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A lot of news in the FBI’s raid of Michael Cohen’s office-as well as hotel room and home-but this is the big one:

“Michael Cohen, the longtime attorney of President Trump, is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations, according to three people with knowledge of the case.”

“FBI agents on Monday raided Cohen’s Manhattan office, home and hotel room as part of the investigation, seizing records about Cohen’s clients and personal finances. Among the records taken were those related to a 2016 payment Cohen made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had a sexual encounter with Trump, according to a fourth person familiar with the investigation.”

“Investigators took Cohen’s computer, phone and personal financial records, including tax returns, as part of the search of his office at Rockefeller Center, that person said.”

Just a few days ago I’d written a chapter entitled ‘Why Stormy Daniels Matters.’ When this story initially broke, much of the MSM dismissed it as a nonstory-after all the story won’t change the mind of his supporters-and after all, his Deplorables are the measure of all things-right?

The MSM also argued that it was consensual sex from over a decade ago, so it wouldn’t matter. That consensual sex doesn’t matter isn’t what they said about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky but-the Clintons always got a much higher, not to say, impossible standard.

From the start, I felt that this MSM gloss was wrong; what it ignored was the payment. The hush money was the problem more than simply the sex; though one advantage with sex is that it tends to make scandals more vivid and understandable for the average American who’s not so plugged in on a daily basis to the happenings in Washington DC.

FN: On the other hand in the recent reporting of a woman accusing Trump of forcibly kissing her in the campaign aide in 2016, the MSM has chosen to pretend the story doesn’t exist.

As Stephanie Clifford’s-aka Stormy Daniels-attorney says many laughed off this story when it broke but they aren’t laughing anymore.

Last week Avenatti had made some predictions on. These predictions already are looking pretty good:

UPDATE: I wrote this chapter initially on April, 10, 2018. Eleven months later after Cohen has fingered Trump as directing him to commit illegal acts and testifying against him in Congress Avenatti certainly was prescient there.

FN: Yes, I know Avenatti has had a number of his own problems but this doesn’t make his predictions any less accurate.

One reason I’d thought that the Stormy Daniels story will end up mattering a lot was that it was pretty clear it would interest Mueller as it goes to pattern. Again-putting the issue of sex to one side-what stands out here is the way Michael Cohen and other Trump friends tried to shut Daniels up. Hush money-under great pressure, and according to her, with physical threats.

As Mueller is also investigating obstruction of justice, this was a pattern of witness intimidation that he’d be pretty interested in. And lo and behold-the raid yesterday was not a Mueller operation-it was done by the U.S. attorney’s office for the South District of NY but based on Mueller’s referral.

Back to the Washington Post-it’s clear that not only is Cohen in trouble but so is Herr Trump.

Back to the Post:

“In a dramatic and broad seizure, federal prosecutors collected communications between Cohen and his clients — including those between the lawyer and Trump, according to both people.”

To authorize a search warrant for the so-called President and his attorney was anything but a small feat; in obtaining the search warrant they must have made a very compelling case to the judge:

“The Cohen raids required high-level authorization within the Justice Department. Under regulations governing the special counsel’s work, Mueller is required to consult with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein if his team finds information worth investigating that does not fall under his mandate to examine Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.”

“Rosenstein, as the acting attorney general supervising Mueller’s work, has the responsibility of deciding whether to expand Mueller’s mandate to include the new topic or to refer it to a U.S. attorney’s office.

“Since Cohen is a practicing attorney whose communications with clients are considered privileged, federal prosecutors would have been required to first consider a less intrusive investigative tactic than a search warrant before executing the raids.”

As Joe Biden would put it ‘This is a big f-ing deal.’

“A search warrant for a law office is extremely rare,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor at the New York University School of Law. “Lawyers are given the courtesy of producing documents in response to a subpoena or a request unless the government believes a lawyer will destroy or conceal the objects of the search.”

“To serve a search warrant on a practicing attorney, federal prosecutors are required to obtain approval from top Justice Department officials. That means the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman, who was appointed to his role by Sessions in January, as well as Justice Department officials in Washington, probably signed off.”

Seth Abramson:

UPDATE: Cohen has in fact been charged and convicted, of course, and is going to prison in May for three years. Still have yet to hear regarding Prince-Kushner.

Kushner had a 7 hour interview with Mueller last year

Prince compared his interview to a proctology exam. 

End of Update.

“Known for his combative style and fierce loyalty to Trump, Cohen served for a decade as a top lawyer at the Trump Organization, tangling with reporters and Trump’s business competitors on behalf of the celebrity real estate mogul.”

“He never formally joined Trump’s campaign but was in close contact with his longtime boss from his Trump Tower office throughout the 2016 race and presidential transition.”

“Cohen left the Trump Organization in January 2017, around the time of Trump’s inauguration, and since then has served as a personal attorney to the president.”

Regarding Cohen’s alleged work as a personal attorney for Trump post January 2017, Abramson asks a good question:

And as Abramson points out, as Trump and Cohen both insist Trump knew nothing about Stormy Daniel’s hush money this would mean that any communications between them on this matter is NOT covered by attorney client privilege.

As so much in such legal cases, it comes down to intent:

“To pursue criminal charges against Cohen for breaking federal election law, prosecutors would have to prove that he made the payment to Daniels to influence the election, rather than for personal reasons — to protect Trump’s reputation, for example, or his marriage.”

In any case this transaction worried Cohen’s own bank:

“Eleven months later, in September 2017, that California bank — City National Bank in Beverly Hills — asked Davidson about the source of the payment, according to an email reviewed by The Washington Post. Bank officials declined to comment on whether the inquiry was triggered by a request or subpoena from law enforcement.”

“At some point, Cohen’s New York bank, First Republic, flagged the transaction to the Treasury Department as a suspicious payment, according to the Wall Street Journal.”

“Cohen used his Trump Organization email in negotiating the agreement with Davidson and in communicating with his bank about the funds.”

In February, after a watchdog group filed a complaint about the payment with the Federal Election Commission, Cohen released a statement saying he “used my own personal funds to facilitate” the payment. He rejected the idea that the payment should have counted as a campaign contribution.

“The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone,” he said, referring to Daniels’s real name, Stephanie Clifford.

In any case, no matter how you parse it, Cohen has a big problem:

“Whatever evidence federal prosecutors have collected concerning Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime attorney, it is most likely extraordinarily strong.”

“Before federal agents raided Cohen’s home, hotel room and office Monday afternoon, they would have had to convince high-ranking officials at the Department of Justice and a federal judge that a search warrant was necessary to obtain the evidence sought.”

“Doing a search warrant rather than a subpoena suggests the investigators thought Cohen, if given a subpoena, would possibly destroy evidence or withhold key evidence, particularly if it were incriminating,” said Clinton Watts, a former FBI agent and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“Under normal circumstances, obtaining a search warrant on an attorney for the subject of a federal investigation is an incredibly aggressive move. When the attorney’s client is the president of the United States, the stakes couldn’t possibly get any higher.”

The evidence logically must be very strong because this is clearly very deep water-the tendency of a law enforcement official is to proceed very carefully:

“These things are not anonymized, so you know you’re talking about Michael Cohen, the longtime attorney for the person who is now president of the United States, so you know you’re in very deep water,” said John Q. Barrett, a former associate special counsel in the Iran-Contra affair and a law professor at St. Johns. “Any law-enforcement official would proceed very carefully.”

“The raid, first reported by The New York Times, is an extraordinary development in a story that was already incredibly strange. Cohen wired $130,000 to adult actress Stormy Daniels in late 2016, during the waning days of the presidential campaign, in order to prevent her from speaking out about her alleged affair with Trump. A longtime employee of the Trump Organization and one of the president’s personal attorneys, Cohen has reportedly been under scrutiny by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating the Russian effort to sway the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, and whether the Trump campaign aided that effort. It’s unclear whether the raid is related to the special counsel investigation, or a separate inquiry being pursued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.”

It was a referral from Mueller. Abramson recently noted the difficulty the MSM has had in understanding this or in understanding more generally that all these various spinoff investigations were referred by Mueller.

Find Abramson’s thread regarding.

This has been the subject of some confusion. The case was referred by Mueller to the SDNY but it’s not a Mueller investigation. Having said that, it’s a mistake to think it’s totally unrelated to the Mueller case.

UPDATE: That was indeed what ended up happening-Cohen cooperated greatly for Mueller-and we still don’t know most of what he told him.

Once again we get to use the meme of ‘Party of Treason’ P.O.T. After all, Cohen was the RNC”s National Deputy Finance Chair-until yesterday. 

A big day for Michael Cohen news: it turns out that there really WAS a Uranium scandal but it’s Cohen and Trump’s:

 The special counsel is investigating a payment made to President Trump’s foundation by a Ukrainian steel magnate for a talk during the campaign, according to three people briefed on the matter, as part of a broader examination of streams of foreign money to Mr. Trump and his associates in the years leading up to the election.”

Remember the furor over Hillary’s paid speeches? And Uranium One? I guess we have to call this-Uranium Two?

Investigators subpoenaed the Trump Organization this year for an array of records about business with foreign nationals. In response, the company handed over documents about a $150,000 donation that the Ukrainian billionaire, Victor Pinchuk, made in September 2015 to the Donald J. Trump Foundation in exchange for a 20-minute appearance by Mr. Trump that month through a video link to a conference in Kiev.

“Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer whose office and hotel room were raided on Monday in an apparently unrelated case, solicited the donation. The contribution from Mr. Pinchuk, who has sought closer ties for Ukraine to the West, was the largest the foundation received in 2015 from anyone besides Mr. Trump himself.”

So another $150,000 dollar payment for Cohen to explain on top of the hush money to Stormy Daniels.

“The subpoena is among signs in recent months that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is interested in interactions that Mr. Trump or his associates had with countries beyond Russia, though it is not clear what other payments he is scrutinizing.”

“Mr. Mueller also ordered the Trump Organization to turn over documents, emails and other communications about several Russians, including some whose names have not been publicly tied to Mr. Trump, according to the three people, who would not be named discussing the ongoing investigation. The identities of the Russians were unclear.”

So was this a case of a foreign donor attempting to buy influence?

The payment from Mr. Pinchuk “is curious because it comes during a campaign and is from a foreigner and looks like an effort to buy influence,” said Marcus S. Owens, a former head of the Internal Revenue Service division that oversees tax-exempt organizations. He called the donation “an unusual amount of money for such a short speech.”

“Mr. Mueller has also examined a deal Mr. Cohen was putting together with Mr. Trump to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Mr. Trump said last summer that Mr. Mueller should not look at his or his family’s finances beyond issues related directly to Russia.”

“But the special counsel’s investigators have questioned witnesses about whether money from the Persian Gulf had been used to finance Mr. Trump’s political efforts and asked for information on Mr. Pinchuk.”

“The inquiry into the Trump Organization’s payments from foreign nationals underscores how diffuse Mr. Trump’s sources of income have been over many years. And the destination of Mr. Pinchuk’s donation — the Trump Foundation instead of the president’s personal coffers — raised fresh questions about how the president handled the entity he set up to deal with charitable giving.”

With all the sound and fury signifying nothing over the Clinton Foundation during the election, there was little talk of Trump’s own-completely fake-charity during the election, the Trump Foundation.

“Two weeks after he was elected president, the foundation acknowledged in a tax form that it might have broken federal rules designed to prohibit self-dealing, when charities use their money to benefit principals in their organization.”

“In the same filing, the foundation disclosed the donation from Mr. Pinchuk for Mr. Trump’s video appearance.”

Uranium 2.

UPDATE: In the 11 months since I wrote this piece the Trump Foundation was shutdown by NYnAG last December but the NY AG’s investigation against TF continues and Trump personally needs to pay $8.4 million to end the lawsuit against it. 

Good thing he’s really a billionaire, huh Tim O’Brien?

Oh wait a minute-he sued O’Brien for writing a book that he isn’t a billionaire and Trump failed to prove discovery to win his frivolous lawsuit.

UPDATE 2.0. The mention of the tax return in this chapter’s title was something of a misnomer come to think of it-Mueller may very well have them but we don’t know for a fact he got them from Cohen though you might conjecture he had them on file- and something of a sore point as the Dems are still dithering on getting the tax returns. Richard Neal keeps saying in two weeks-it’s always just two weeks a way; Neal really hopes Trump can be his bipartisan buddy.

UPDATE 3.0: Thanks to ProPublica’s investigating we now know of yet another of Trump’s co-conspirators receiving an FBI raid.

Broidy is connected to Nader-who made that big $2 million dollar payment to the Joel Zamel-the owner of an Israeli media company after the election.

 

The Washington Post reported in August that the Justice Department was investigating Broidy. The sealed warrant offers new details of federal authorities’ investigation of allegations that Broidy had attempted to cash in on his Trump White House connections in dealings with foreign officials. It also shows that the government took a more aggressive approach with the Trump ally than was previously known, entering his office and removing records — just as it did with Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen.”

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October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

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