Trump slams FBI raids on lawyer

Agents were looking for records on payments to two women

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday lashed out at prosecutors over the FBI raids of his longtime personal attorney’s Manhattan office, home and hotel room, claiming that it signals an end of attorney-client privilege.

“Attorney-client privilege is dead!” the president said on Twitter.

On Monday, FBI agents seized records of lawyer Michael Cohen’s clients and personal finances. The agents were looking for records about payments to a former Playboy playmate and to porn actress Stormy Daniels, who both claim to have had sexual encounters with Trump, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing several people briefed on the investigation.

The Times reported that agents were looking for records of payments to ex-Playmate Karen McDougal and also information related to the publisher of The National Enquirer.

McDougal has said she carried on an affair with Trump in 2006 after the birth of his son. The Enquirer’s publisher, American Media Inc., paid McDougal $150,000 but never published her story. American Media Inc. has said she was paid to become a fitness columnist.

Daniels says she had sex with Trump in 2006. She has begun cooperating with federal investigators looking into whether Cohen’s $130,000 payment to her in 2016 was illegal, sources told NBC News.

Critics of the president have claimed that the payments amount to illegal campaign contributions — from Cohen and American Media — to the president’s campaign because they helped Trump win the White House by keeping politically damaging stories out of public view.

Cohen has acknowledged that he paid Daniels $130,000 as part of a nondisclosure agreement to secure her silence just days before the presidential election.

The Monday raids were part of an investigation referred by special counsel Robert Mueller to federal prosecutors in New York. Cohen is under federal investigation over possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign-finance violations, three people with knowledge of the case have told The Washington Post.

Trump ignored questions about Mueller shouted by reporters during an afternoon meeting at the White House with Qatar’s emir. But White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president thinks he can fire Mueller, though he isn’t taking that step now.

The Times reported Tuesday that Trump tried to fire Mueller in December.

CNN, meanwhile, reported that Trump was considering firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who signed off on the FBI’s decision to raid Cohen’s office. It cited sources familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Furious over news reports about a new round of subpoenas from Mueller’s office, the Times reported, Trump told advisers in December that Mueller’s investigation had to be shut down.

The president’s anger was fueled by reports that the subpoenas were for obtaining information about his business dealings with Deutsche Bank, according to interviews with eight White House officials, people close to the president and others familiar with the episode.

To Trump, the subpoenas suggested that Mueller had expanded the investigation in a way that crossed a line.

In the hours that followed Trump’s initial anger over the Deutsche Bank reports, his lawyers and advisers worked quickly to learn about the subpoenas, and ultimately were told by Mueller’s office that the reports were not accurate, leading the president to back down.

Despite assurances from leading Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that the president has not thought about firing Mueller, the December episode was the second time Trump is now known to have considered taking that step.

The other instance was in June, when the White House counsel, Don McGahn, threatened to quit unless Trump stopped trying to get him to fire Mueller.

A bipartisan group of four senators plans to introduce legislation today that would protect Mueller’s job, two people familiar with the bill said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Republican Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Democratic Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware and Cory Booker of New Jersey are behind the measure.

It would give any special counsel a 10-day window in which he or she could seek expedited judicial review of a firing. The review would determine whether the firing was for good cause.

The legislation combines two bipartisan bills introduced last summer.

Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor who practices law in Chicago, said Trump was “mistaken” in his assessment Tuesday that attorney-client privilege is dead.

“As a lawyer, you never like to hear about lawyers getting searched,” Cotter said. “It’s a scary scenario, but the reality is, there is a procedure for this.”

Several lawyers noted that public statements by Trump and Cohen may have aided federal prosecutors’ legal arguments to justify searching the lawyer’s office, home and hotel room.

Cohen has said that he arranged the 2016 payment to Daniels and that Trump was unaware of it. Then, late last week, Trump said he did not know of the payment.

Because both the lawyer and the client insisted Trump had no idea that Cohen had made the payment, they cannot assert that those activities were protected by attorney-client privilege, legal experts said.

“At that point, anything to do with that entire incident is, I would argue, not attorney-client privilege,” Cotter said. “If I were a prosecutor hearing both the lawyer and the client say the client had no awareness whatsoever of that, I would now feel very confident going to a judge to seek that material.”

It is rare, but not unprecedented, for federal prosecutors to execute search warrants on lawyers’ offices.

Justice Department procedures call for a filter or “taint” team to screen all the seized documents in such cases, separating out material protected by attorney-client privilege so that it would not be shared with investigators.

Information for this article was contributed by John Wagner, Devlin Barrett and Sean Sullivan of The Washington Post; by Eric Tucker, Chad Day, Michael Balsamo, Tom Hays, Jake Pearson and Mary Clare Jalonick of The Associated Press; by Michael D. Shear, Matt Apuzzo, Michael S. Schmidt, Sharon LaFraniere and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times; and by Chris Sommerfeldt of the New York Daily News.