FBI probing Trump lawyer’s ‘personal business dealings’
NEW YORK — Federal prosecutors said in a court filing Friday that the criminal probe that led them to raid the offices of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer this week is focused on his “personal business dealings” and has been going on for months.
In the filing with a court in New York, prosecutors blacked out a section describing what laws they believe Trump attorney Michael Cohen has broken, but they said the “crimes being investigated involve acts of concealment” and suspected fraud.
They also made clear that investigators have been gathering extensive evidence for some time as part of an ongoing grand jury investigation. Agents, they wrote, had already searched multiple email accounts maintained by Cohen after securing an earlier search warrant.
None of those emails, they added, was exchanged with Trump.
In a footnote, the prosecutors wrote that while the investigation was referred to prosecutors in New York by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, it was proceeding independently.
The U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan made the filing after lawyers for Cohen and Trump asked a judge to block the Justice Department from reviewing records seized Monday in FBI raids on Cohen’s apartment, hotel room, office and safety deposit box.
In a court hearing before U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood, Cohen’s lawyers asked to examine the seized documents and electronic devices. The lawyers said they should be allowed to identify which of the documents are protected by attorney-client privilege before prosecutors get to look at them.
An attorney for the president, Joanna Hendon, appeared as well, telling the judge that Trump has “an acute interest in these proceedings and the manner in which these materials are reviewed.”
“He is the president of the United States,” she said. “This is of most concern to him. I think the public is a close second. And anyone who has ever hired a lawyer a close third.”