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Indeed it is. Watch out, it’s going to get nasty now. Can you say cornered rat?
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Indeed it is. Watch out, it’s going to get nasty now. Can you say cornered rat?
The woman who will first review materials seized from President Donald Trump’s lawyer spent about 17 years as a federal judge and also worked as a prosecutor.
Barbara Jones, 70, was appointed Thursday to sift through material seized on April 9 by the FBI from the premises and electronic devices of Michael Cohen, a longtime Trump attorney.
Jones will decide what records may contain communications protected by attorney-client privilege, making them off-limits to prosecutors. Her determinations may help shape the direction of a criminal investigation that prosecutors have said is focused on Cohen’s personal business and financial dealings.
U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood chose Jones after prosecutors said they would agree to the use of a so-called special master. Jones was not among the seven names proposed by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers for Cohen.
Jones was appointed to the federal bench in the Southern District of New York by President Bill Clinton in 1995 and served until the end of 2012. She works now at Bracewell LLP.
In the 15 months since Donald Trump shut him out of a White House job, Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, has made a show of publicly dining with a vocal Trump critic, the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.
After lunch at Freds restaurant in New York in April 2017, a gossip item appeared. When they had breakfast at the Time Warner Center in November, paparazzi “somehow” showed up, Mr. Cuban said. “I think he does it to piss off Trump when Trump is ignoring him.”
The president isn’t ignoring Mr. Cohen now. Federal prosecutors are investigating Mr. Cohen’s work for Mr. Trump, including his $130,000 pre-election payment to a former adult-film actress, as well as his taxi business and other personal dealings. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided his premises earlier this month.
Looming over all of this is an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into whether associates of Mr. Trump, including Mr. Cohen, colluded with Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Cohen and the White House have denied any collusion.
Prosecutors may not find evidence of wrongdoing by either man. Mr. Trump and his lawyers nonetheless are now grappling with the question of how the president’s self-described “fixer” may respond if charged and presented with the choice of turning on his boss or facing prison time.
Mr. Cohen has memorably said he would “take a bullet” for the president. But in a sign of Mr. Cohen’s state of mind, he has in recent months privately groused about being excluded from White House posts he believed he deserved, according to people familiar with his thinking. He has struggled to get Mr. Trump’s attention. And two new business engagements he started during that time that could have profited from his Washington connections have instead languished.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that a longtime Trump legal adviser had warned the president that Mr. Cohen would likely cooperate if charged. Since then, Mr. Trump called Mr. Cohen “a fine person with a wonderful family” on Twitter and expressed confidence he would stand strong.
“Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if…it means lying or making up stories,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “Sorry, I don’t see Michael doing that despite the horrible Witch Hunt and the dishonest media!”
Mr. Cohen declined to be interviewed and provided a two-word response to a list of questions sent by email: “Completely inaccurate.” He didn’t respond to a request to elaborate.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
WASHINGTON — Another day, another casualty. Or two.
By the time the sun set Thursday, Dr. Ronny L. Jackson was a failed cabinet nominee whose life had been picked apart for public consumption, and Michael D. Cohen was back in court facing possible criminal prosecution.
A ride on President Trump’s bullet train can be thrilling, but it is often a brutal journey that leaves some bloodied by the side of the tracks. In only 15 months in office, Mr. Trump has burned through a record number of advisers and associates who have found themselves in legal, professional or personal trouble, or even all three.
Half of the top aides who came to the White House with Mr. Trump in 2017 are gone, many under painful circumstances, either because they fell out with the boss or came under the harsh scrutiny that comes with him. Some of the president’s longest-serving aides have left with bruises. His son and son-in-law have hired lawyers and been interrogated. Even his lawyers now have lawyers as they face inquiries of their own.
Proximity to Mr. Trump has been a crushing experience for many who arrived with stellar careers and independent reputations yet ended up losing so much. Rex W. Tillerson ran the world’s largest energy company. David Shulkin was a respected doctor and a “high priest” of the medical world. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster was an admired warrior. So was John F. Kelly. Jeff Sessions held a safe seat in Congress. So did Tom Price. Now all of them are known for unhappy associations with Mr. Trump.
THE JILL STEIN campaign is refusing to comply fully with a Senate intelligence committee request for documents and other correspondence, made as part of the committee’s probe into Russian activities in the 2016 election, according to a letter to be delivered Thursday to the panel by an attorney for the campaign.
The Green Party campaign will agree to turn over some documents, but raised constitutional objections to the breadth of the inquiry, which was first made in November 2017, arguing that elements of it infringe on basic political rights enshrined in the First Amendment.
WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. first gave the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, a file containing spousal abuse allegations against Rob Porter in March 2017, according to a detailed new timeline the bureau has given to Congress that casts further doubt on the West Wing’s account of how accusations against one of President Trump’s closest advisers were handled.
Mr. Porter, Mr. Trump’s staff secretary, resigned under pressure in February after allegations that he had been physically violent toward two former wives were aired in the press. The White House — which initially sprang to his defense — has issued several competing accounts of how Mr. Trump’s team handled the allegations, which they insisted no senior officials knew about until just before Mr. Porter left his job.
But in a letter this month to the leaders of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is investigating how Mr. Porter could have received a security clearance given the allegations, a top official at the F.B.I. said that on March 3, 2017, the bureau sent a “partial report” on Mr. Porter “addressed to the Counsel to the President, Donald F. McGahn, which contained derogatory information.” A former federal law enforcement official said the violent abuse allegations were included in that file.
The F.B.I. furnished a more complete report to the White House personnel security office in July, according to the letter, which did not detail the nature of the derogatory information.
Mr. McGahn could not be reached for comment on the report. But a White House official said that he never saw it, and that aides believe it was reviewed by an underling and passed on to the White House personnel security office, which reviews F.B.I. background investigations as part of its process for evaluating whether officials should receive security clearances.
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