Trump’s lawyer raided by the FBI

anexplanationofunfortunateevents:

Early
Monday morning, the FBI searched longtime Trump lawyer Michael
Cohen’s office and residences. They had no-knock warrants for a ton
of stuff, including correspondence between Trump and Cohen.

It’s
almost hard to get perspective on how important this is, because it’s
genuinely unprecedented. But it’s a big fucking deal and you need
to know where things are.

Aside
from his own shady business, Cohen is
up to his ass in Trump’s bad behavior. He’s in
the Steele dossier and was responsible for paying off/intimidating Stormy Daniels. Cohen
knows everything about Trump, his business, and his kids. 

It’s
hard to get a court to approve a warrant to raid the office of any
defendant’s lawyer, because most of what you’d find there will be
inadmissible anyway. But attorney-client privilege doesn’t apply
when the lawyer is actually, you know, participating in the
client’s crimes. Three things
that tell you how serious this is:

• The
  DOJ made a lot of extra work for itself with this decision, because
  now they have to set up a second team to go through all the documents
  and separate privileged communication and evidence of a crime.
  Cohen’s lawyers will challenge it in court. Whatever
  they have is worth the
  headache.

• To
  get the warrant,
  the feds had to convince a judge that it was more likely than not
  that Cohen’s home and office had specific
  evidence of a criminal
  conspiracy between Cohen and his client.

• Getting
  Cohen’s documents in
  surprise raids,
  rather than by
  subpoena, means they could show that he would probably obstruct
  justice otherwise.

Those
are the hurdles a prosecutor would have to jump to get any defense
attorney’s papers, which is why it almost never happens. This is
what happens to mob lawyers. To get at Trump’s
lawyer….they have some serious shit. 

For
reasons we don’t know yet, the search wasn’t actually carried out
by special prosecutor Mueller’s team. Mueller’s office found
evidence against Cohen and took it to their boss Deputy Attorney
General Rosenstein, who decided
that the case should go through the federal prosecutor in Manhattan.
That suggests most of what
they found isn’t strictly about Russian election interference, but
is still serious enough to pursue. Critically, this
takes things even further out of Trump’s hands.
Even if he tries to go
nuclear on the special prosecutor’s office, he can’t
make the Southern District of New York go away.

Unsurprisingly,
he’s panicked.

We
don’t know what’s next. But things can happen very quickly. Pay
attention.

What
you can do:

• Even
  though it won’t save him anymore, Trump may still lash out and try
  to get rid of the special prosecutor. We can’t let that happen.
  Mueller’s office is pretty much the only one trying to get to the
  bottom of Russian interference in the 2016 election. More broadly,
  though, Trump firing someone appointed specifically to investigate
  him would basically be him saying he’s above the law. MoveOn has
  rapid response protests planned all over the country to protect
  Mueller’s job.
• Call
  your representatives in Congress and tell them to vote for
  legislation protecting the special prosecutor’s office. You don’t
  need to know the nuances of a specific bill or anything. Call their
  office and say “My name is [x] and I am your constituent. I expect
  you to pass legislation protecting Special Prosecutor Robert
  Mueller.” Then repeat for your senators.
• Reading
  and posting online doesn’t usually count as Doing A Thing. Right
  now, though, it does. Understanding where we are and helping to make
  other people aware are really important steps that we all need to
  take.