And what those past investigations tell us about where the Russia investigation might go next.
We’ve taken a look at how Mueller’s first year measures up against the initial 12 months of other special counsel and independent counsel investigations. In terms of the number of charges he’s been able to file, Mueller is moving quickly. At one year after the formal appointment of a special or independent counsel, only the Watergate special prosecution force had obtained more indictments and guilty pleas.
But the total number of charges doesn’t tell the whole story. To get a sense of where Mueller’s investigation might go in its second year, it’s worth looking at where the three other highest-profile investigations in modern history — Watergate, Iran-Contra and Whitewater — stood a year after a special or independent counsel came on board and how they evolved in the year or two afterward.
The F.B.I. raided the office and hotel room of President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, on Monday, seizing business records, emails and documents related to several topics, including payments to a pornographic film actress.
.. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Mr. Cohen for possible bank fraud, and the documents identified in the warrant date back years
.. Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, who called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.”
.. The search does not appear to be directly related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation, but most likely resulted from information that he had uncovered and gave to prosecutors in New York.
.. “Today the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York executed a series of search warrants and seized the privileged communications between my client, Michael Cohen, and his clients,” said Stephen Ryan
.. Mr. Trump reacted angrily to the raid. “It’s a disgraceful situation,” he told reporters at the White House before a meeting with military leaders. He added, “I have this witch hunt constantly going on.”
.. Agents raided space Mr. Cohen uses in the Rockefeller Center office of the law firm Squire Patton Boggs, as well as a room Mr. Cohen is staying at the Loews Regency Hotel on Park Avenue
.. In order to obtain a search warrant, prosecutors must convince a federal judge that agents are likely to discover evidence of criminal activity.
.. The searches open a new front for the Justice Department in its scrutiny of Mr. Trump and his associates: His longtime lawyer is being investigated in Manhattan; his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is facing scrutiny by prosecutors in Brooklyn; his campaign chairman is under indictment; his former national security adviser has pleaded guilty to lying; and a pair of former campaign aides are cooperating with Mr. Mueller. Mr. Mueller, meanwhile, wants to interview Mr. Trump about possible obstruction of justice.
.. The search is an aggressive move for the Justice Department, which normally relies on grand jury subpoenas to obtain records from people who are represented by lawyers and are cooperating with authorities. Search warrants are more often used in cases in which prosecutors do not trust people to preserve or turn over the records themselves.
.. The seized records include communications between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, which would likely require a special team of agents to review because conversations between lawyers and clients are protected from scrutiny in most instances.
.. He attracted attention in the Russia investigation after emails showed that a business associate of Mr. Trump, Felix Sater, pitched Mr. Cohen on a lucrative real estate deal in Russia.
.. The deal was supposed to be a Trump Tower in Moscow and Mr. Sater boasted to Mr. Cohen that the tower would get Mr. Trump elected president. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.” But the emails obtained by The New York Times show no response from Mr. Cohen, who told congressional investigators that he regarded Mr. Sater’s talk as puffery.
Comments:
.. As a lawyer of 35 years, this is one of the most significant developments in the Mueller investigation.
It is extraordinarily hard to convince a judge, who is a former lawyer himself or herself, to pierce the attorney/client privilege and work product doctrine to issue a subpoena and seize material subject to those sacred protections.
The judge must be convinced that Cohen’s records will demonstrate substantial criminal activity.
This may be “Black Monday” for Donald Trump.
.. Remember that phrase Joe Biden got caught saying on mike that time? This is one of those.
Getting a search warrant for a lawyer’s files is a BIG, BIG deal. It requires sign-off from either the US Attorney or an Assistant AG, consultation with main justice in DC, and consideration of other, less-intrusive methods of getting the information. And that’s before the warrant goes to the judge. Judges tend to be very protective of attorney-client confidentiality and are very skeptical of such requests even in routine cases, let alone when the request is for a warrant for the client files of the personal attorney to the President of the United States.
On a scale of 1 to 10, Cohen’s legal trouble just went all the way to 11.
.. The plot thickens. Trump keeps talking about collusion. It’s the money laundering and related financial activities he should be worried about. It’s the payoffs and bribes he should be worried about. It’s the threats he should be worried about.
.. Trump said many times, do not investigate the family business! Big red line. Gosh! Why would he say that? Looks like we are about to find out.
.. Remember this, Republicans; President Clinton’s impeachment over sex-related perjury began with an investigation into a real estate deal. YOU set this standard of expansive investigations. YOU laid the groundwork for this. Any cries that this exceeds Mueller’s authority and mission should be accompanied by your profound apologies to the country for what you have done. Otherwise, reap the whirlwind.
.. And now, the American people get to learn about the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege.
.. I’ll bet they included records regarding Cohen’s negotiation of a hotel deal in Moscow for Trump during the election when Trump said he had no business in Russia. It would seem such a Moscow deal would fit right into the areas of inquiry of Mr. Mueller.
.. The noose tightens… Expect the obligatory military strike on Syria as another in a long list of “Look – a puppy!” diversion is perpetrated on the all-too-gullible American public.
.. As Richard Nixon would put it, people have the right to know if their president is a crook.
.. The privileged communications between an attorney and his/her clients may be seized legally as part of an investigation by a special prosecutor. Completely legal. Very sorry the whiny lawyer of the lawyer doesn’t want to admit it. The truth of everything involved with this investigation will be made known. Be patient.
.. Just as in the cases of Manafort et al. (and that dossier) many will scream that this is way beyond Mueller’s powers.
But, best as I read, he IS entitled to follow up on almost EVERY crime he finds when doing his work on collusion and such.
Capone didn’t go down for murders, he was convicted on tax fraud.
.. For all those Trumpsters hanging out here disparaging Mueller, this action is totally within the scope of the Russia investigation. Remember Mr. Cohen was already reportedly involved in brokering a Trump business project in Moscow and had been also involved with a Ukrainian lawmaker passing a pro-Russian peace proposal from a Ukrainian lawmaker to Michael Flynn, so it is very likely that Cohen has been resisting handing over documents that the Special Counsel wanted to review, and this was the most appropriate way of going about getting the information they were after. The Daniels stuff isn’t even in the same league as the types of possible crimes that Mueller may be investigating. Uncovering an unlawful international money laundering racket alone would be fair game for Mueller and his team. Think about this for a second. What would a personal attorney for Donald Trump be doing in Russia in January 2016 in the midst of a presidential campaign when Trump had not even locked up the nomination yet. Come on people! There is something very rotten in Trumpland. The Stormy Daniels case is just a small sideshow that is eating up oxygen in the media. Follow the Cohen.
.. There must be a multi-million dollar overseas fund with Cohen’s name on it
.. It isn’t just the facts of the case that determine when they will act and how; they also are studying their foe.
.. As of the past week or a little longer, Trump has no personal support, no one person in place he can trust and confide in, no one who can temper his outbursts and his tendencies to blindly and stupidly lash out. They know it and are counting on it – the case doesn’t rely solely on this, but who the opposition is and how they act/react, who their support lines are, who their attorneys are…it all has its own bit of importance. Trump is now on his own, if and how much we as a country suffer for this before the insanity ends is a guess.
It was no wonder the public tuned out the CFPB narrative that Democrats have repeated since they controlled Congress and the White House and passed the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which created the bureau. The plot never changes — before Cordray’s resignation, Republicans opposed the bureau because it kept the financial industry honest; now they restrain the CFPB so businesses can cheat consumers.
.. The Dodd-Frank Act forbids the Federal Trade Commission and the CFPB from conducting independent inquiries into the same matter. Cordray may have authorized an investigation of the Equifax data breach, but the FTC ended up conducting the full-scale probe.
.. Cordray and Warren, who helped draft the law, surely recognized Rucker’s sleight-of-hand. Nevertheless, the senator tweeted, “Another middle finger from @MickMulvaneyOMB to consumers: he’s killed the @CFPB’s probe into the #EquifaxBreach.”
.. Since 2010, Republicans have objected to the lack of legislative and executive checks on a regulator with so much impact on the economy.
.. Democrats, confident there would never be a Republican director, characterized the near-absolute power as independence from political influence.
.. Ironically, the once-secretive CFPB has been more transparent since Mulvaney throttled its External Affairs Division, the propaganda machine Warren created in 2010 while leading the agency’s yearlong start-up process as a presidential adviser.
.. The division’s copious press releases have been replaced by more-informative leaks from the bureau’s overwhelmingly Democratic employees. Contrary to the stale narrative that liberals craft from the leaks, the acting director does not hate consumer protection; he just hates the CFPB’s structure, which he once described as “a joke . . . in a sad, sick way.” Warren’s obstinacy has only allowed him to validate the now-famous comment and delight in the bully’s comeuppance.
.. Mulvaney invited a Daily Caller reporter to the CFPB headquarters Warren had procured in 2011. Cordray’s $124 million renovation of the Brutalist eyesore came to symbolize the bureau’s elitist liberal entitlement. The reporter was escorted through a 2,660-square-foot athletic facility with two huge locker rooms, offices with electric height-adjustable workstations, a library with a sofa and lounge chairs but few books, a roof deck with spectacular views and motorized cantilevered umbrellas, and a courtyard with lavish fountains. The images recalled the familiar spectacle of triumphant soldiers touring a deposed dictator’s opulent palace.
.. But exposing his predecessor’s sins is only Mulvaney’s jab. His knockout punch is demonstrating that the CFPB’s structure allows its director to behave like the Republican stereotype.
.. Unlike other Trump nominees who renounced previous calls to eliminate the agencies they were tapped to lead, Mulvaney told reporters he was not shutting the CFPB down because the law did not permit him to do so. In his introduction to the agency’s five-year strategic plan he declared that “we have committed to fulfill the Bureau’s statutory responsibilities, but go no further.”
.. He requested no funding from the Fed for the first three months of 2018 and instead financed the CFPB’s operations by draining its stockpiled reserves, a likely prelude to agency layoffs.
.. Rather than defend his policies, Mulvaney reminded his critics: “I am the judge, I am the jury, and I am the executioner in some of these investigations, and that is completely wrong. . . . If you don’t like it, talk to the person who wrote the statute.”
.. Her attempt to shame Republicans is laughable — Democrats remained silent for five years while Cordray proved that Congress is powerless to rein in the director.
.. Mulvaney is not, as Warren writes, “turning the CFPB into a politicized rogue agency.” He is showing Democrats that it will continue to be one unless they help restructure it.
.. More likely, Trump is exhibiting a set of compulsions and delusions that have characterized his entire adult life. You can’t have declining judgment that never existed. You can’t lose a grasp on reality you never possessed. What is most striking is not Trump’s disintegration but his utter consistency.
.. If the secret tape of a president threatening a private citizen with jail were leaked, it would be a scandal. With Trump, it is just part of his shtick.
.. The president’s defenders, in perpetual pursuit of the bright side, argue for the value of unpredictability in political leadership — which is true enough. But Trump is not unpredictable. He is predictable in ways that make him vulnerable to exploitation.
He is easy to flatter, easy to provoke and thus easy to manipulate.
.. The Chinese have made an art of this
.. “I like very much President Xi,” Trump has said. “He treated me better than anybody’s ever been treated in the history of China.” Contrast this with Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has treated Trump like an adult with arguments and criticism. Big mistake.
.. Trump has revealed a thick streak of authoritarianism. “I have [an] absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department,” he insists.
.. “Libel laws are very weak in this country,”
Rivals are not only to be defeated; they should be imprisoned.
Critics are not to be refuted; they should be fired.
Investigations are not to be answered; they should be shut down.
.. we are depending on the strength of those institutions, not the self-restraint of the president, to safeguard democracy.
.. At the beginning, they could engage in wishful thinking about Trump’s fitness. Now they must know he is not emotionally equipped to be president. Yet, they also know this can’t be admitted, lest they be accused of letting down their partisan team.
.. GOP leaders are engaged in an intentional deception, pretending the president is a normal and capable leader.
.. they will, eventually, be exposed. And by then, the country may not be in a forgiving mood.
