Federal agents on Monday raided the offices of President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, who has been under intense public scrutiny for weeks over a $130,000 payment to woman who has alleged an inappropriate relationship with Trump more than a decade ago.
The move ignited the president’s anger, with Trump calling it a “disgrace” that federal agents “broke into” the office of his personal attorney. He also called special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation “a total witch hunt” and “an attack on our country.”
The raid on Cohen’s office was done by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan and was based at least partly on a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller, according to Cohen’s lawyer, Stephen Ryan.
“The decision by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York to conduct their investigation using search warrants is completely inappropriate and unnecessary,” Ryan said in a statement. “It resulted in the unnecessary seizure of protected attorney client communications between a lawyer and his clients.”
JUST IN: President Trump has been watching TV reports of the FBI raiding the office of Michael Cohen, his longtime lawyer and confidant, a White House official tells @jeffzeleny https://t.co/flG4uDokat pic.twitter.com/TPwNYy3JRe
— CNN (@CNN) April 9, 2018
The raid creates a new legal headache for Trump even as he and his attorneys weigh whether to agree to an interview with Mueller’s team, which in addition to investigating potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign is also examining whether the president’s actions constitute obstruction of justice.
The existence of a referral from Mueller’s office to the Manhattan U.S. Attorney suggests that the matter isn’t related to Russia.
Under Justice Department regulations, Mueller is required to consult with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein when his investigators uncover new evidence that may fall outside his original mandate. Rosenstein then will determine whether to allow Mueller to proceed or to assign the matter to another U.S. attorney or another part of the Justice Department.
A spokesman for Mueller’s office did not immediately return a call seeking comment. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the U.S. attorney’s office also had no comment. The New York Times first reported on Monday’s raid.
Ryan did not elaborate on the documents that were taken from Cohen’s office but said he has cooperated with investigators, including meeting last summer with lawmakers looking into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In his remarks to the Senate intelligence committee, Cohen confirmed that during the early parts of the Trump campaign, the Trump Organization pursued a proposal in Russia for a Trump Tower Moscow. He has downplayed the significance of the deal, which fell through, and said it wasn’t related to the campaign.
But Cohen has more recently attracted attention for his acknowledgment that he paid the woman $130,000 out of his own pocket just days before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen has said neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with the woman and he was not reimbursed for the payment.
Trump told reporters last week that he did not know about the payment.
The woman has said the relationship with the president took place in 2006. She has been suing to invalidate the nondisclosure agreement she signed before the election and has offered to return the $130,000 she was paid in order to “set the record straight.”
She argues the agreement is legally invalid because it was signed by only herself and Cohen, but was not signed by Trump.
Several former officials at the Federal Election Commission have said the payment appears to be a violation of campaign finance laws, and multiple Washington-based groups have filed complaints with the FEC, urging it to investigate.
There have been few signs that Mueller was interested in investigating the payment, though. One Mueller witness, former Trump aide Sam Nunberg, recently connected the special counsel with the payment, saying in an interview on MSNBC last month that prosecutors had asked him about it.
Federal agents searched Cohen’s office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, where he had been working as part of a “strategic partnership” with the law firm Squire Patton Boggs.
On Monday, the firm said in a statement that its relationship with Cohen had “reached its conclusion, mutually and in accordance with the terms of the agreement.”
“We have been in contact with Federal authorities regarding their execution of a warrant relating to Mr. Cohen,” the firm’s statement said. “These activities do not relate to the firm and we are in full cooperation.”
(AP)
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4 Responses
The Trumpkopf seems to become more delusional day by day. The FBI did not “break in” to his lawyer’s office. They executed a lawful search warrant. That search warrant was requested by the Trumpkopf’s own recent appointee as U.S. Attorney for New York SD and was approved by his own appointee as Deputy AG at DOJ. If he cannot understand those simple facts, than perhaps we need to be considering the options available under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
While I think the checks and balances is a system that is sacred as prescribed by the constitution this is not that. This is over and beyond what his mandate was to be. He is not the country’s prosecutorial minister of the president and his office. This guy should be fired at once and charges broight against him for his violations. He is a tyrant and we don’t have tyrany in this country a la the chants of the Boston Tea Party of the 1700s.
The FBI is looking into the lawyer’s $130,000 contribution by Trump’s lawyer, which came from his home equity line of credit, to pay an actress to remain silent about something that never happened. This is probably a violation of campaign finance laws as well as an unbelievable story .
For the police to raid an attorney’s office to seize documents protected by attorney-client privilege is extremely outrageous. It is roughly on the same order as holding people with recourse to bail or habeas corpus, or suspending juries in criminal cases, or trying people in secret while denying them right to counsel. Of course, one can argue that civil liberties are just old fashioned things left over from an earlier era, but this seriousness of this may shock many anti-Trump “resistance” to understand that they don’t really want a world in which the police can force all lawyers to reveal what all their clients say – which is what is really at stake.