Attorney privilege debated after raid
Cohen’s many roles complicate matters
WASHINGTON — The FBI’S raids on President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Monday drew denunciations from the president, who called the seizure of attorney-client documents “an attack on our country.”
“Attorney-client privilege is dead,” he tweeted following the sweep of the home, office and hotel room of lawyer Michael Cohen.
Victoria Toensing, a former federal prosecutor whom Trump had considered hiring for his defense team, called the raids “the weaponization of the criminal justice system” and decried the inappropriate use of tactics generally reserved for “terrorists, organized crime and drug dealers.”
In a piece written for The
RAID
Hill, Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz wrote that civil libertarians would be incensed if the FBI had raided the office of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s lawyer during its investigation of her use of a home-brew server for thousands of government emails, many of which she deleted. But they are silent when Trump’s attorney is in the crosshairs, he noted.
Dershowitz, who reportedly was dining with the president Tuesday night, did not vote for Trump, he disclosed, but said he considers the raids “a serious mistake because these violations establish precedents that lie around like loaded guns capable of being aimed at other targets.”
Mixed roles complicate matters
George Washington Law School Professor Jonathan Turley, a sometime Trump critic, told the Review-journal that “a raid of this kind raises very serious questions.”
“Having said that, Michael Cohen may be the least compelling person to raise the attorney-client privilege,” he said, noting that Cohen has frequently seemed to mix up his roles as friend, lawyer and business partner of Trump.
It is unclear in which capacity Cohen paid porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000, who claimed to have had sexual relations with Trump once in 2006, to stay quiet. Cohen “created a shield company. Donald Trump did not sign the agreement”
and has said he had no knowledge of a deal, Turley said. “All those things make his role difficult to define,” he noted.
Federal prosecutors argue that the system has ample protections to prevent prosecutorial abuses. In Cohen’s case, a top Department of Justice official and the U.S. attorney’s office from the Southern District of New York had to sign off on the search warrant, they note. Most important, a judge had to review the evidence to see if there was probable cause for the search of an attorney’s documents.
There are additional safeguards after a seizure of potentially privileged documents, said one federal prosecutor, who spoke to the Review-journal on condition of anonymity. An