How Trump Got Michael Cohen’s Emails Over DA Objections

For weeks last year, the Manhattan district attorney scrambled to stop Donald Trump from engaging in what prosecutors saw as an invasive revenge scheme against a former confidant who’s become a lead witness in the Stormy Daniels hush money case: an attempt to seize Michael Cohen’s personal emails and text messages.

But Trump’s lawyers managed to circumvent local prosecutors by going straight to the feds who had previously sent Cohen to prison, scoring more than 30,000 emails they now plan to use to discredit him at the upcoming trial.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York is now flooding the much smaller Manhattan DA’s Office with tons of paperwork, which then gets turned over to the former president’s defense team.

This strategic maneuver is fueling a crisis in the DA’s case—which was set to be the first criminal trial against a former American president.

Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead defense lawyer, is now accusing prosecutors of committing serious violations by holding back evidence that could help the former president mount a successful defense in a case that threatens to send him to prison as he campaigns for another four years in the White House.

“The people’s conduct relating to data from Cohen’s phones is particularly suspect,” Blanche wrote, referring to the DA’s office in a March 8 court filing made public only this week.

As of Friday evening, Trump’s legal team is expected to review more than 119,000 documents that SDNY has released since March 4, bizarre timing that demands a herculean effort to prepare for the trial. However, on Friday afternoon, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan announced the start date for the proceedings would be delayed from March 25 until at least April.

According to a court filing, that rapid review will examine Cohen’s bank records, personal communications, and extensive material the FBI seized from his two iPhones and three email accounts when agents arrested him in 2018.

Although the DA’s office is portraying this fiasco as a deliberately late document grab by Trump meant to freeze the clock on the case, in some ways there was always going to be a degree of chaos stemming from a case with as messy a start as this one.

When the public discovered that Trump had secretly funneled a $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the 2016 presidential election, SDNY only went after Cohen for coordinating the deal.

Federal prosecutors in New York didn’t follow the money trail all the way up to the White House, which had exerted pressure on that office to drop the investigation entirely, according to a memoir by the head of SDNY at the time, Geoffrey Berman.

But by taking down Cohen—and only Cohen—the feds sat on a ton of dirt that Trump could later seek when the Manhattan DA eventually indicted him nearly a year ago on 34 felony counts for faking business records to hide the Stormy deal.

To some extent, the former president’s attorneys have also managed to overcome the barriers put up by Merchan, who sided with the DA in December when he concluded that Trump was after nothing more than dirt to discredit the prosecution’s case.

“It would appear that defendant here seeks nothing more than ‘the opportunity for an unrestrained foray into confidential records in the hope that the unearthing some unspecified information will enable them to impeach witnesses,’” Merchan wrote in his Dec. 18 order, quoting separate legal precedent and calling the attempt an “invasion” that could “not be justified.”

But after reviewing that order, federal prosecutors still concluded that they could turn over some of what Trump was looking for without running up against Merchan’s limitations. That is, as long as the DA’s office was allowed to review the material first before passing it along to the defense team.

Damian Williams, Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, authorized the release of Cohen’s data in a signed Feb. 23 letter that stopped well short of giving the former president everything he wanted.

For example, Trump’s lawyers asked the feds to turn over large swaths of Cohen’s personal tax filings, in part to explore whether the former lawyer told the IRS that the $420,000 he got for coordinating the hush money was taxable income or a non-taxable reimbursement. However, Williams rejected that idea.

Manhattan’s U.S. attorney was also fiercely opposed to handing over Cohen’s tax filings from 2012 to 2016, a period during which Cohen in federal court would later admit to having “evaded paying substantial taxes”—a figure pegged at $4 million by the Department of Justice. Williams considered the request even “less relevant or material than the subpoena requests quashed by Judge Merchan,” particularly since it happened long before the hush money payment.

However, Williams agreed to turn over nine different banks’ records and emails related to Cohen, material that the feds had acquired through search warrants. Instead of putting his office through what he called a “painstaking and extremely time-intensive task” of identifying specific documents, Williams simply delivered a huge chunk of them to the DA—meaning that some of the material might have already been in Trump’s hands.

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Similarly, Williams employed a dump-it-all policy when it came to personal messages the FBI seized from Cohen’s two iPhones. When Trump’s team sought communications that they argued would probe Cohen’s “fraudulent schemes” as well as his “potential bias and motive,” Williams reasoned that “it would be unreasonably burdensome for this office to review the seized materials to identify potentially relevant material.”

So instead, he handed it off to the DA—noting that he could have said no, but thought it best to share the material.

“Although the overbreadth and burden objections would be sufficient bases to deny this request, under the extraordinary circumstances of this case, I authorize disclosure of the seized materials,” he wrote, on the condition that the highly private material wouldn’t get leaked.

In a letter to the judge on Friday, Blanche and fellow defense lawyer Susan Necheles pointed to SDNY’s willingness to turn over documents to bolster their arguments that the DA failed to meet its obligations to do it sooner.

“The USAO-SDNY produced this large volume of records voluntarily, in response to a straightforward request by President Trump that the office exercise its discretion under federal regulations in a manner that promotes the interests of justice and the truth-seeking function at the criminal trial in this case,” they wrote, accusing the DA’s office of partaking in a “failed effort” to “prevent the truth from coming out.”

But there’s one potential goldmine that thus far has evaded Trump’s team: a draft manuscript of a pro-Trump memoir Cohen was writing in early 2018—back when he was still loyal to the real estate tycoon.

At the time, The Daily Beast obtained the book proposal that was being shopped around to publishers. In it, Cohen described himself as the “family fix-it guy” and the first true Trump “special counsel.” He also teased that he “saw it all, handled it all. And still do.”

But more interestingly, the book seemed to position itself as a counter to what was then the most popular exposé of the chaos and dysfunction of the Trump White House: Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which had detailed Trump’s deteriorating mental health—and the way the president would stop housekeepers from touching his toothbrush out of fear that he’d be poisoned.

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By contrast, Cohen’s book proposal promised that it would detail the “complexities and nuances of the Trump family.”

It’s no wonder, then, that the former president’s defense team wants a copy of that manuscript. In a court filing, Blanche described it as having “obvious and important impeachment value at trial.”

However, Trump’s lawyers have yet to acquire it, according to a source briefed on the matter.

When Trump’s lawyers subpoenaed Cohen for the manuscript and other materials, the DA rushed to Cohen’s defense and won over the judge in November. And prosecutors have also apparently stood in the way when Trump’s team has approached book companies too, an action that Blanche described in one court filing as “consistent with the existing strategy to hide the truth.”

Trump’s lawyers fared no better when they approached SDNY, where Williams declined to turn over any book drafts. However, in his letter last month, Manhattan’s U.S. attorney did leave open the possibility that Cohen’s manuscript could be buried in the personal communications they’ve since turned over.

The search is on.

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