The Daily - Tuesday, Apr. 10, 2018

Episode Date: April 10, 2018

The F.B.I. has raided the home of President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen — the same man who acknowledged paying $130,000 to a pornographic film actress who said she had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. What are investigators looking for? Guest: Matt Apuzzo, who covers law enforcement for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the FBI has raided the offices of President Trump's personal lawyer, the same lawyer who says he wrote the $130,000 check to Stephanie Clifford. What are they looking for? It's Tuesday, April 10th.

Okay, I'm ready. I don't hear, oh, hi. I can now hear you. Hi. We're live. We are definitely live. What's going on? I'm so sorry to make you do this at 8.30.

I just, I feel like such a jerk. Matt Apuzzo, what happened on Monday? Monday morning in New York City, the FBI showed up and raided the office at Rockefeller Center used by Donald Trump's longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen. And they also searched a hotel room that he was using on Park Avenue while his apartment's being renovated. And this was a really aggressive move. It's been no secret that in the swirl of federal investigations that Michael Cohen was a potential witness or a subject.

And he had a lawyer and he had been cooperating with Congress. And so there's typically this understanding that if you can just subpoena and ask them for records, you do that rather than show up. So by showing up with a search warrant and going after a lawyer's documents, the FBI and the Justice Department are really basically saying, we do not trust this guy to give us the records.

We got to go get them ourselves. This is investigators saying, we so distrust you that we're actually going to, like, bust into your spaces and grab these things. Right. We don't even trust you to comply with a grand jury subpoena to turn him over. And since you won't be the one to say this, because you're quite humble, you were actually the first person to break this story of the raid. So how did you find out that this had happened?

There was no secret sauce on this one. We got a tip, and I called his lawyer, and his lawyer, in response to my inquiry, gave a quote. And that's sort of the, you know, three-step process to doing journalism. You talk to people, write down what they say, and then tell others. So there were no meetings in parking garages. This was pretty straightforward. And as you would expect it to be in New York City, when the FBI shows up at Rockefeller Center and a Park Avenue hotel, that can only kind of stay secret so long. So we just, I got a tip, and I called his lawyer and asked for a comment, and that's that. So you called the lawyer of the president's lawyer.

Lawyers upon lawyers. And just to be clear about Michael Cohen, because the president has many lawyers at this moment, how does he fit into the president's legal universe? Michael Cohen has been with President Trump for a decade. And he plays different roles at different times. He's a trusted confidant, and he is a reliable attack dog. He's a fixer.

He makes problems go away, and he's extremely loyal to the president. Right. I mean, my experience with him is that you're calling Donald Trump, you're writing a tough story, eventually Michael Cohen gets on the phone, and you feel menaced.

Yeah, I mean, I think he gets called in when, whether it's a reporter or whether there's a situation that needs to be resolved, he gets called in to fix it. And sometimes that means to just sort of do his best to make it go away. And sometimes I guess it means to go on the attack. But most recently, when we think of Michael Cohen, what we think about is his own personal disclosure that he wrote a check for $130,000 to Stephanie Clifford, the adult film star who says that she had a sexual affair with Donald Trump. So is what you're reporting, this raid, connected to that? Yes.

This is definitely related to the payment to Stephanie Clifford, who's also known as Stormy Daniels. But the documents that were seized go so much deeper than that. And so our understanding is that the Justice Department is investigating Mr. Cohen for bank fraud. But they didn't just come looking for like bank records, right, or transaction records. just come looking for like bank records, right, or transaction records. They came looking for financial documents, emails, correspondence between Michael Cohen and the president, files related to his practice of the law.

And, you know, all of that could touch on the Stormy Daniels payment. But they've also just done this incredibly broad, you know, deep dive into the world of Michael Cohen, and the world of Michael Cohen is just an extension of the world of Donald Trump. And what does that suggest that the Justice Department is interested in about Michael Cohen, that they took so many different kinds of documents and not just necessarily those related to Stephanie Clifford? And how is it that the Justice Department has the right to go in and take this many

different documents? So the way it works is to get a search warrant, which is what this was. You have to persuade a federal judge that searching that location will produce evidence of criminal activity. So that in and of itself is significant because it tells you that prosecutors cleared at least that preliminary hurdle of, is there a probable cause that a crime was committed and you'll find evidence here? Yes. Okay.

You get your search warrant. What's significant to me here is that this wasn't Bob Mueller. And when we think about the Justice Department and the Trump world these days, we think about Bob Mueller. But this is a different group of prosecutors. This was executed by the FBI in New York and applied for and supervised by federal prosecutors in Manhattan,

independent of Bob Mueller. But there's a twist. independent of Bob Mueller. But there's a twist. Cohen's lawyer says that he was advised that this search was prompted by a referral from Mueller to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan. So basically, Mueller found something that was evidence of a potential crime and passed that to prosecutors in New York.

Presumably because Mueller's mandate is to go after Russian interference in the election, potential collusion with the Trump campaign, and whatever he saw doesn't relate to that. That gets passed to prosecutors in New York. And that happens all the time. And prosecutors in New York can run to that. That gets passed to prosecutors in New York. And that happens all the time. And prosecutors in New York can run with that. And it appears that they are very much running with that. So, just to be clear, in the course of its investigation, the special counsel's office found something, something that led them to believe a crime might have been

committed, but that wasn't directly relevant to the scope of the special counsel's mission, which was, of course, Russian meddling in the election and the question of whether or not the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia in carrying that out. So they therefore suggest that someone else look into it. Exactly. That's our understanding based on what Cohen's lawyer said tonight. Okay. Do we have any idea what the Mueller team saw that would have caused them to refer this case over to another law enforcement agency? We don't know for sure. Bank fraud is a really broad crime.

And I'm not sure right now how that fits in with the Stephanie Clifford stuff, but there are a lot of questions about, all right, well, if you give somebody $130,000, was that a campaign contribution? You know, how was it recorded? I mean, there are a lot of questions that come with just giving somebody $130,000.

And so, you know, that is certainly an area that is ripe for exploration. But we don't know what Mueller saw that made him want to refer that out. And you're talking about bank fraud because your reporting suggests that that's the crime being investigated. Exactly. I guess I'm a little surprised to learn that the Mueller investigation would find something about the president's lawyer that seemed worth referring

to another law enforcement agency, but wouldn't be of interest to its own investigation. Oh, I'm sure it was of interest. But the way the special counsel regulations are written, Mueller can't kind of just go off and, you know, pursue his interests, if you will. He has to stick to his mandate.

And when he was appointed, the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said, here's what you can investigate. And it's Russian interference in the election, potential coordination with the Trump campaign, and, like, other matters as you discover them. But there's a real reluctance in Washington to having a special counsel who kind of just follows his heart.

And in fact, Mueller has been criticized by Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, for essentially having a mandate that's too broad or is not well-defined. So in this instance, it appears that Mueller is saying, I found something, but it's not really my place to go down that avenue. And the right place for that is federal prosecutors in New York. But there's suspicion that what this really is, is an overreach by Mueller. The suspicion is that Mueller says, well, this is totally not part of my mandate. And I really can't justify going around fishing in Cohen's emails and his correspondence with President Trump.

But if I kick this to Southern District of New York prosecutors and they get a search warrant, well, then if they come up with anything really good, they can always just kick it my way, which they can. And so there's real suspicion in and around the White House that that's what's going on here, that this is Mueller by proxy. So Mueller could essentially be using other law enforcement agencies to do an additional investigation that would benefit him, kind of finding a backdoor to getting stuff he wants from a character like Michael Cohen. Right. And look, there are plenty of reasons to believe that is not the case, but that is absolutely what President Trump, Michael Cohen, and people around

him believe is happening here. What we know is that in order to get a search warrant of a lawyer related to interactions with his client, that's like the most intrusive, sensitive thing the federal government does. You have to go through an extra level of review. There are special rules at the Justice Department for how to handle those situations. Additional oversight, special scrutiny. This is not something that can be done just on the fly. Presumably because of attorney-client privilege. just on the fly.

Presumably because of attorney-client privilege. So what you're saying is it is no joke to go after the president's lawyer given the baseline of attorney-client privilege and then attorney-client privilege involving the president of the United States. That's absolutely right. And the significance here is it's getting harder for the president to credibly say,

look at Bob Mueller, I'm the subject of a witch hunt. So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, good man. And it's a disgraceful situation. It's a total witch hunt. I've been saying it for a long time. I've wanted to keep it down. We've given, I believe, over a million pages worth of documents to the special counsel. And the reason it's getting harder is because this wasn't Bob Mueller's team. And there were additional checks outside the normal Mueller process. And so, you know, if he's got a grievance with this, he's got a grievance with a larger group of people in federal law enforcement than just Team Mueller.

And it's a disgrace. It's frankly a real disgrace. It's an attack on our country in a true sense. It's an attack on what we all stand for. So when I saw this and when I heard it, I heard it like you did. I said that is really now in a whole new level of unfairness. Matt, is the target of this raid Michael Cohen, or is the target actually President Trump,

with whom Michael Cohen has had so much communication that might be of interest to investigators who want access to those documents, or is it both men? That's a great question, and that is front and center to why this is important. Now, Michael Cohen is the focus of this search warrant. Full stop.

Prosecutors are only supposed to review documents that are going to be related to whatever crimes they think Michael Cohen may have committed. They're not supposed to just go rummaging through a client's conversations or his emails with his lawyer. But there are exceptions here. If they believe that Cohen and Trump were working together to commit a crime, Those emails are fair game. And so what's going to happen, I'm sure, is that there's going to be a fight over,

well, what records can prosecutors even get a hold of? But ultimately, you can't look at Michael Cohen at this depth without also looking at Donald Trump. He is such a fixture in the president's world. So if Cohen was complicit in any kind of crime, investigators can look at the communications between him and his client, the president. Otherwise, they cannot look at those because of attorney-client privilege. Yeah, generally speaking, that's right. If you have a lawyer, you seek out advice from your lawyer and you say, hey, I think I might have just committed a crime. What should I do here? And your lawyer says, all right, well, you should do X, Y, and Z. The government is not allowed to just come in and read your lawyer's emails and be like, aha,

well, there's the evidence of the crime. It's in the client's own mouth. That's the purpose of the attorney-client privilege. And so if prosecutors in Manhattan are going to pierce that, right, they have to either find things that they would say are evidence that are not protected by attorney-client privilege, or they have to say, look, this is part of something that's an ongoing violation of the law or that maybe Cohen was in on it. This is going to have to be worked out carefully, both to protect the attorney-client privilege and because the U.S. Attorney's Office does not want this to blow up their entire investigation. Matt, what we've been discussing is genuinely confusing, and it's got a lot of layers to it. If you and I were at a bar,

after what I'm sure has been an incredibly long day for you, how would you describe what we've learned today, and how would you explain it in simple terms? I think I would say, and I wish I were at a bar, that what this means is that the intense scrutiny that Donald Trump is under by the Justice Department right now has just gotten much more intense. In President Trump's world right now, this is the Justice Department reaching in a really invasive way into your inner circle, into your private communications with your lawyer. And it doesn't really matter whether it's Bob Mueller or the U.S. Attorney's Office.

A bunch of prosecutors and FBI agents just seized a ton of documents and files and emails from a man who has been one of the most trusted figures in Donald Trump's life for the last decade. And that is why this is a big deal. Matt, really appreciate it, and I hope you do get that drink tonight. Thanks, man. Why don't I just fire Mueller?

Well, I think it's a disgrace what's going on. We'll see what happens, but I think it's really a sad situation when you look at what happened. And many people have said, you should fire him. Again, they found nothing. The Times is reporting that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating a $150,000 payment made to the Trump Organization in 2015 by a Ukrainian steel magnate and billionaire in exchange for an appearance that Trump made by video connection at a conference in Kiev. The donor, Viktor Pinchuk, is known to have sought closer ties

between Ukraine and the West. His contribution, the largest to the Trump Foundation that year, other than one from Trump himself, was solicited by Michael Cohen. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. I'd like to begin by condemning the heinous attack on innocent Syrians with banned chemical weapons. It was an atrocious attack. It was horrible. You don't see things like that as bad as the news is around the world. You just don't see those images. On Monday, President Trump opened a cabinet meeting at the White House by addressing the chemical attacks in Syria over the weekend

and promising to quickly decide on whether to retaliate. We are studying that situation extremely closely. We are meeting with our military and everybody else, and we'll be making some major decisions over the next 24 to 48 hours. The Times reports that the White House is feeling pressure from France to act fast. On Sunday, Trump spoke to French President Emmanuel Macron, and they agreed to a, quote, strong joint response. If it's Russia, if it's Syria, if it's Iran, if it's all of them together, we'll figure it out and we'll know the answers quite soon. So we're looking at that very, very strongly and very seriously.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.