Special Master just dumped a ton of bricks on Michael Cohen and Donald Trump
For all his formal and symbolic moves that have moved him closer to cutting a plea deal, Michael Cohen still has yet to actually cut a deal. Even as he and his new attorney take pot shots at Donald Trump, the legal system is still moving forward against Cohen. To that end, a federal judge just dumped a ton of proverbial bricks on the heads of Cohen and Trump – more than eight hundred thousand bricks, to be more precise.
Weeks ago, federal prosecutors were handed a motherlode of evidence against Michael Cohen. The Special Master granted prosecutors access to more than a million pieces of evidence seized during the FBI’s raid of Cohen’s office; most of these appeared to be electronic communications such as texts and emails. Only a handful of communications were suppressed under attorney-client privilege. If that wasn’t bad enough for Cohen, the Special Master has now finished sorting through another batch of seized evidence, and she’s ruled that another 883,634 pieces of evidence must be turned over to prosecutors. So where does this get us?
If Cohen still harbors any idle fantasies about winning at trial, this ruling should help to further shatter those illusions. Cohen’s defense strategy was based on the idea of trying to get the evidence against him thrown out. Perhaps Cohen knew that the most damaging evidence against him was in the second batch that was still being reviewed. But now that he’s officially lost that battle, there’s really nothing else for him to hang his hat on. Cohen now knows that if he goes to trial, he’ll probably lose, which will land him in a cell for decades.
So we’ll see if this latest devastating blow against Michael Cohen is enough to push him over the hump when it comes to a plea deal. The bigger upshot is this: some of these pieces of evidence are communications between Cohen and Donald Trump. Now that it’s been established that practically none of it was protected by attorney-client privilege, Special Counsel Robert Mueller can – and will – use it as part of his criminal case against Donald Trump.
