Michael Avenatti catches Michael Cohen in the act

| 11:18 pm EDT May 22, 2018
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Donald Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen was having a pretty terrible day, considering that his taxi cab business partner just cut a plea deal against him. Now it turns out Cohen’s day has managed to get even worse. Cohen has apparently been caught leaking cherry-picked audio recordings that he secretly made of his conversations with other people. That’s a big problem, because it means he’s leaking evidence in an ongoing case.

The recently appointed Special Master in the Michael Cohen case is still sifting through the evidence seized by the FBI from Cohen’s office, determining which of it is or is not privileged, and dispersing the allowable evidence to both sides. Michael Avenatti, the attorney for Stormy Daniels, has received whatever evidence Cohen has received. That means he’s in position to know if Cohen is leaking that evidence. Today he called him out on it.

Avenatti filed this letter with the judge: “We write to bring an important matter to the Court’s attention. We have reason to believe that plaintiff Michael Cohen, or members of his team, have begun to leak select audio recordings to the media that were seized in the FBI raids. We further have reason to believe that these recordings may relate to our client, Ms. Stephanie Clifford. We think that these select leaks are meant to paint a false narrative relating to Mr. Cohen and his business dealings at the same time he is not disclosing numerous other recordings of him speaking with individuals such as Mr. Trump.”

Michael Avenatti and Stormy Daniels are using this lawsuit primarily to help advance the criminal prosecution of Michael Cohen and expedite the ouster of Donald Trump. If the judge agrees with Avenatti’s premise that Cohen is selectively leaking evidence to the media, it’ll put Cohen and his legal team on far shakier ground going forward. That’ll give Avenatti more of the upper hand when it comes to using the civil court proceedings to further incriminate Cohen, even as the Feds continue to build a criminal case against him.