A Few Things You Need To Know About The FBI’s Raid On Michael Cohen’s Offices…

As you’ve probably heard, the FBI raided Michael Cohen’s offices. Authorities “seized records related to various topics, including payments made just before the 2016 presidential election to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.”

You know the story. Cohen paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, and word has it Trump knew nothing about it.

What does that have to do with the raids? Word has it Cohen is “under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations, according to three people with knowledge of the case.”

President Trump responded to the news last night.

“It’s a total witch hunt. I’ve been saying it for a long time. I’ve wanted to keep it down. I’ve given over a million pages in documents to the special counsel,” Trump stated.

“They continue to just go forward and here we are talking about Syria, we’re talking about a lot of serious things … and I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now,” he continued. “Actually it’s much more than that. You could say right after I won the nomination it started.”

“This is the most biased group of people,” he added. “These people have the biggest conflicts of interest I have ever seen … Either Democrats or a couple of Republicans who worked for President Obama. They’re not looking at the other side — Hillary Clinton … They only keep looking at us.”

The entire situation can get kind of confusing. It’s times like these that I look to people like Ben Shapiro. What’s his take?

He has an excellent article on the Daily Wire, where he basically maps out the 8 big things you need to know about the FBI’s raid on Mueller’s offices. Here are a few of Shapiro’s points that deserve to be highlighted:

1:

Trump And Cohen May Have Violated The Law. So, what’s this case even about? Trump allegedly slept with Stormy Daniels back in 2006. Then Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet, according to Cohen himself. According to Cohen, Trump knew nothing about the payment. The settlement agreement contains pseudonyms for Trump and Daniels, and was funneled through an LLC. This could make Cohen’s payment to Daniels an in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign in violation of campaign finance law. Furthermore, if Trump knew about it, that could constitute criminal conspiracy to violate campaign finance law. Former Democratic presidential candidate and senator, John Edwards, was tried on precisely those grounds; a jury split on five counts and acquitted on a sixth before the DOJ decided to drop the case. Ironically, Trump could have avoided all of this by merely paying Daniels directly.

2:

Attorney-Client Privilege Doesn’t Apply To Violating The Law With Your Attorney. This is called the “crime-fraud exception” to attorney-client privilege: if you claim privilege in an attempt to cover up a crime, the privilege no longer applies. The legal elements to be fulfilled here include that the client intended to commit a crime, and that the client purposefully communicated with the lawyer to prevent anyone from knowing about the crime.

3.

The FBI Never Treated Hillary Clinton This Way. This is perfectly obvious. Hillary wasn’t merely allowed to delete 33,000 documents from her computer server three weeks after revelations that she had a private computer server, she was protected by the DOJ and the FBI, which allowed her personal attorney, Cheryl Mills — who was also under investigation — to invoke attorney-client privilege to stop the FBI from investigating Hillary’s email scheme.

4.

The FBI Makes Mistakes. Everybody seems to think that because the FBI raided Cohen’s office, Cohen is guilty. But the FBI has made mistakes on raids like this before. As Jesse Eisenger of ProPublica writes:

A note of caution on the Michael Cohen news: The FBI screws up a lot. It messed up a raid on Benjamin Wey. Case got thrown out. FBI raided David Ganek's hedge fund, which I'm convinced was an abuse.

— Jesse Eisinger (@eisingerj) April 10, 2018

While the procedures appear to have been upheld in the Cohen raid, we don't know what they were authorized to look at and what they took. That will be a legal fight to come, and the FBI doesn't have a pristine track record.

— Jesse Eisinger (@eisingerj) April 10, 2018

Despite their vaunted reputations, the DOJ and the FBI don't have as much experience in conducting these raids on white-collar targets as they used to. Now Mueller & his number 2, Weissmann, do. But they only referred the case. The Cohen raid was done by the SDNY.

— Jesse Eisinger (@eisingerj) April 10, 2018

The overall point is: Cohen is still innocent until proven guilty (though there is a Five Alarm amount of smoke around him), and the FBI's screwups have allowed seemingly guilty people to skirt justice.

— Jesse Eisinger (@eisingerj) April 10, 2018

You can read the rest of Shapiro’s points here. He concludes:

So, where do we stand? It’s unclear. We don’t have the application for the warrant, so we don’t know what the FBI is looking for. But nothing here is good news for Cohen, who could end up in jail — or Trump, who could end up on the wrong end of a conspiracy charge on campaign finance violations.

There’s definitely a lot to this and even MORE we don’t know. We’re just going to have to wait and see where this goes.