Afterwards, Avenatti said at a press conference that he wasn’t surprised at Trump’s interest in the case because longtime lawyer Cohen knew “where all the bodies were buried”.
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Cohen has not yet been charged with any crimes, but at this point it’s a foregone conclusion. Sad!
The Trump interventions came as federal prosecutors in NY confirmed Cohen “is being investigated for criminal conduct that largely centers on his personal business dealings”.
Cohen is scheduled to arise in dwelling and his own NY office this week in connection with a raid from representatives with the Federal Bureau of Investigation which has been based on the referral from Mueller simply. Early Monday morning, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents carried out a raid on the home, offices and hotel room of the president’s longtime personal counsel. If Cohen and AMI’s payments were created to prevent the disclosure of information that would hurt Trump’s presidential bid, they could be found to be illegal in-kind contributions far in excess of personal contribution limits.
Prosecutors blacked out sections of their legal memo in which they described what laws they believe Cohen has broken, but the document provided new clues about an investigation that the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan had previously declined to confirm existed.
It doesn’t appear the raid was directly tied to Mueller’s investigation. On Monday, the judge will continue to consider Cohen’s lawyers’ request, which federal prosecutors argued is unjust. Mueller’s office referred the case about his business dealings to NY but hasn’t been involved since, the Manhattan prosecutors said.
Sources say Cohen was known to record conversations with reporters so he could show them to Trump in order to deal with reporters on certain stories.
A taint team is an internal group, walled off from investigators, that the government sets up when it seizes electronically stored documents with a search warrant.
Cohen’s lawyers, for their part, have asked to review the material for themselves, a proposal which the Manhattan prosecutors are fighting.
Trump has called the raids a “witch hunt”, “an attack on our country” and a violation of rules that ordinarily make lawyer client communications confidential.
The most salacious claim of the dossier, that Trump had prostitutes urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel that President Barack Obama and his wife had slept in, is also back in the news this week.
But the report that Cohen did indeed travel to Prague undercuts one of the most frequent claims from Donald Trump, that the dossier is “fake”.
On Monday, Cohen’s attorney called the searches “completely inappropriate and unnecessary”.
Michael Avenatti, a lawyer for Stormy Daniels, also made an appearance at the hearing.
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Trump had earlier sounded off on the raids in a Twitter message Monday, saying “Attorney-client privilege is dead!”
