Lawyer’s bad week worsens
NEW YORK Michael Cohen’s bad week reached a crescendo yesterday as federal prosecutors confirmed he is a target of a criminal investigation and a judge ordered him to appear in court on Tuesday with a list of his clients.
The week started for Cohen, long known as President Donald Trump’s ‘‘fixer’’, with FBI raids on his office, home and hotel room. Agents also seized the contents of a safety deposit box and two of his cellphones.
In all, the FBI may have taken thousands, if not millions, of privileged documents from Cohen, his lawyers claimed in an emergency request to stop prosecutors from going through the data before they had a chance to review it. US District Judge Kimba Wood, after three separate hearings yesterday, gave the lawyers until Tuesday to file further paperwork and prepare arguments.
Prosecutors revealed that Cohen had been the target of a months-long federal investigation in New York, separate from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the November 2016 US presidential election.
Trump’s advisers believe the Cohen investigation is a bigger threat to the president than the special counsel’s inquiry, the New York Times reported yesterday.
Cohen wasn’t in court for the hearings. Instead, TV cameras caught him sitting on a bench outside the Loews Regency Hotel in Manhattan – where the FBI conducted one of the raids – chatting with a group of men and smoking a cigar. Wood told his lawyers she wanted Cohen to attend Tuesday’s hearing.
Investigators were seeking evidence of crimes ‘‘many of which have nothing to do with his work as an attorney, but rather relate to Cohen’s own business dealings’’, prosecutors said.
McClatchy reported yesterday that Mueller has evidence that Cohen secretly made a trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, citing two unnamed sources familiar with the matter. That confirms a detail in a retired British spy’s report that Cohen has denied.
BuzzFeed reported separately that a former Russian spy helped Trump’s business team seek financing for a Trump-branded tower in the heart of Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign, citing two unidentified sources. That project didn’t work out, but at least one email to Cohen about the potential deal mentioned a contact in Russia who could help – a former colonel with Russia’s military intelligence, the two sources told BuzzFeed. AP
Cohen arranged a US$130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, to keep her quiet about an alleged sexual tryst she had with Trump in 2006. The FBI seized records relating to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate who said she had a 10-month affair with Trump, according to a person familiar with the matter.
In another bizarre turn yesterday, Cohen was linked to another hush payment to cover up an affair.
Elliott Broidy, a top Republican donor, said he had a relationship with a Playboy Playmate – who wasn’t named – and that Cohen had approached him after talking to the woman’s lawyer, Keith Davidson. Davidson had also represented Daniels and McDougal.
Broidy agreed in late 2017 to pay US$1.6 million to the woman, according to a person familiar with the matter. The woman had become pregnant, and ended the pregnancy, Broidy said.
Asked yesterday whether Cohen was still Trump’s personal attorney, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said she wasn’t sure. Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah later said on CNN that Cohen remained as Trump’s personal attorney.
The US attorney’s office in Manhattan had obtained earlier search warrants on multiple different email accounts maintained by Cohen, and reviewed them for privileged material, the prosecutors said.
‘‘Zero emails were exchanged with President Trump,’’ they wrote, and investigators had reason to believe ‘‘that Cohen has exceedingly few clients and a low volume of potentially privileged communications’’.
In an unexpected twist, Trump sent his own lawyer to yesterday’s hearing to assert his privilege.
Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti also got involved in the hearing, telling the judge his client also had an interest in the proceedings.‘‘We have every reason to believe some of the documents seized relate to my client,’’ Avenatti said. TNS-Bloomberg