President Donald Trump said Sunday that all lawyers are now “deflated and concerned” by the FBI raid on his personal attorney Michael Cohen’s home and office.
“Attorney Client privilege is now a thing of the past,” he tweeted. “I have many (too many!) lawyers and they are probably wondering when their offices, and even homes, are going to be raided with everything, including their phones and computers, taken. All lawyers are deflated and concerned!”
The raid carried out last Monday sought bank records, records on Cohen’s dealing in the taxi industry, Cohen’s communications with the Trump campaign and information on payments he made to various woman, people familiar with the investigation into Cohen told The Associated Press.
Trump has been enraged by the raid, calling it an “attack on the country.”
Lawyers for Cohen appeared in federal court in New York on Friday asking that they, not the Department of Justice, be given a first crack at reviewing the seized evidence to see if it was relevant to the investigation or could be forwarded to criminal investigators without jeopardizing attorney-client privilege.
Prosecutors contend that Cohen was “performing little to no legal work” for Trump. They acknowledged that the investigation was referred by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is looking into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but was being conducted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders demurred when asked Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” if Trump was worried that Cohen might agree to work with prosecutors, if charged, to reduce his own punishment.
“Look, the president is very confident in the fact that he has done nothing wrong and he can’t speak on behalf of anyone else, but he’s very confident in what he has and hasn’t done,” Sanders said. “And he’s going to continue focusing and fighting for the American people.”
Cohen, who didn’t attend Friday’s hearing, was ordered to appear in federal court on Monday to help answer questions about his law practice. He has denied wrongdoing.
(AP)
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6 Responses
Threatened is a better word. If the precedent stands, prosecutors at all levels will feel free to seize documents and interrogate lawyers about their client’s affairs. The attorney-client privilege had been well established, and without it there can probably not be effective legal representation. The only effective solution would be for Mueller to be disbarred for willfully violating a core practice in the American legal system – and that’s unlike since the people who control discipline of attorneys share Mueller’s hatred of Trump.
This is one lawyer who is not deflated or concerned about the FBI and its actions. I’m more concerned about Trump’s continual lies.
Trump is partly right. Lawyers are concerned that the actions of Michael Cohen tarnish their profession. All lawyers should realize how difficult it is to meet the requirements to get a search warrent for a lawyers home and office.
It was difficult to get a search warrant in order to gain access to information protected by lawyer-client privilege. “WAS” as in it used to be, but not anymore. If this highly publicized breach of attorney-client privilege goes unpunished, every prosector will feel he/she is entitled to the same, and all the liberals who rejoiced when Trump’s lawyer had his files sized by the police will be horribied when their lawyer’s suffer the same fate.
The question of whether or not this raid was justified depends on something we do not know – the actual information given to (and missing from) the judge on which the judge issued the warrant. As in the case of the FISA warrants that have been revealed ,the question became whether the judge was bamboozled into issuing the warrant due the fact the judge was never told that the report which cast suspicions on the Trump campaign was paid and bought for by the Clinton campaign. So there is precedent here to suspect questionable tactics in convincing the judge to issue the warrant.
The second point that seems to be relevant is that Cohen was cooperating with anything they asked for, so the suspicion arises that there was no need for a raid in the first place, and that it was deliberately done this way for publicity (bordering on political innuendo).