams.
Fox’s Ed Henry asked on Hannity’s radio show when did you ever hear of the offices of Clinton’s personal lawyers being raided?
How about did you ever hear the offices of Perkins Coie being raided due to their involvement with paying foreign nationals for opposition research to be used in an American political campaign?
The DOJ is hopelessly corrupt and it appears Sleepy Jeff has done little to fix it.
In this case, no respect accorded for attorney-client privilege.
Yet in Hillary’s case, her attorneys who participated in the destruction of email records under investigation and were at the very least witnesses were allowed by DOJ to be treated as her attorneys and sit in on DOJ/FBI interviews, and were even given immunity in exchange for essentially nothing.
Here, in seizing the client files of attorney Michael Cohen, the DOJ must anticipate that much of the material will be challenged as subject to attorney-client privilege and therefore not allowed to be seized by the government.
The DOJ may counter that under the crime/fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege, the actions to pay Stormy Daniels off violated election law and were a crime. And maybe they hope to find someone in Cohen’s records who meets the description of the person Daniels claims made threatening comments to her, tying another crime to Cohen and hopefully Trump. They may discover legal analyses written by Cohen of the election laws which may alert the DOJ to weaknesses in Cohen’s legal strategy.
For the DOJ, they do not need to be successful in litigating the question of whether attorney-client privilege covers much of these records.
They win by keeping Stormy Daniels in the news during the election cycle, thereby damaging Trump and the Republicans for the election. If the DOJ can flip the House this cycle, then impeachment gets a green light.
Also, there may be a treasure trove of other leads in the attorney files that will no doubt find their way to the media and Mueller, even if a judge later determines the seizure to be wrongful.
AGREE 100%. The fact that the FBI and Mueller are TOTALLY IGNORING THE NUMEROUS CRIMES COMMITTED BY TEAMS OBAMA AND HILLARY IS SICKENING.
You can say that again!
If by raiding the office of @realDonaldTrump’s attorney, the @fbi violated Trump’s attorney-client privilege, this is about to get really ugly.
4:38 PM - 9 Apr 2018
According to Mark Levin, Sessions could stop this anytime. Rosenstein granted the Mule to much authority, who it seems is even taking more authority than was granted, and Session’s can invoke his actual authority to limit the scope of Mule.
.... Stormie’s Lawyer said last week that Trump saying he didn’t know about the payoff was a “Gift from Heaven.” My guess is they are trying to find evidence that the Evil Trump ordered the payoff.
Just an ordinary day in 2018, when FBI agents are rifling through the president’s lawyer’s papers to find out about a hush-money payoff to a porn star.
Two things about this. One: It surely has to do with more than Stormygate. The FBI wouldn’t make a move this explosive because they’re worried about an undeclared two-year-old campaign contribution.
Two: Trump is going to blow a gasket, above and beyond his usual Russiagate indignation. With the possible exception of Keith Schiller, there may be no one in TrumpWorld who knows as many secrets as Michael Cohen. If he’s done anything in the past, Cohen not only would probably know about it, he might have the paperwork to prove it. I wonder who’s getting fired first — Sessions, Rosenstein, or Mueller himself.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan obtained the search warrant after receiving a referral from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, according to Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, who called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.” The search does not appear to be directly related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation, but likely resulted from information he had uncovered and gave to prosecutors in New York…
The payments to Ms. Clifford are only one of many topics being investigated, according to a person briefed on the search. The F.B.I. also seized emails, tax documents and business records, the person said.
The seized records include communications between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, which would likely require a special team of agents to review because conversations between lawyers and clients are protected from scrutiny in most instances.
Trump warned Mueller early on not to cross the line by expanding his investigation into Russia-related matters in 2016 into a full-blown investigation , his business, etc. Mueller’s answer appears to be, “Fine. If I stumble across anything unrelated to Russia, I’ll just hand that off to the relevant U.S. Attorney.” He won’t exceed the scope of his inquiry but others prosecutors will.
How unusual is it for the feds to raise a lawyer’s office? Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Ken White..
Imagine how many layers of approval it would require when it’s the president’s lawyer. At a minimum, notes White, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman (a Trump appointee) would have signed off. I wonder if Rod Rosenstein was consulted. The politics are so explosive that it’s unimaginable lower-ranking DOJ officials would have ordered it without letting the higher-ups know. :
3. A Magistrate Judge signed off on this. Federal magistrate judges (appointed by local district judges, not by the President) review search warrant applications. A Magistrate Judge therefore reviewed this application and found probable cause — that is, probable cause to believe that the subject premises (Cohen’s office) contains specified evidence of a specified federal crime. Now, Magistrate Judges sometimes are a little too rubber-stampy for my taste. But here, where the Magistrate Judge knew that this would become one of the most scrutinized search warrant applications ever, and because the nature of the warrant of an attorney’s office is unusual, you can expect that the Magistrate Judge felt pretty confident that there was enough there.
That raises the question: What could be so terribly incriminating that Berman, Rosenstein, and a federal magistrate judge would risk embarrassing Trump by doing something like this? What do they think Cohen has but hasn’t turned over that’s worth a raid?
Coincidentally, McClatchy published this story just three days ago: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators this week questioned an associate of the Trump Organization who was involved in overseas deals with President Donald Trump’s company in recent years.
Armed with subpoenas compelling electronic records and sworn testimony, Mueller’s team showed up unannounced at the home of the business associate, who was a party to multiple transactions connected to Trump’s effort to expand his brand abroad, according to persons familiar with the proceedings.
Investigators were particularly interested in interactions involving Michael D. Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney and a former Trump Organization employee. Among other things, Cohen was involved in business deals secured or sought by the Trump Organization in Georgia, Kazakhstan and Russia.
Maybe Mueller has information about a business deal not involving Russia and felt it’d be safer to refer that matter to the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan rather than pursue it himself and risk violating the boundaries of his Russiagate authority. The Stormy Daniels matter may be low-hanging fruit that Mueller’s interested in as a way to potentially flip Cohen. If he can find written evidence somewhere that Cohen made the payment with an eye to influencing the election, that would potentially make it easy to prove that it was in fact a campaign contribution for legal purposes — an undeclared one, for which Cohen could be punished. Unless he’s willing to cooperate.
Is he? The core, core, core duty of being Donald Trump’s “fixer,” one would think, is taking as many bullets as is necessary for the boss. If that means going to jail for a thousand years on contempt charges because you won’t testify against him, that’s what it means.
His lawyer is outraged: It wasn’t just Cohen’s law office either: It was more than that! Vanity Fair says they raided his hotel room as well. I wonder if that’s standard practice or if they feared Cohen might start destroying evidence in other locations once he found out that they were raiding another.
He’s now involved in two criminal investigations, one Mueller’s, the other the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s. That’s extra pressure to cooperate with Mueller, as he could conceivably be indicted by the DOJ in two different jurisdictions if he doesn’t. This is Russiagate’s boldest squeeze play yet.
“This is war.” Stand by for updates. https://hotair.com/archives/2018/04/09/oh-boy-feds-raid-michael-cohens-office-seize-material-related-payments-stormy-daniels-matters/
President Trump said last week he didn’t know about any payment to this person who he has also said he didn’t have sex with. The President’s former lawyer paid the woman for some reason. Why? The swamp must be in a big tizzy over Congress looking at what the Obama swamp was doing for years.
Time will tell. If this country is going down, I don’t believe it will do so quietly.
The seized records include communications between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, which would likely require a special team of agents to review because conversations between lawyers and clients are protected from scrutiny in most instances.
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I’m unfamiliar with the “special team of agents” exception to the attorney-client privilege.
We are witnessing being conservative become a criminal act.
A person familiar with the matter told NBC News that this was not a subpoena requesting documents from Cohen. Instead, the source said, this was a court-authorized search, which means there was sufficient probable cause for a federal judge to agree that a search involving the President’s personal attorney could occur without any advance notice to Cohen.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/fbi-raids-office-trump-lawyer-michael-cohen-n864121
The DOJ & FBI can’t supply paperwork after a year and Subpoenas, but they can raid a President’s lawyers office. Unf****believable. Fire Mueller-Rosenstein and Sessions!
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