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[Michael Cohen thread] SDNY cases against Cohen, Stormy Daniels case, bribes through Cohen
matt has a problem
Points to 'off'Points to 'on'Registered User regular
Points to 'off'Points to 'on'Registered User regular
So, today, the FBI raided the office of Michael Cohen.
And his New York residence. And his temporary residence at the Lowes Regency Hotel.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/09/politics/michael-cohen-fbi/index.html
Erica Orden is a reporter for the WSJ
Ostensibly to gather documentation on the Stormy Daniels scandal, but likely searching for more.
This is huge for several reasons, not the least that this was a no-knock raid of an attorney for a sitting US President, that included seizing communications between an attorney and his clients. That a judge signed off on this warrant means there had to have been a near-incontrovertible amount of evidence showing this raid would produce evidence of a crime or crimes. This came about from information Robert Mueller brought to acting Attorney General Rosenstein, and Rosenstein authorized the FBI to take action. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York executed the search warrants.
The President has responded, in the expected fashion.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/after-fbi-raids-cohens-office-trump-calls-probe-an-attack-on-our-country
Now quit trying to get infracted in the Mueller thread!
And his New York residence. And his temporary residence at the Lowes Regency Hotel.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/09/politics/michael-cohen-fbi/index.html
Erica Orden is a reporter for the WSJ
Ostensibly to gather documentation on the Stormy Daniels scandal, but likely searching for more.
A person briefed on the search told the Times that the FBI also seized emails, tax documents and business records, including communications between Trump and Cohen.
This is huge for several reasons, not the least that this was a no-knock raid of an attorney for a sitting US President, that included seizing communications between an attorney and his clients. That a judge signed off on this warrant means there had to have been a near-incontrovertible amount of evidence showing this raid would produce evidence of a crime or crimes. This came about from information Robert Mueller brought to acting Attorney General Rosenstein, and Rosenstein authorized the FBI to take action. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York executed the search warrants.
The President has responded, in the expected fashion.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/after-fbi-raids-cohens-office-trump-calls-probe-an-attack-on-our-country
“So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, a good man, and it’s a disgraceful situation,” Trump told reporters at the start of a meeting with military brass and national security advisers. In fact, Cohen’s own lawyer acknowledged in a statement that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York had “executed a series of search warrants,” which would have to be approved by a federal judge.
“It’s a total witch hunt,” he continued. “I’ve been saying it for a long time. I’ve wanted to keep it down. We’ve given, I believe, over a million pages worth of documents to the special counsel. They continue to just go forward.”
“I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now,” Trump said, adding: “It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.”
Trump called Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office “the most conflicted group of people I have ever seen” and complained, as he often has, about Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusing himself from Russia- and campaign-related matters.
“He should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself and we would have put a different attorney general in,” Trump said of Sessions. “So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country.”
Trump complained that no one “is looking at the other side,” a reference to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
After concluding his comments, Trump listened to reporters’ shouted questions and repeated one: “Why don’t I just fire Mueller?” he wondered aloud.
“Well, I think it’s a disgrace what’s going on. We’ll see what happens. But I think it’s really a sad situation when you look at what happened.”
“And many people have said you should fire him,” he continued. “Again they found nothing and in finding nothing that’s a big statement. If you know the person who’s in charge of the investigation, you know all about that. Deputy Rosenstein, Rod Rosenstein, he wrote the letter very critical of Comey.”
Now quit trying to get infracted in the Mueller thread!
So It Goes on
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I love how Trump is associating this as a part of the Mueller investigation. Or, maybe, we now know the actual intent behind him calling "this" a "witch hunt." He's actually mad that he and his are being investigated for anything at all. He sees it as a conspiracy to go after 'them.' What a deranged loon.
BUT the man of the hour is Cohen and bank fraud would be a hell of a thing to be nailed for. His disbarment, at the very least, is coming up.
Only in that is probably part of the info seized. Judges do not sign off on search warrants targeting defense attorneys lightly. That goes treble when said attorney is tied to the President of the United States. This happening is massive.
Could be. The scenario seems to be Meuller came across evidence of wrong doing wrt to Cohen that fell outside of his jusridiction as Special Counsel so he passed the info along to the proper authorties, who, upon examining said info, found it to be worth a full blown warrant for a 3 location raid.
The Daniels pay off probably factors in but it sounds like there's a lot more going on there.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
They said they took tax documents and records that included to the payoff, so the payoff is probably only related as a piece of a larger financial puzzle.
Many people have described Cohen as Trump's fixer. There's no telling what kind of bribery, spurious settlements, or legally grey obfuscation thereof, that he has gotten in to over the years; or for whom.
Ok now that that’s out of my system...
Cohen is the paperwork guy for all of Trump’s real estate stuff, in addition to representing him for some other personal matters, right?
So does this lead to an arrest of Cohen, or was Cohen just the vector to get the evidence for others...
Considering Meuller was free to share info with them I'd imagine if they found something they felt was relevant to the investigation they could send it back on over to Meuller.
He's more Trump's mob enforcer of a lawyer.
https://www.popehat.com/2018/04/09/the-search-of-trump-lawyer-michael-cohens-office-what-we-can-infer-immediately/
Mueller, NY district attorney, etc... Trump has real estate ventures in multiple states, they might all have claims, depending on what gets found. This raid may have nothing to do with Russia, but it still absolutely could have a LOT to do with Trump.
If Cohen was committing crimes, it's entirely plausible he was doing some of them on behalf of Trump. Trump is certainly acting like this raid is an attack on him. Like he's fairly certain the FBI will find things about his own involvement in these alleged crimes.
It's going to be real interesting to watch this case.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Supposedly documents seized include records of conversions between Trump and Cohen.
Attorney Client privalige won’t keep them safe if they discuss crimes they are committing.
Oh, shit. I forgot about that. Mueller was looking into foreign campaign funds; which could have been to context of his tip on whatever this is.
Edit: And if this is targeting the GOP, it makes sense that they would want to put more of a target on Mueller.
(Though this feels like pretty tin-foily speculation)
Records or recordings?
Is Cohen a smart enough lawyer to sanitize those kind of things?
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
The most important thing is that it prevents Cohen from destroying evidence related to Stormy Daniels from this point forward.
Prior to today, he was expected to be Trump's nominee to the post permanently.
I'm guessing that opinion will be subject to change in the near future.
https://reason.com/archives/2018/04/09/what-we-know-about-the-search-trump-lawy
Seems like a Big Deal.
He’s very consistently a gigantic idiot
How does law enforcement seize these documents and avoid breaching attorney-client privilege at the same time?
I mean, surely they have a warrant to search for documents related to money laundering, campaign finance violations, etc. But if, in the processing of those documents, they found evidence of another crime, and that evidence was say, documentation of a conversation between attorney and client? How do you put the rabbit back in the hat on that sort of thing? Does it become inadmissible and you have to prove it some other way? Does everyone take a valium and pretend it never happened? Like, this is a part of law that I never thought about and I'm really curious about now. What is the extent of attorney-client privilege?
SiG as a legal matter what does that make the pay off if theres no valid agreement to go along with it?
The popehat article talks about that.
In short, you are right: You have to do a LOT to do this, because there is no way not to violate the attorney/client privilege.
Well then Mr. President, why do your companies, relatives, cabinet, and lawyers all resemble the Slytherin common room?
They double up the investigation. Running a dirty team (which looks at the info) and a clean team(that does not). This way they have perfect construction for anything they need if the dirty teams stuff gets thrown out
From what I've read they use a completely separate "taint" team which is completely walled off from the rest of the investigation to go through the messages and separate out the ones which are privileged. The actual investigators don't ever see those files.
Oh god. Please give me tv news anchors and talking heads having to say "taint team" ad nauseum.
Any chance this is the reason Mueller passed it off?
it's basically a doc review gig though
albeit a particularly sensitive one.
are you asking if he's a bad enough dude to rescue the President?
Given plenty interviews saying it, and he did sit for 2 days with the intelligence committees of both the house and Senate, but I doubt Stormy Daniels stuff came up, so probably nothing under oath. This feels pretty big though..big like they're likely going to trace this hush money and/or other shady expenses straight back the GOP. Of course there's always the possibility dude really was dumb enough to pull 130k out his home equity line for a client notorious for not paying his attorneys.
At a minimum I feel like emails/documents with those two calling Daniels some very awful things are probably going to leak.
Or was that Lewandowski?
He is indeed the "Says Who?" Guy.