Dawn Dearden, spokeswoman for the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of NY, declined to comment. Looking into whether President Trump or his campaign committee was involved with the Russians in skewing our 2016 election?
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen exits a hotel in New York City, U.S., April 11, 2018. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the investigation. She too said she was concerned about prosecutors being the first to review the records seized, and would prefer that a third party was brought in to review the documents instead.
That FBI agents were searching Cohen’s office for information about the AMI payment to McDougal is particularly notable, as Cohen claims to have had no part in the transaction.
Cohen has maintained that Trump was unaware of the arrangement. It was meant to keep her from discussing her claim of having sex with Trump in 2006. “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen”, Trump said. He is maintaining his innocence.
A subpoena is more typical, to protect attorney-client privilege.
Both Trump and Moscow deny any wrongdoing. He wants the investigation to be over and continues to say everything he did in regards to paying Stormy Daniels for the non-disclosure agreement was perfectly legal.
A federal judge in Manhattan granted President Donald Trump’s request to intervene in the court hearing regarding longtime attorney Michael Cohen, whose offices were raided on Monday.
Trump has denied the women’s allegations.
It also establishes a protective barrier between Mueller and one of the seedier Trump scandals. “Many people have said you should fire him”. “He should be allowed to finish the job he was assigned”. It was, he said, “a whole new level of unfairness”. “The raid is seismic”, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a former federal prosecutor, told MSNBC, adding such searches by the FBI indicate the possibility a crime was committed. “We’ve given, I believe, over a million pages’ worth of documents to the special counsel”, he told the reporters.
“They raid an office of a personal attorney early in the morning”, he said. Rosenstein has repeatedly said that he has not seen any reason to dismiss Mueller. Or, they said, the court could appoint a special master for that objective. “The less the president said on this whole thing, the better off he would be, the stronger his presidency would be”. If he decides not to, Rosenstein can refer the information to a U.S. attorney’s office. That’s an investigation, not a witch hunt, and as continuing revelations expose, it clearly has merit.
A hearing on the searches has been set for 10:30 a.m. (1430 GMT) in a Manhattan federal court, the courthouse said.
A team at the Department of Justice would need to review any tapes the Federal Bureau of Investigation has seized to determine whether they violate attorney-client privilege and fall within the scope of the search warrants.
But “the attorney-client privilege can’t at the same time be used as a sword and as a shield”, McKay told Wood.
Should FBI agents have gotten their hands on recorded conversations between Cohen and Trump, it could be just what Mueller needs to build his case against not just Trump’s campaign staff, but Trump himself. Stephen Ryan, Cohen’s lawyer, confirmed to the Times on Monday that the search warrant for the FBI raid stemmed from a referral by Mueller, though it reportedly was not directly related to the ongoing investigation into Russian election interference.
Trump has been seething about the raids all week. He called Mueller’s investigation “an attack on our country”.
Agents also seized records related to a $130,000 payment made to Daniels, who says she had sex with Trump the same year as McDougal.
“It’s a disgrace”, he said.
Reports surfaced in March that special counsel Robert Mueller was examining documents pertaining to incidents involving Cohen. Cohen’s attorney said in his statement Monday that the matter was referred from Mueller’s probe to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of NY.
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Next, a “taint team” will have to determine what communications between the president and his attorney might fall into this category.
