Michael Cohen and the Busting of the Trump Crime Family

Things didn't go well yesterday in court for Donald Trump's consigliere, Michael Cohen - or by extension, Trump himself.  Efforts to quash the evidence seized in the raids on Cohen's office, home and hotel room failed and the federal judge overseeing the case reject White House demands that Trump attorneys be the first to be allowed to review the materials.  Also taking a hit was Trump cheerleader and fake news disseminator Sean Hannity who was identified as another Cohen client.  Despite Hannity's dissembling, one has to wonder what he really engaged Cohen to undertake on his behalf given the cesspool like nature of most of Cohen's "fixing" for Trump and at least one other well heeled Republican hypocrite.  A piece in Talking Points Memo focuses on why Cohen could be Trump's Achilles heel.  Here are highlights:

The most shocking-but-not-surprising aspect of James Comey’s account of meeting Donald Trump is the ease with which he drew upon his experience prosecuting organized crime. Meeting Trump, he told George Stephanopoulos, “I had a flashback to my days investigating the Mafia, La Cosa Nostra.” Trump’s leadership style eerily tracked that of the mob bosses he had studied. “There’s an expression in the Mafia — there’s a distinction between a friend of yours and a friend of ours. A friend of yours is someone on the outside of the family, a friend of ours, an ‘amica nostra’ is the way they talked about it in Sicilian, is part of the Family, capital F.”

It is a pure coincidence, but a revealing one, that Comey’s story has come out at the exact same time that Michael Cohen has emerged as a first-tier, and perhaps pivotal, figure in the prosecution of Trumpworld. Cohen has called himself Trump’s consigliere and is the most palpably moblike character in Trump’s orbit. . . . . The investigation of Cohen, in particular, will reveal just where along that continuum the truth lies.

One of the ways in which Trump’s business closely resembles organized crime is that, because it relies so heavily on morally and legally dubious business ventures, its human-resource strategy de-emphasizes qualifications and relies heavily on loyalty. Or, to put it differently, a person’s willingness to engage in, and keep one’s mouth shut about, Trump’s dubious activities is the most important qualification.  This explains why Trump is not known for hiring bright young minds from leading business schools and relies so heavily on his children, as a mafia boss would. It also explains why he retained the legal (or quasi-legal) services of Michael Cohen, a graduate of the worst law school in the United States.

It was immediately evident that the FBI raid on Cohen’s home and office posed a major and novel threat to Trump.  . . . . the instant reaction may have understated things. Cohen has involved himself in a wide array of shady activities, ranging from business deals involving Russia and/or underworld financing sources to paying off women Trump had sex with or sexually harassed.

There is no question that Trump would pardon Cohen of any federal charge. But that still leaves many open channels through which Cohen’s troubles could implicate Trump. One is that physical evidence seized from Cohen could implicate his boss. Reportedly, Cohen kept recordings of his conversations, and legal mistakes like this are the sort of risk you run when you scour America’s worst law schools for talent.

A second risk is that Cohen might be vulnerable to prosecution for state crimes — and remember, a president can only issue pardons for federal crimes.

Trump has run his business like a mafia operation because maintaining secrecy is the paramount value. Despite the vast trove of public access to Trump’s endless public statements and colorful marital life, a huge amount of his work remains shrouded in secrecy, from his ties to La Cosa Nostra in the New York real-estate world to his casino business in Atlantic City, to his overseas business dealings and the tax returns he refuses to disclose. Mueller’s investigation probably will not result in the literal end of Trump’s presidency. (That would require 67 Senate votes to impeach, a highly improbable outcome.) But it will probably reveal whether he has run his business merely like a crime family or literally as one.

Allies Fear Trump Could Go Postal and Fire Mueller

Two things continue to strike me as the shock waves continue from yesterday's FBI raid on Donald Trump consigliere, Michael Cohen.  First, if Trump is completely innocent of collusion with Russia or other crimes, why is he acting increasingly obsessed with closing down Robert Mueller's investigation and acting as if he has cataclysmic secrets and misdeeds he is trying to hide?  Second, if Trump is in fact guilty of crimes or collusion, why did it never seemingly occur to him that once he occupied the White House, eventually all of his dirty linen would eventually come out?  Personally, I suspect that Trump is likely guilty of any number of crimes, treason perhaps being one of them.  Trump's increasingly desperate behavior and attacks on the nation's legal and criminal justice systems only add to my gut feeling in this regard.  Now, as two piece in Vanity Fair - one here and one here - report, fearful that Michael Cohen might be "flipped," Trump may be edging closer to firing Mueller, Rod Rosenstein and/or Jeff Sessions, thereby igniting a constitutional crisis.  Here are excerpts from both pieces:

It was supposed to be the most somber and impressive of presidential moments, a gathering of the national security team at the White House to discuss military options to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a suspected chemical weapons attack on a Damascus suburb that killed at least 60 people, including children. But as the meeting began, Donald Trump was more enraged by a crossed red line much closer to home: the F.B.I.’s raid on his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen.

There have been times during Robert Mueller’s investigation—Mueller’s subpoenaing of Trump business records, for instance—when White House advisers worried Trump seemed on the verge of triggering a constitutional crisis by firing Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The stunning Cohen raid is another one of these moments. “He’s sitting there bitching and moaning. He’s brooding and doesn’t have a plan,” a Republican close to the White House said last night. “I could see him having a total meltdown and saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m firing all of them,’” a Trump friend told me. “This is very dry tinder. If someone strikes a match to it, you could see it catching fire,” added a former official.

In the past, Trump’s impulses could be tempered by the calming presence of loyal aides like Hope Hicks and longtime security chief Keith Schiller. But both Hicks and Schiller are gone, leaving Trump to operate largely unchecked. His legal team remains leaderless following the resignation of Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd . . . .

The second piece looks at why Trump's desperation level is growing:

The implications, for Cohen and for Trump, are potentially explosive. “I suppose you could say that it is Trump’s moment of truth,” Bob Bauer, the former Obama White House general counsel, told me. “It is the red line he always seemed to draw in his bitter complaints about the Mueller investigation—now here we are. Cohen would not be a subject or target that Trump would wish to have flipped against him.” Legal experts agree this is a major development. “It’s an enormously aggressive move for any prosecutor to make, particularly given Cohen’s client,” said Sol Wisenberg, a deputy special prosecutor during the Starr investigation. Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general under Obama, described it as “very bad news” for Cohen. “D.O.J. only raids once they have concluded that lesser options—like cooperation—aren’t working and that there is a risk that evidence may be destroyed,” he said.

The barrier to convincing a judge to approve a search warrant would be even higher in a case involving a sitting president. More significant, a judge would require evidence of potential illegal behavior between Trump and Cohen before approving the seizure of any communications involving both of them. “If the warrant specifically authorized the seizure of attorney-client communications, the government would have had to convince a federal magistrate that the crime-fraud exception was in play,” Wisenberg added. . . . . if the client is attempting to use the lawyer, or the lawyer is volunteering to be a part of an ongoing crime, there is no attorney-client privilege.” [O]utsourcing the raid could mean “there is some aspect to what is in Cohen’s office that is outside of Mueller’s jurisdiction,” he added. If the latter is true, Wisenberg noted, “Then it is no longer part of Mueller’s case.” That logic is unlikely to soothe Trump, who is reportedly itching to fire Sessions, Rosenstein, and Mueller. Still, it provides the special counsel with at least one degree of separation from the initial raid. “To criticize Mueller misses the mark,” Wisenberg continued. “It was wise of Rosenstein to assign the case to another office to take the heat off of Mueller.”

It also establishes a protective barrier between Mueller and one of the seedier Trump scandals. “It is wise that Mueller and Rosenstein avoided the fatal mistake of Ken Starr when he decided to expand his jurisdiction to the Monica Lewinsky matter, a tawdry subject, but not highly serious to the welfare and security of the American people,” William Jeffress, a white-collar defense attorney who worked on the Valerie Plame leak case, told me. “There are several possible crimes that might have been committed by the circumstances of the hush money, but these are appropriately investigated by a U.S. attorney, not by special counsel appointed to investigate Russian interference in the election.”

Will Cohen flip? “You just need to break one weak link to do it,” Hall said. But don’t expect new indictments too soon. “I think that things are going to sound like they are slowing down for a little bit because all of this information has to be pulled, digested, analyzed, inputted into a bigger picture,” he cautioned. “Nixon didn’t resign because of the Ellsberg Papers, but that led to the Watergate break-in, that led to the cover-up, and Nixon’s resignation was tied directly to the cover-up . . . So, to me, as things heat up, the next big thing will be a shift from things like ‘What was the Russian involvement in the campaign?’ to ‘Has the cover-up begun and where is it?’” 

Michael Cohen's - and Trump's? - Serious Legal Jeopardy

We can expect more lies and posturing from the White House today in the wake of an FBI raid of Trump consigliere Michael Cohen's home, law office and hotel room (where he was staying during home renovations) that included seizing Cohen's computer, records and emails.  This is NOT something that happens with regularity and the fact that a warrant was issued by a federal judge is telling because the U.S. Attorney's office would have had to convince a judge that (i) there is a likelihood that a crime occurred, and (ii) there was a strong likelihood that evidence would be destroyed or go missing if the normal course of issuing a subpoena had been followed.  Having been a witness for federal prosecutors on two occasions and worked as a consultant on another case, these folks do NOT fool around.  Cohen - and possibly Trump - is in serious legal jeopardy as a column in the Washington Post lays out.  Here are highlights:

When your lawyers need lawyers, it’s usually a bad sign. When your lawyers have their offices and homes raided, it’s a really bad sign. News that federal investigators on Monday took the extraordinary step of executing a search warrant at the legal office of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal attorney, indicates that Cohen is suddenly in serious legal jeopardy of his own. And although the investigation is not directly related to the Mueller probe, it’s yet another example of the legal walls closing in on one of the people closest to Trump — someone who may have a wealth of information about the president’s own conduct. The first thing to note about this striking development is that the warrant was not obtained by Mueller himself. Whatever the subject matter of this particular investigation, it apparently falls outside of Mueller’s jurisdiction and thus resulted in his referral to the New York prosecutors. So we know the potential crimes that led to the search today do not directly relate to Mueller’s inquiry into any conspiracy with Russians to influence the election or related crimes such as obstruction of the special counsel’s investigation. We also know that a search warrant, unlike a grand jury subpoena, requires prosecutors to go before a federal judge to demonstrate probable cause that a crime has been committed and evidence of that crime can be found in the premises to be searched. Before approving a search of a lawyer’s office, a judge would want to be satisfied that there was some substance behind the prosecutors’ allegations. This is not just some prosecutorial fishing expedition; it bears the imprimatur of a federal judge. This was not just any search warrant; that the raid took place at a lawyer’s office further highlights the seriousness of the investigation. Searches of an attorney’s office are extremely rare and are not favored, due to their potential to impinge on the attorney-client relationship. Prosecutors must jump through multiple hoops to get such a warrant approved, both within their own office and at the criminal division of Main Justice. (Notably, this would likely have included approval by Trump’s own guy, the new interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Geoffrey S. Berman, who was just appointed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions this past January.) Approval of a search warrant suggests prosecutors were able to demonstrate not only the gravity of the potential case but also the risk that evidence might be destroyed or otherwise go missing if they pursued a less aggressive option. Cohen, and perhaps the president, will likely argue that this raid violates the attorney-client privilege. . . . . There is an exception to the attorney-client privilege if communications to an attorney are used in furtherance of a crime or fraud; that could come into play here as well. And documents related to anything Cohen did on his own — after all, Trump has deniedknowing about the payment to Daniels — are likely not privileged if they do not contain attorney-client communications. Documents are not automatically privileged simply because they passed through an attorney’s hands. There may well be litigation concerning whether particular records seized during this search are protected by privilege. But seizing the records now allows prosecutors to ensure that the integrity of the evidence is maintained while those legal issues are sorted out.

Cohen, someone extremely close to Trump and who has been known as the president’s “fixer,” appears to have serious legal problems. If federal prosecutors feel they have enough on you to execute a search warrant, it’s never a good sign — just ask Paul Manafort. . . . . we can’t rule out the possibility that his own legal troubles could induce him [Cohen] to cooperate in the Russia investigation.