Today, Explained - The raid

Episode Date: April 11, 2018

President Trump today called the raid on the office of his personal lawyer Michael Cohen “unthinkable.” Vox’s Zachary Fryer-Biggs explains what the FBI was looking for, and Vox’s Andrew Prokop reveals Cohen’s complicated past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello? Hello, is this Johnny Harris? This is Johnny Harris. Johnny Harris, senior producer of videos here at Vox. You're not in the office today, but rumor has it you bought yourself a Quip toothbrush. Yeah, I just got the confirmation email. It's all fancy with a tracking number and it's on its way. And I'm not going to lie, I'm kind of excited about it.

You went to getquip.com slash explain? I did. I actually first went to getquip.com and then I realized, wait a minute, I have to support my people and this thing I listen to every day. And so I hit the slash explained and actually got a bunch of free stuff at the same time.

Oh my God, you're killing it. You're killing it. I need to find out your thought process, what led you to this decision. I need to hear it all. It's not every day that the president's personal lawyer has his offices raided by federal agents, right? Feels that way now, but yeah, no, it's not an everyday occurrence. So, Zach Fryer-Biggs, national security reporter at Vox, what exactly happened on Monday? We're still sorting out details, but the rough overview that we got now is that Robert Mueller, the special counsel who's investigating Trump and his campaign tied to the Russian meddling in the 2016 election, found some material on Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer.

Okay. Brought it to his boss, Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general, who decided that this shouldn't be part of the Russia investigation. It should be this other thing. So he gave it to the prosecutor in New York who decided to authorize a raid of Michael Cohen's office. What they were looking for is whatever communication they could find about two payoffs that Michael Cohen gave to two women who claimed to have had relationships with President Trump before he was president. That's Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. There's all sorts of accusations that those payments may have violated campaign finance law. They may have included some bank fraud, some wire transfer fraud.

There's all sorts of things that they could have caused. And so that's what they were looking for. Could they have just asked him, hey, Michael Cohen, we're interested in these particular documents. A raid seems pretty dramatic. You don't do a raid unless you're concerned that someone's going to be destroying evidence or if you're concerned that they may not give you everything you ask for. Otherwise, if you are in sort of an amicable place, you're just going to ask and hopefully they turn over the documents you need. So this does suggest a level of concern about getting the evidence they want.

There's a scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse tells Walter White, Seriously, when the going gets tough, you don't want a criminal lawyer. You want a criminal lawyer. Know what I'm saying? Are the FBI and Rod Rosenstein implying that Michael Cohen's a shady dude here? It certainly implied that they have some pretty good evidence against him. Otherwise, you don't get a judge to sign off on a raid of a lawyer's office. It's a sensitive situation because obviously he's got attorney-client privilege. And the president tweeted that attorney-client privilege is now dead.

Is that true? No, there's a very specific exemption for if the lawyer involved is trying to commit a crime or helping a client commit a crime, then attorney-client privilege doesn't apply. So, no, attorney-client privilege is very much alive. So how has the president been handling all this? On Monday, Trump was meeting with his military commanders to discuss options for Syria. He allowed reporters into the room before that meeting and proceeded to give a fairly impassioned defense of Michael Cohen, of himself, and attack Mueller pretty directly.

So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys. He referred to the raid as... An attack on our country in a true sense. It's an attack on what we all stand for. He described the Mueller probe again as a disgraceful situation. It's a total witch hunt.

A phrase he's used many times before. He ostensibly argued that the actions taken as part of the raid were a threat to our democracy. Today, we got a lovely comment from him, which is a little puzzling, saying that he hasn't obstructed justice as part of this investigation, except to defend himself. I don't know what that means. If you can figure out what that means and tell me, I'd be really appreciative. No, that's why you're here, to tell us what things mean. Trump views many of his actions as a defense of himself. Even if he may be towing the line with obstruction or something that would get him into legal jeopardy,

you've got to remember, he comes from a mindset of combat when it comes to any legal proceeding. And so he's viewing this as he's got to fight, even if pretty much every lawyer I've talked to about this case says that he should just keep his mouth shut. How might this play out? I mean, why are they focusing on potential payoffs and checks and bank fraud maybe? What it comes down to is that the payments themselves aren't necessarily illegal unless they were meant to help Trump win the election, in which case they'd be a campaign contribution. Okay. And the $130,000 for one of the payments, $150,000 for the other payment is well in excess of what you can legally contribute to one candidate. And they never reported it as a campaign contribution. And then the other

part is that Michael Cohen said that at least for the Stormy Daniels payment, he got it from his personal credit line. Depending on what the bank asked for, he may have been violating certain banking rules if he lied about what he was going to use the money for. And so that's the other part of this is how did Michael Cohen get the money? Was he honest about where the money was going? And was it intended to help Trump win the presidency? Is there a chance that Michael Cohen goes to the clinker, the clinky? What is that one? What do they say? Slammer or the clink, I think, normally, because it's the single sound of the lock closing and, you know, you recognizing your inevitable doom inside of a jail cell. What's the worst thing that could possibly happen to him?

He could face jail time. I personally doubt it. Most of the time when you're dealing with campaign finance issues, it's really sort of slap on the wrist. But it's possible. So then why bother? Why make a huge stink out of raiding Donald Trump's personal lawyer's office? Mueller in particular is a Boy Scout. He just well and truly is the square jawed example of what someone thinks of when they're

looking at law enforcement. Yeah. If he found evidence of a crime, he's not going to let it go. This all stems from the Russia probe, but obviously has nothing to do with Russia. It's about these payoffs and these alleged affairs. Is this the final sort of coup de grace that's like, no, the summer Zervos, Stormy Daniels, has nothing to do with Russia. It's about these payoffs and these alleged affairs. Is this the final sort of coup de grace that says, like, no, the summer Zervos, Stormy Daniels,

that is all part of this other thing, this bigger thing? I think it becomes a question of how the Justice Department decides to use this material. If they're going after Cohen partially to try to gain leverage so that he'll flip on Trump, then it's definitely part of that overall narrative. Mueller has got a history of dealing with especially organized crime investigations. He's the guy who led the investigation that brought down the Gambino crime family. The way you bring down organized crime or large family organizations is you start from the bottom, you find low-level people, you find whatever crime you can against them, you flip them, and then you build upwards

to the top. You need people to flip. That's what we've seen Mueller doing thus far with Trump campaign aides, whether it's Gates, whether it's Papadopoulos. These people have taken plea deals and are working with Mueller to build cases higher up in the food chain. If that's what he's looking for, I am sure that the U.S. attorney in New York would be willing to plead Cohen out in exchange for testimony and cooperation. I think it's pretty unlikely that Cohen is going to go ahead and do that just because I'm sure he'll be taken care of by some people in the Trump orbit if he just keeps his mouth shut. Not dissimilar to, frankly, the mob. Soldiers don't go to hell. It's war.

Soldiers, they kill other soldiers. We're in a situation where everybody involved knows the stakes. And if you're going to accept those stakes, you got to do certain things. It's business. We're soldiers. We follow codes. Orders. He said, speaking of the mob, that he would take a bullet for the president, right? Yep. So this doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's going to flip. Well, I mean, he has lasted in

the Trump family for an incredibly long time. And we know that Trump values loyalty above pretty much all else. So you'd have to expect a pretty high level of loyalty if he's been around this long. This whole mobster lawyer thing isn't just some perception. This comes from Michael Cohen himself. Turns out the president's lawyer sort of has a tendency to threaten to if you even dare to that's in a This Is Today Explained.

It was this meta moment when i was listening to the podcast while i was like getting ready for bed okay and it was that you did this ad that was like you look at your old pathetic toothbrush that's all moldy and gross and i was holding my old pathetic toothbrush that was all moldy and gross holy smokes and you're like and so i'm like sitting there like, wait a minute. It felt like the Truman show. Like I'm being like an ad is being like spoken to me through like the ether. And so I look, I, this, this is a true story. I'm not exaggerating. I look at my old, this is like a 18 month old toothbrush.

And I'm like, man, this is just, this is a sign. So I immediately like put the toothbrush down, went to getquip.com slash explain and bought the thing. And I was feeling so like hyped about this serendipity that I was like, I'm going to upgrade to the metal version so that I can be like 100% in on this. Wow. Yeah.

So is what they say true? Do they start at $25? Do they come with free brush head refills the first time? Is it all there? It's all there. It didn't come with free brush heads until I put the slash explained part. Hey, and then it was like three brush heads. And I was like, sweet. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Viram. Michael Cohen is Donald Trump's personal lawyer. But he's really so much more than that.

Andrew Prokop writes about the politics for the Vox. He's more of an all-purpose problem solver, cleanup man. I'll do anything to protect Mr. Trump, the family, now Vice President-elect Pence. Michael Cohen has been compared to Tom Hagen from The Godfather. There you go. I think he himself may have made that comparison too. I know almost every big lawyer in New York. Who the hell are you? I have a special practice. I handle one client. Now you have my number. I'll wait for your call. Yeah, he views himself as Trump's consigliere. And he's talked

in very colorful terms about how he's going to try really, really hard to make sure that anything Trump doesn't want to happen doesn't end up happening. You'll be the first one to know, Sean, you and of course, all your viewers. I'm going to be the personal attorney to Mr. Trump. I'm not going to be in government, but I'm going to remain technically in the same role for Mr. Trump, for President Trump. Can you give me an example? Okay, so one thing that Cohen himself told a reporter in 2011, if somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn't like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump's benefit. If you do something wrong, I'm going to come at you, grab you by the neck, and I'm not going to let you go until I'm finished. Oh, my. Oh, my gosh.

So we should probably get back to square one. Who is Michael Cohen and what does he do? So Cohen is a lawyer who, you know, he's been associated with Donald Trump for about a decade. But before that, he came up in New York City doing a lot of work, both business and legal work for a community of Ukrainian immigrants. One thing he did was he bought up a lot of taxi medallions, you know, the permits that let you drive a taxi. They used to be really valuable in New York before Uber showed up.

Yep, yep, exactly. And so he was doing this in the 90s and the 2000s. So he made a lot of money there. He was involved in various other businesses too. Cohen and his brother both married women who had immigrated to the US from Ukraine. And that seems to have opened a lot of doors for them in the Ukrainian immigrant community. And they pursued business opportunities from there. Basically, there was a

floating casino or gambling company that he was involved in in Florida that ended up failing. But he made a lot of money off of all this stuff. It's not entirely clear how, but he seems to have been successful one way or another. Okay. Sounds like he'd be a great candidate for the Trump organization as an attorney. Yeah. And the way he got involved with Trump is pretty interesting. He had gotten pretty wealthy and he started buying Trump Organization properties for himself and encouraging his family members and business associates to buy them, too. And he eventually became treasurer of the board of Trump World Tower in New York. It was great timing for this

because there was a big fight going on over control of the condo board. There were some owners who were very angry at Donald Trump and had taken control of the board. And Cohen ended up fighting to wrest control of the board. And Cohen ended up fighting to wrest control of the board back from them and to deliver it back sort of on Trump's side. So that really impressed Trump. And he ended up offering Cohen a job at the Trump organization. He was named executive vice president and special

counsel. That was in 2007. And he got involved in a bunch of different things one particular line of business that he was very involved in was pursuing trump investment opportunities in the former soviet union uh the country of georgia in kazakhstan and eventually in russia. So at what point does Michael Cohen become such a close personal counsel, conciliary, as you said, to Donald Trump? It seems like their relationship took a step forward in 2011. Trump was considering challenging Obama for his re-election. While I'm not at this time a candidate for the presidency, I will decide by June whether or not I will become one.

And Cohen became like a leading political advisor to Trump as he considered running this campaign. It ended up not happening. Trump decided against running that year, but Cohen continued to build up that trust with him and take on bigger and bigger roles in the Trump organization. So Cohen has this reputation for going after Donald Trump's enemies. What kind of tactics does he use? It sounds like there's a lot of sort of verbal bullying.

Well, he can use either carrots, as we've seen in the hush money that he gave to Stormy Daniels, or he can take a harder line and use some sticks. So after Trump began running for president in June 2015, the following month in July, the Daily Beast was preparing a story about an old deposition from Trump's first wife, Ivana, in which she said that Donald Trump had raped her at one point during their marriage. Cohen was asked to respond about this, and he said a few things. He falsely told the Daily Beast that legally you could not rape your spouse in New York. Quote, by the very definition, you can't rape your spouse. It is true.

You cannot rape your spouse. And there's very clear case law. Then in an attempt to stop the story from being printed, he really, really threatened one of the reporters involved, Tim Mack. So Cohen said, I will make sure that you and I meet one day when we're in the courthouse and I will take you for every penny you still don't have

and I will come after your daily beast and everybody else that you possibly know. So I'm warning you, tread very fucking lightly because what I'm going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. Oh my God. And this for sure he said, like there's no tape of that, but he said that to a reporter.

I don't know if it was taped, but Tim wrote it up and put it in the Daily Beast, and Cohen has never disputed saying that, so pretty clearly said it. One of the biggest legal issues swirling around the president right now is obviously his connections to Russia, his campaign's connections to Russia. What kinds of connections does Cohen have to Russia? So in the fall of 2015, Donald Trump is already running for president at this point. Michael Cohen, working for the Trump Organization, gets involved in a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The Trump Organization signs a letter of intent saying they plan on proceeding with this project, basically. And Cohen is emailing with a longtime business associate of his named Felix Sater. And it's a very interesting email exchange that we learned about last year. Sater emails Cohen,

I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. Buddy, our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this. Cohen later said that Sater was just using colorful language and salesmanship, you know, enthusiastically trying to get this project made. A few weeks after that in mid January 2016, so this is just weeks before the Iowa caucuses. Trump is the frontrunner leading in the polls. Cohen writes to Vladimir Putin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, in an email. Okay. He's basically asking for help with permitting for the Trump Tower Moscow project. They're having

trouble obtaining the local permits to move forward. So Cohen writes, I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. Cohen was very clearly reaching out to both a top Russian government official and was involved in business pursuits related to Russia during the campaign. Now, he says he never got a response from this Russian official and that Trump organization abandoned their plans for the Trump Tower Moscow soon afterwards. So it all amounted to nothing in the end. It was just a business opportunity. He was exploring it and it went nowhere and that there was certainly no collusion or even further communication after that. Other than the fact that this guy, Michael Cohen, seems to be a bit of a bully on Trump's behalf and fancies himself

conciliary to the head of the family, why should we care about him? Is he important? Is he someone we need to be keeping an eye on? I think he's an extremely important figure for the future of Donald Trump's presidency right now. Trump has been, as far as I know, his only client in recent years. And he has a lot of documents on his work for Donald Trump and the Trump organization over many, many years. And now the Justice Department has these documents. So Cohen knows a lot. He's been around a long time, close to Trump for a long time. And I think it's safe to say that he's what happens, what comes out of this raid, and whether Michael Cohen is eventually charged could have very, very big implications for the

future of Trump's presidency. So this is this weird liminal space you're in now between ordering your Quip toothbrush and having your Quip toothbrush after going to getquip.com. How are you going to spend the coming days of anticipation? You know, I now have this feeling of kind of like I'm ready to move on. And now every time I approach my current toothbrush, it just feels kind of awkward. Like, you know, I'm moving on from you, but I can't quite yet. And so there's this kind of weird tension in my life that I'm really ready to move on from, but it's going to be a few days. And I'm looking at the tracking now, it's going to be two days before it's here. So I don't know, it's kind of this a few days. I'm looking at the tracking now. It's going to be two days before it's here. I don't know. It's kind of this weird middle ground.

I feel like I'm in toothbrush limbo at the moment. If it gets there by Friday morning and there's a Friday afternoon brush that you can foresee, you're going to have to call us back and report on how satisfied you are with your Quip toothbrush. Yeah. I have

pretty high expectations. You know, that there's all this promise about it being able to tell me when I'm supposed to switch sides and I'm up kind of an 80 D brusher. And so this kind of that, that's actually one of the main, main features I'm excited about is like the guidance that it will give me to brush.

And so I, I have high expectations. I'll give it a thorough review and let you know how I feel. Excellent. Johnny, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for, you know, supporting the show and love your work. Thank you, Sean. I appreciate it. I'll let you know how it goes. Great.