While President Trump, Fox news and the GOP scream attorney client privilege, it begs the question, was this what Donald Trump meant when he said he would “Drain the Swamp”. Perhaps he was predicting how his White House would be run once in office, hire marginal people then either fire them or have them leave within 6 months. Maybe he was speaking to the departure of long term party members he aligned with like Paul Ryan jumping a ship floating in the swamp.
Michael Cohen, President Trump’s embattled lawyer, is expected to appear in a courtroom in Manhattan on Monday as prosecutors and Mr. Cohen’s lawyer continue to argue over the fruits — and future — of the extraordinary raids that federal agents conducted last week on Mr. Cohen’s office, home and hotel room.
Investigators were seeking evidence of possible attempts to suppress negative media coverage of Mr. Trump in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. We’re talking about porn stars paid for a romp or two and maybe all the business owners he’s burned in his tenure as a “successful businessman”. As a New Yorker, I never could understand how the GOP and his campaign got this out there and made it stick among the mindless uninformed. It took like 1-2-3 Google searches to understand in what way he was successful.
[Read our article on the F.B.I. raids that Mr. Trump called ‘disgraceful’]
Last week, Mr. Cohen ignored an initial hearing in the case, opting instead to smoke cigars in the sun outside the Loews Regency Hotel, a move that prompted Judge Kimba Wood of Federal District Court in Manhattan to tell his lawyer to make sure Mr. Cohen was present at the next court appearance. Mr. Cohen will not be alone at that hearing, scheduled for 2 p.m. on Monday: In tweets over the weekend, a lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, the porn star better known as Stormy Daniels, said Ms. Clifford would be there too, setting up a remarkable face-to-face confrontation.
Todd Harrison, one of Mr. Cohen’s lawyers, sought a temporary restraining order to stop the government from reviewing what he called thousands of pages of documents seized in the raids — some of which, the authorities have said, were related to a $130,000 payment Mr. Cohen made to Ms. Clifford to keep her from discussing an alleged affair she had with Mr. Trump. In response, prosecutors filed a memo explaining that they took great pains to avoid violating the attorney-client privilege in the case and planned to have a team of prosecutors who are not involved in the investigation — a so-called taint team — review the material to determine if they are protected by Mr. Trump’s legal relationship with Mr. Cohen.
The prosecutors also said that they have been investigating Mr. Cohen for months for a range of possible crimes and had already been secretly reading his emai
Mr. Cohen’s lawyers have objected to the use of a taint team and, in yet another unusual move, a lawyer for Mr. Trump filed an emergency motion to the court on Sunday night, saying that the president also objected to that “extraordinary measure.” In her motion, the lawyer, Joanna C. Hendon, asked Judge Wood to give the documents to Mr. Cohen first so that she and the president can look at them and decide if any are protected by attorney-client privilege.
The issue before Judge Wood is, at least for now, a relatively narrow one: Who should be the first to read the seized material and thus be in a position to decide if any of them should be excluded from the case and av
oid further scrutiny: the taint team, a special master appointed by the court or Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump themselves. It remained unclear on Monday morning if the judge would rule from the bench or issue a written decision at another time.
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