On Tuesday, a federal judge released nearly 900 legal documents concerning Micheal Cohen, President Donald Trump‘s former “fixer” and attorney. The documents are the affidavits and search warrants the Southern District of New York wrote, outlining their case against Cohen and their planned search into his offices and homes.
The search warrants were approved, spurring a successful investigation of Cohen’s homes last year. According to the court papers, the search included Cohen’s Park Avenue apartment, a hotel room he had used, his downtown Manhattan office, his safe deposit box and two iPhones. Interestingly, investigators were given permission to “depress the fingerprints and/or thumbprints of Michael Cohen onto [his iPhone] or hold [the iPhone] in front of Cohen’s face” so they could gain access to it.
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Cohen has been investigated by two separate teams, one being Robert Mueller and the special counsel’s team and the other being New York Southern District federal prosecutors. According to the documents, Cohen still considered himself Trump’s attorney as late as July 2017 when the FBI was granted permission to search his email. Other investigators were granted permission to search Cohen’s emails in January 2016.
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Twenty of the 897 pages discuss the “illegal campaign contribution scheme” Cohen concocted. While all of the details pertaining to it were redacted by the judge, they presumably reference Cohen’s hush money payments to two women his boss had affairs with during his presidential campaign. Cohen, who pled guilty to this crime, stated that Trump was informed of and approved of this plan and reimbursed him throughout 2017. Notably, the White House has challenged Cohen’s creditability, claiming he’s an unreliable witness only looking to reduce his jail time.
The documents also confirm officials had been monitoring Cohen for various crimes, including illegal campaign contributions and bank fraud. While there’s ultimately little new information to parse out of the documents, they do confirm Mueller and his team have had access to many more documents than the public is privy to.
269 pages of the court documents can be read below:
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