Michael Cohen Archives - Bookworm Room

The Mystery of The Recusal of Geoffrey Berman

April 11, 2018 by Wolf Howling 128 Comments

The most obvious mystery of the No-Knock Warrant issued against Michael Cohen out of the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York is that the person who sought the warrant from that office was not the interim U.S. Attorney for that office, Geoffrey Berman. He recused himself from involvement in the Cohen case.

There are many bases on which an attorney can recuse himself from a matter, the two most common being an actual conflict of interest or the appearance of a conflict of interest. What we know about Berman is that he was personally interviewed by Trump for the job as Interim U.S. Attorney of SDNY and that he donated to Trump’s campaign. We do not know why he recused himself, nor whether he was pressured to do so. We do know that Rod Rosenstein signed off on both the no-knock warrant and Berman’s recusal.

If Berman’s only basis for recusal was the appearance of impropriety – as Allahpundit at Hot Air speculates – once again we have a Republican bringing a safety pin to a fight where the proggies bring tanks and are not playing by the same set of rules. We can see multiple examples of real conflicts of interest that have been ignored by the DOJ in the special counsel fishing expedition — Rod Rosenstein for his involvement in Uranium One, his potential criminal exposure for signing off on an extension to the unlawful Carter Page warrant, and of course his unlawful authorization of for the special counsel to conduct the entire counter-intelligence investigation instead of limiting his jurisdiction to a specific crime; Mueller for his close personal relationship to Comey; Mueller’s team for their overt support of Hillary Clinton . . . and I could go on.

Far more likely, I suspect that Mueller passed on information to the SDNY that was specifically crafted to bring within its ambit some legal work done previously by Berman. According to Hot Air, the warrant sought information on the payoff to Stormy Daniels, ATI’s contract with Playboy Bunny Karen McDougal, and, according to ABC News, a payment of $150,000 to Trump Foundation in by a Ukrainian billionaire in 2015 for a speech. In all fairness to ABC, they do an even handed job of pointing out that the same man

donated between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation over the years, and the New York Times reported that he lent his private plane to the Clintons. His name also appears in State Department emails made public by the group Citizens United as being invited to a small private dinner with then-Secretary Clinton.

Do hope that the special counsel is right on top of that one.

Lastly, there was one other basis listed in the warrant for the no-knock raid — the NYC taxi medallions that Cohen owns in his own private portfolio.

What the hell?

Did Mueller and SDNY crowd tack on the taxi medallions as a means to engineer the recusal of Berman? To date, I can find no one who has contacted Berman and asked him about the justification and circumstances surrounding his recusal. The stench of all of this just got significantly stronger.

Alan Dershowitz on the Cohen No-Knock Warrant

April 11, 2018 by Wolf Howling 13 Comments

According to retired Harvard Law Professor, Alan Dershowitz, the DOJ’s early morning raid, approved by Rod Rosenstein among others, to execute a no-knock warrant on Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen violates the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments. This from the Daily Mail:

Among the scooped-up papers, and lurking on phones and hard drives, is likely to be a cache of material that’s covered by attorney-client privilege.

Prosecutors are not permitted access to those files, and the DOJ’s standard practice is to set up a ‘taint team’ – a group of agents and lawyers not connected to the Cohen case or the special counsel probe into all things Russia – to decide what they can see.

But ‘taint teams don’t work,’ Alan Dershowitz told DailyMail.com on Tuesday, because seizing the material in the first place was a violation of Cohen’s constitutional rights – even if it’s never used in court. . . .

Rare? A no-knock warrant taking privileged communications between a sitting President and his attorney? Try unprecedented in American history. Even in the effort to burn Nixon at the stake, no one went as far. There, documents subject to executive privilege were subpoenaed and Nixon and his lawyers had the opportunity to contest the warrants in an open, public forum. Here, we are being asked to trust in the honest and trustworthiness of a host of people who have proven themselves anything but trustworthy.

The Daily Mail quotes from a second law professor who talks about the trustworthiness of the “taint teams” employed by the FBI. Talk about living in a bubble. That would be the same FBI that refused to enforce Congressional subpoenas for eight years against the Obama administration, the same FBI that executed a whitewash of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, the same FBI that ignored unlawful email communications between the President and his Secretary of State on her private email address, the same FBI that executed the political assassination of Michael Flynn, the same FBI that used unverified Clinton generated opposition research in an effort to destroy Trump’s presidency and in which Rod Rosenstein was personally involved, . . . and we are supposed to trust their “taint teams?” Bullshit.

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Outrageous — the FBI raid on Michael Cohen (Update 2)

April 9, 2018 by Wolf Howling 36 Comments

The FBI gave Hillary a free pass for national security violations; now it conducted an outrageous raid against Trump’s attorney right before the IG report.

This morning, the DOJ, based on allegations passed on by Bob Mueller, executed a warrant on Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, sweeping up a host of material covered by attorney client privilege. Indications are that the information related to Stormy Daniels, something completely unrelated to a single thing about Trump-Russian collusion.

[Update 1: By all accounts, Cohen was fully cooperating with the FBI and DOJ. So why and how this warrant? The procedure for issuing this particular warrant would have had to pass a high bar and involved multiple people at DOJ. My suspicion, reinforced by the following from Liz Shields at PJM, is that it is the mother of all fishing expeditions:

One thing is curious: Mr. Cohen was cooperating with the authorities, so why were the jackboots brought in? A special team of agents will need to go through the material in order to identify communications that are protected under attorney-client relationship. If the New York agents just happen to find something relevant to Mueller’s investigation they can turn it over to the special counsel, The New York Times reports.

So just who made the decision to seek a warrant in this matter? We’re still waiting to find out. It is just being reported that the AG for the Southern District of New York, a Trump appointee, was recused from this matter and he, just like Jeff Sessions did with Rosenstein, turned the matter over to someone else in his office — all with the approval of Rosenstein. Rosenstein also approved the warrant at issue here.]

[Update: Andy McCarthy, writing at NRO, puts the investigation of Cohen in perspective:

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was caught hiding the sources of 1,300 large campaign donations, aggregating to nearly $2 million. The campaign also accepted more than $1.3 million in unlawful donations from contributors who had already given the legal maximum.

Under federal law, such campaign-finance violations, if they aggregate to just $25,000 in a calendar year, may be treated as felonies punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment . . .

The Obama campaign did not have a defense; it argued in mitigation that the unlawful donations constituted a negligible fraction of the monumental amount it had raised from millions of “grass-roots” donors. Compelling? Maybe not, but enough to convince the Obama Justice Department not to prosecute the Obama campaign — shocking, I know. During the Christmas holiday season right after the 2012 campaign, with Obama safely reelected and nobody paying much attention, the matter was quietly settled with the payment of a $375,000 fine.

Is the $130,000 in hush money Donald Trump’s personal lawyer paid to porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election a campaign-finance violation? Probably, although it’s a point of contention. Even if we stipulate that it is, though, we’re talking comparative chump change.

Yet, as that lawyer, Michael Cohen, has discovered, what was not a crime in the Obama days is the crime of the century now. . . .

This is a mockery of equal justice, which makes the execution of this warrant look like an utter abuse of our legal system, all in an effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election.]

This warrant is from the same bastards who have yet – two years after the fact – to execute a warrant to verify that the single most basic fact of the collusion story, that the DNC server was hacked by the Russians. This from the same bastards that allowed Hillary to maintain her private server for months after it became known that she had run all State Dept. business through that server, all but certainly exposing thousands of confidential, secret and top secret documents and items of information in violation of our state secrets laws. During that time, Hillary and her attorney wiped that server clean. And now these bastards, seemingly having found nothing on which to charge Trump relating to Russian collusion, and having given Hillary and her team a pass on crystal clear felonies, go after Trump and/or his personal attorney on a technical violation of election law? These worthless bastards are out of control.

It is hard to express just how outrageous this is [Update: though Alan Dershowitz does a good job of it]:

The attorney–client privilege is one of the oldest recognized privileges for confidential communications. The United States Supreme Court has stated that by assuring confidentiality, the privilege encourages clients to make “full and frank” disclosures to their attorneys, who are then better able to provide candid advice and effective representation.

Indeed, the Attorney Client privilege is not merely judge made law well over a century old, it is part of the Federal Rules of Evidence passed into law by Congress. If a prosecutor is even thinking of violating it, he has a high bar to overcome. That is doubly so in this case where the warrant was issued ex parte, without any chance for Trump or his attorney to object and be heard. [Read more…]

FBI raid on Michael Cohen — Open Thread

April 9, 2018 by Bookworm 10 Comments

We have a few fixed data points about today’s raid on Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, but not much else. I’m interested in your thoughts on the matter.

Here’s what we know:

Robert Mueller is supposed to be probing whether Trump colluded with the Russians in the lead-up to the November 2016 election.

Trump had an affair a decade ago with an adult film actress.

Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen paid the actress money to keep her mouth shut.

Trump claims not to have known about this payment. (I can actually believe this. Trump has always boasted about his conquests and we know he cheated on all of his wives. Why would he become coy now?)

Despite accepting money to keep her mouth shut, the actress has revitalized her career by talking non-stop.

Mueller, with Deputy A.G. Rosenstein’s agreement, gave some information to the FBI’s Southern District of New York office.

Based on that information, the FBI got warrants to raid Cohen’s home and office.

Leftists are thrilled, believing that this is the prelude to criminals charges against Trump and impeachment.

Trump is furious.

That’s what we know. (At least, since this is off the top of my head, I think it’s what we know.) I haven’t formulated any conclusions or ideas yet. In part, I think it’s premature to have any real idea what’s going on. Still, I’m interested in what your thoughts are, even at this early stage.

*****

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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trump: the Russia collusion story needs to end soon

February 13, 2018 by Wolf Howling 13 Comments

Available facts indicate that the Progressives’ Russia Collusion narrative is fake — and time is running out to investigate the true Clinton/FBI collusion.

With questions swirling around the Trump-Russian collusion narrative, we seem to be living in a John le Carré novel. It is one full of spies where the truth is hidden deep beneath disinformation and, ironically enough, behind security protocols. And just like a le Carré novel, it seems that there are many people in this mix determined that the truth should never see the light of day.

Is Trump a Russian intelligence asset with a taste for Russian prostitutes and golden showers who stole the 2016 election with help from Russia? Perhaps. But given the dearth of evidence supporting that contention after twenty months of investigation, another, better question arises: Is the Trump Russia collusion narrative the single most dirty — and criminal — trick in the history of American politics? It would be intellectually dishonest in the extreme to say that only one of those questions deserves investigation.

Was the Russian collusion narrative started, then spoon fed to the FBI and the media, as a way to make Hillary seem less corrupt in comparison to Trump during the 2016 election campaign? Was the narrative then pushed as hard as possible after the election as a way to delegitimize the Trump presidency; to serve as a vehicle to overturn the 2016 election results, and to protect people in government who had acted unethically, and perhaps criminally, as regards all things Hillary — i.e., those responsible for the criminal travesty that was the FBI/DOJ investigation and exoneration of Hillary for her email scandal, those who allowed the Uranium One deal to be approved without notifying Congress of related Russian corruption, and those DOJ officials who defied the recommendations of FBI field agents to open an investigation of the Clinton Foundation?

Let me note here, before you start measuring me for a tin-foil hat, I am not alleging some grand conspiracy involving the FBI, CIA, ODNI, and others. If this was a political dirty trick, then the truth is likely being held in a death-grip of secrecy among a handful of conspirators, they most likely being no more than one or two people in the leadership of the DNC and Clinton Campaigns, perhaps CIA Director John Brennan and/or Glen Simpson of Fusion GPS, and/or Christopher Steele. As to everyone else who then picked up this narrative and ran with it, sometimes unlawfully, that was not a conspiracy. Far more likely it simply grew out of the partisan culture created throughout the government agencies by the Obama administration. That culture, as Ms. BWR has fairly described it, is one of bias, entitlement, arrogance, and corruption, at least to the extent that ideological ends have at times justified patently unlawful means. I believe Ms. BWR’s description also covers about 90% of the mainstream media as well.

Just to review, there are precious few factual allegations regarding the Trump Russia collusion narrative beyond the bald allegation that Trump was a Russian asset, a narrative Fusion’s Glen Simpson claims was known all over Moscow and was just there for the picking in June 2016. People were “talking about it freely.” (Sen. p87-88). Amazing that Simpson and Steele were able to uncover that in a week whereas the CIA and NSA were blissfully ignorant during the eight years that Trump is alleged to have acted as a Russian agent, eh?

The people Steele names as active in the Russia Trump collusion are Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen. Steele mentions Michael Flynn, but only in passing as someone the Kremlin was cultivating. Steele alludes to two others, someone in the Trump campaign who “admitt[ed that the] Kremlin [was] behind [the] recent appearance of DNC emails on Wikileaks,” later claimed to be George Papadopoulos, and someone “close” to Trump who knew of his intelligence relationship with Russia, later asserted to be Sergei Millian.

As to specific acts alleged by Steele, there are only four that directly relate to Trump (at least by my count, ten by count of the Washington Times). The first specific act alleged is that Trump engaged Russian hookers to do a golden shower in his Moscow hotel room in 2013. The second is that Carter Page traveled to Russia in order to meet Igor Sechin, President of Rosneft, and a Russian political official, Diveykin. The third is that George Papadopoulos admitted to knowing that Russia was behind the DNC Wikileaks affair. And the fourth is that Michael Cohen met in Prague with Russian officials in the last week of August or first week of September. [Read more…]

The true tale of the Steele Dossier and the Russia Conspiracy

January 31, 2018 by Wolf Howling 10 Comments

New facts show that the so-called Russia conspiracy was in fact a product of savvy Russians and credulous, willing, and very dishonest Democrat operatives.

This Trump-Russia collusion narrative is looking more and more like an incredibly intelligent mix of publicly available facts wrapped around some damning pieces of knowing slanders and fictions, all of which were then given the imprimatur of verisimilitude by attaching a retired British spy, Christopher Steele’s name to the whole misbegotten mess. None of the damning pieces have been proven, though several key bits have been disproven. Edward Jay Epstein recently opined at Powerline that the Steele Dossier, to the extent it seems to contain actual information from Russian sources, seems to contain Russian curated disinformation at best.

I am rapidly concluding that the Dossier may represent more than Russian meddling. Certainly Russia meddled. That’s what it does. But in this case, it seems to have gotten some help on the home front. There are far too many coincidences, far too many things that don’t make sense, and in several cases, dogs that don’t bark, for me to believe that, within America’s borders, those working on the Steele Dossier assembled it in good faith as honest, genuine investigatory work. It might be, but that is not the direction in which the known undisputed facts point at the moment.

In addition to reading this post, I recommend you read two other things. The first is Victor Davis Hanson’s article, Hillary’s “sure” victory explains most everything. The second is my post briefly explaining FISA and the questions that the FBI and DOJ have yet to answer about abusing FISA in the Trump-Russia matter. Both will help make sense of the events of the past two years and the tale I tell below.

In the coming days, I will also publish a detailed timeline listing all the relevant events and explaining why many of the key ones are problematic. It is very long. Before throwing you into that deep end, this post simplifies the timeline narrative and lets you see most of the major the issues without having to hack your way through the . . . I would say weeds, but it really is a triple-canopy jungle.

This post, relying on the facts set out in my soon-to-be-published timeline, gives you an insight into what was going on in the Hillary campaign. You’ll see that the evolving Trump-Russia narrative dovetailed perfectly with the struggle Hillary’s campaign had to overturn voters’ firm conviction that it was impossible for anyone to be more corrupt than Hillary.

So, with that preamble, let me ask you to step back in time and pretend you’re a top political operative in the DNC Now, close your eyes and make spooky noises as you travel back through slime, time and space. When you open your eyes, you see that the calendar on the wall shows that today is April 30, 2016.

April 30 . . . and your gal, Hillary Clinton, is tapped as a shoe-in for the nomination. And looking at the crowded Republican primary field, you know it’s a hop, skip and a jump from nomination to her walk on a red carpet, showered with a glittering combination of male tear drops and fragments of glass from the broken ceiling, as she heads to her coronation . . . uh, inauguration.

It’s a beautiful vision. But in the meantime, something has gone wrong. Very wrong.

Now, don’t misunderstand — not everything has gone wrong. The DNC is an arm of Clinton, Inc., bought and paid for, and it is doing her bidding. The DNC has stacked the primary deck in her favor and Hillary has virtually all the super-delegates in her bag.

The MSM is on her side and is pushing Donald Trump’s nomination on the theory that he will be her weakest opponent, Donald Trump. The MSM’s work seems to have paid off, as it is becoming ever more apparent that Trump is going to win the Republican nomination. All of that is great . . . but there are still a few irritants preventing you from reveling in the moment.

The main irritant is that Hillary is still on the ropes with the public for the email scandal that was first exposed almost a year ago. And worse, that public — including all those darn Deplorables — will get to vote for President in six months.

These likely voters know that Hillary, while Secretary of State, put tens of thousands of America’s secrets at risk by running them through an unsecured private server, the entire purpose of which was to thwart Congressional investigations and watchdog groups, something itself completely illegal. (This particular irritant, incidentally, if proven can be punished with 20 years in prison and a ban on ever again holding public office – which may explain why Comey didn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole when he exonerated Hillary on 5 July.) The Russians and every other American competitor and enemy, from China to Iran to the fat boy in Pyongyang, may have copies of all her emails during her time as Secretary of State, exposing both her and our nation to blackmail.

The FBI and DOJ are giving the appearance of investigating Hillary’s wrongdoings, but giving her exoneration a veneer of an honest investigation takes time. The FBI needs to interview witnesses and give them immunity. They need time to make side deals to destroy evidence. The grand jury needs . . . whoops, forgot: Unlike virtually every other criminal case the DOJ and FBI investigate, they haven’t bothered to impanel a grand jury. Someone needs to write (and edit) an exoneration statement, so it doesn’t get thrown together carelessly at the last minute, after you’ve heard and discarded the evidence. And all of this is a pain in the ass when you keep getting interrupted by having to do all these check-the-box “key” witness interviews.

And all the while all this is going on, no one trusts Hillary. She can’t shake the scandal, despite her trying out a new excuse – usually laughable, as even you admit – on a weekly basis.

Still worse, Hillary is facing a real primary challenge from Bernie the Red, despite the fact that the super-delegates will ensure he can’t possibly win. Still, he’s seriously hurting m’lady’s “inevitability” narrative, especially because young Democrat voters, those with the stars still in their eyes, are almost as bothered as the Deplorables are by Hillary’s email “issues.”

Finally, to pile on the irritants bedeviling inevitability. you learn that Hillary’s Campaign Chairman, John Podesta, fell for a phishing scam and now Wikileaks has all the DNC’s and Podesta’s emails. Who knows what dirty laundry lies at the bottom of that black hole?

So many problems it makes even the most confident head spin. You shake yourself — time to get back to concentrating on pulling this tired old donkey across the finish line. You decide that what you are going to need is an opponent who makes Hillary look like an angel dressed in shining white robes; one that makes her seem an avatar of ethics and purity in comparison.

Impossible? You say, Ha! [Read more…]