POTUS cranks up hyperbole over FBI’s ‘fraud’ raid on lawyer
President Donald Trump speaks with the media before a meeting with his military leadership in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington on Monday. Credit: EPA / Jim Lo Scalzo
Suddenly President Donald Trump sounds like a pitch man for the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Attorney-client privilege is dead!” he wailed on Twitter.
The FBI had seized records from his lawyer Michael Cohen.
Using language perhaps befitting the late radical attorney William Kunstler, Trump said the authorities “broke into” the office.
The fact is that the feds, in the executive branch which Trump sits atop, had a warrant. There are, in fact, circumstances that allow the government to go after lawyers.
Of course it remains to be seen if this eye-popping raid on Monday was justified. Feds have violated legal restraints before.
“The FBI screws up a lot,” Jesse Eisinger of Pro Publica said, via social media. Eisinger recalled how a case against Wall Street financier Benjamin Wey collapsed: A judge ruled a federal raid stomped on Wey’s Fourth Amendment rights.
Past cases, however, were about other people — and this, at least partially, is about Trump. He called the Cohen raid part of an ongoing “attack on our country in a true sense” and on “what we all stand for.”
That’s the kind of statement we expect to hear from presidents about terrorist attacks — not the authorized seizure of files from a Rockefeller Center office or a Park Avenue hotel room.
If Trump develops a libertarian’s objections to domestic spying under the Patriot Act or inhumane jail conditions in Maricopa County, Arizona, maybe he’ll share those too.
For now, there’s no sign that special counsel Robert Mueller is conducting some massive deep-state Democratic Party cabal to undermine the republic as Trump would have us believe.
This again is not to idealize the actions of law-enforcement, only to say the Cohen raid in itself seems none too extraordinary.
Cohen is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations, according to sources quoted by The Washington Post.
The case falls in the territorial jurisdiction of the Southern District of New York where Republican U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman is a Trump appointee.
The president personally interviewed Berman — a supporter who contributed to the GOP president’s campaign — before nominating him. Berman is recusing himself from the Cohen case, ABC News reported.
Prosecutors reportedly carried out the raid under Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s direction. At this point the Cohen action appears separate from Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Materials were collected relating to Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, various reports said.
So it is easy to see why Trump is agitated. But by calling this case a blow to American liberty, he practices the art of the surreal.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
