FBI raids offices, home of Trump's personal lawyer

You mean like when the wiretapped Trump and others working in the campaign during the election based on the "piss tape" claim from a British spy that made it no secret he supported Hillary?

They got CAPONE on tax evasion,they using the STormy daniels thing as an excuse to get Cohen's records on TRUMP,and hence,all his more major misdeeds

She did it last month

Friendly reminder that they're literally raiding his lawyer's house over a payment made to keep a porn star quiet, that Trump supposedly slept with over a decade ago.

Read that aloud, and think about how ridiculous the whole thing sounds.

Translation: After a year of digging Mueller and Co. still haven't found anything substantial to use against Trump, and are now desperately using anything they can to keep the investigation going.

its almost like they don't feed every bit of evidence they have to the fucking press to show off to the whole country while an investigation is in process

and they also had to prove that evidence would be destroyed if it wasn't a no-knock raid

Mueller made a great 3d move

If he's fired,the separate Cohen investigation into the porn star payments is gonna uncover all sorts of things

A pair of federal prosecutors in New York are now working on cases tied to two of Trump’s closest confidants. The FBI raided Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s office on Monday for a case the prosecutor in Manhattan is handling. Last December, meanwhile, the US attorney in Brooklyn requested bank records tied to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

Those cases are separate from Mueller’s probe into Russian election meddling in 2016 and potential contact between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

That means that if Trump fires Rosenstein and Mueller, those other investigations won’t just go away. Trump would have to fire the other prosecutors and a host of other Justice Department officials.

There are reports that the warrant sought evidence of bank fraud and campaign finance violations, which is consistent with an investigation into allegations that the Daniels payment was illegally sourced or disguised. (For example, routing a payment through a shell company to hide the fact that the money came from the Trump campaign — if that is what happened — would probably violate federal money-laundering laws.)

the search demonstrates that federal prosecutors and supervisors in the Justice Department concluded that Mr. Cohen could not be trusted to preserve and turn over documents voluntarily. The same regulations that require prosecutors to seek high-level approval for a warrant to search a law office also instruct them to use the least intrusive means to obtain evidence from a lawyer, and to consider requesting voluntary cooperation or serving a subpoena. Mr. Cohen’s lawyer has loudly protested that he had been cooperating. This search warrant means that prosecutors — including the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the criminal division at the Justice Department — believed that Mr. Cohen could not be trusted to respond fully to a subpoena or might destroy documents.

If he shredded papers and electronic data before the raid,what charges can be laid against him if the shredding can be proved?

the search suggests that prosecutors most likely believe that Mr. Cohen’s clients used his legal services for the purpose of engaging in crime or fraud. Attorney-client communications are privileged, which is why it’s so unusual and difficult for prosecutors to get approval to search a law office. Justice Department regulations require federal prosecutors to set up a system to have a separate group — a so-called dirty team — review the files and separate out attorney-client communications so that the investigators and prosecutors won’t see anything protected by the privilege.

But if a client is using a lawyer’s services for the purpose of engaging in crime or fraud, there is no privilege. The very aggressive search of Mr. Cohen’s office for attorney-client files suggests that the prosecutors believe they can convince a judge that communications between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen fall under the crime-fraud exception. If you think they can’t pull that off, think again — they’ve already done it once: Mr. Mueller persuaded a judge to apply the exception to compel testimony from Paul Manafort’s lawyer, arguing successfully that he engaged her services in order to commit fraud.

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The final part

Mr. Mueller’s referral of the Stormy Daniels matter to New York suggests he believes it is outside that scope of his investigation. Perhaps it arose from press coverage of Ms. Daniels’s incendiary claims and from the bumbling and inconsistent public responses of Mr. Cohen and President Trump. In other words, this could be an own goal by the president and Mr. Cohen.

A federal criminal defense lawyer’s favorite advice, delivered with varying degrees of diplomacy and accompanying obscenities, is “shut up.” Mr. Cohen would not be the first person to ignore such advice, nor the first person to talk himself into trouble. Many of the people Mr. Mueller has snared to date have fallen into that category, finding themselves charged for lying to the investigative team.

But consider this: The Stormy Daniels payout may be outside the scope of the Russia investigation, but it’s possible that Mr. Cohen’s records are full of materials that are squarely within that scope. And the law is clear: If investigators executing a lawful warrant seize evidence of additional crimes, they may use that evidence. Thus Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, with their catastrophically clumsy handling of the Daniels affair, may have handed Mr. Mueller devastating evidence.

It’s easy to conclude that after so many bombshells, this is just another overfrantic news cycle. It’s not. It’s highly dangerous, and not just for Mr. Cohen. It’s perilous for the president, whose personal lawyer now may face a choice between going down fighting alone or saving his own skin by giving the wolves what they want.

Ken White is a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor at Brown White & Osborn LLP in Los Angeles.

They tried to impeach Clinton over a semen stained dress

Read that aloud, and think about how ridiculous the whole thing sounds.

Clinton shoulda just said,my sex life is none of your beeswax.

They tried to get hm when he lied and said he didn't fuck her.

They're gonna try to get Trump the same way.

Have him swear under oath that he didn't tell Cohen to pay the whore

If there is any substance to the Daniels shit, he's going to be advised to plead the fifth. The media's already going to carry on as though it's true no matter what, he has literally nothing to lose by doing so.

Clinton didn't plead the 5th
I think Clinton was being short-sighted and miscalculated that the scandal of his affair with Lewinsky being validated by his silence would be worse than to lie about fucking lewinsky (and hope his people can cover his ass, like they usually do). But I'm sure there's gotta be some people out there that would speculate that he had some other ulterior motivation. But considering the circumstances, there's no question that the example Bill Clinton set has been studied thoroughly by Trump and his counsel.

Trump could be in deeper trouble so has more reason to keep quiet

I'm sure his new lawyers are telling him not to get too pissed off and say something really stupid publically

More and more, this is looking like a mobster roll-up of the type that some of Mueller’s team of ace prosecutors previously specialized in. In the beginning, the feds target one or two low-level insiders with legal vulnerabilities, obtain court orders to monitor their activities, and, hopefully, get them to coöperate with the government. Gradually, the investigators work their way up the chain of command to the crew captains—the capos—and, eventually, to the boss of bosses, the capo dei capi.

In this case, George Papadopoulos, a foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign who met with people with links to the Kremlin, provided the low-level entry points. The capos included Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser; Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager; and Rick Gates, Manafort’s former partner, who served as the campaign’s deputy chairman. Of these four Trump associates, three—Papadopoulos, Flynn, and Gates—are already coöperating with Muller, having pleaded guilty to felonies. And Manafort, facing serious financial charges in two courts, is under strong pressure to flip.

Now the feds are also putting the squeeze on Cohen, the trusted consigliere. While the investigators of Cohen’s case don’t work for Mueller, the two cases are clearly linked, and there would be nothing to prevent Cohen, in the interests of self-preservation, from eventually agreeing to coöperate with both the Southern District of New York and Mueller.

No wonder Trump seems rattled

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The F.B.I. agents who raided the office and hotel of President Trump’s lawyer on Monday were seeking all records related to the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Mr. Trump was heard making vulgar comments about women, according to three people who have been briefed on the contents of a federal search warrant

The moment Micheal Cohen said he paid Daniels $130,000 out of his own pocket to buy her silence, it raised so many legal issues, both criminal and ethical, among fair minded observers. But it could be dismissed as small time stuff not worth pursuing. However, the moment President Trump last week said that he did not know about the payoff, it basically put a target on Cohen’s back and could no longer be ignored. Trump has no one to blame but himself.