F.B.I. Raids Office of Trump’s Longtime Lawyer Michael Cohen
I can’t help but feel more than a little schadenfreude.
I think your title could have been a bit more descriptive. But I’ll be following the news, anyway.
Is this totally unexpected? Wouldn’t Cohen have removed anything of significance by now?
The investigation’s waveform was multiplied by its complex conjugate? 
I’m grabbing popcorn and a beer. Lovely.
Trump: “Okay fine! I dare ya to cross THIS red line!”
FBI: [shrugs] “Okay.”
There is always evidence.
Lawyer accumulate vast numbers of documents.
There will be something.
So the poo is no longer sham?
Why would they be seizing records of Trump’s payout to the porn star?
They are doing the Bill Clinton on him. Keep searching til you find something the person is dumb enough to lie about.
Well, they might not really care about that. This is probably related to stuff Mueller turned up in his investigation. But Mueller has shown that he’s willing to throw the book at his targets. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was about something else and the Stormy Daniels stuff is just there in the same filing cabinet, so why not, especially since Donald & Cohen are both acting squirrelly about it.
If Mueller wants to flip Cohen, this is a great first step.
Elsewhere -
Ken White at Popehat says this such a Big Deal - not just the initial tip from Mueller, but all the highlevel Federal employees that had to agree to this course of action - that it clearly signals that we are Witnessing history.
https://www.popehat.com/2018/04/09/the-search-of-trump-lawyer-michael-cohens-office-what-we-can-infer-immediately/
Bolding in the original.
Ken’s whole piece lays out why this is important. It’s worth everyone’s time to read, although the site is getting hammered.
Damage control in effect due to the number of lies that the guy’s already told. Hard to find the needle in a stack of needles.
Trump’s lawyer’s lawyer’s lawyer’s lawyer is going to need a lawyer.
Because depending on where the money came from, it could violate campaign finance law.
Trump just spoke, he is such a dummy. This is when he really needs to zip the lip. Is there no one who can stop him?
Santorum (on CNN) is frothing at the…mouth, desperately trying to remind everyone that there’s still no evidence of collusion.
I’d like to learn more about this. My layman’s understanding was that attorney-client communication is privileged and can’t be used as evidence. That’s apparently not always the case? Is it just a matter of getting a judge to sign off on an extra-special search warrant that has a “go ahead and disregard that attorney-client privilege bullshit” clause in it? Something else?
There’s a back and forth here.
The scope of Mueller’s investigation includes any other crimes that he might unearth in the course of investigating the foreign connections. So, he unearthed information about Stormy Daniels and her NDA (which, let’s be honest, is really friggin’ easy to unearth).
So, he looked into the Stormy Daniels thing in a little more detail, and found that there was a strong indication of a crime, there (probably the campaign finance thing). That means that he can get a search warrant for it. So the FBI busts in and looks for documents relating to the Daniels NDA.
But in the course of a proper, warranted search, law enforcement can look in any place that might plausibly contain what the warrant says they’re looking for. They’re looking for documents, so they can look anywhere that might contain documents, including things like filing cabinets and shelves, and also including computers. And so long as they’re looking in places that might include whatever the warrant is for, anything else they find in those places is also valid evidence, even if it has nothing to do with whatever the warrant was for. So, for instance, if they find documents about Russian collusion on Cohen’s computer, that’s valid, legally obtained evidence. Or any other crimes they might find evidence of, for that matter (tax evasion, say).
And they can then turn that evidence over to Mueller, who can perfectly legally use it in his primary investigation, or start a new side investigation for any new crimes.
For extra irony, there probably weren’t actually any crimes committed with the NDA, because Trump probably did pay back Cohen, so it wasn’t actually a campaign contribution. But Trump’s reflexive need to lie about everything lead to him saying that he didn’t pay Cohen, and that lie created the probable cause for the warrant.
TL;DR: Because Trump was really stupid about one crime that he might not have even committed (campaign finance violations relating to Stormy Daniels), Mueller now has complete access to any records of any other crimes he might find in the office of Trump’s personal lawyer. Want to bet there’s no evidence of any other crimes there?
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent self?”
I am waiting on the dog to wag. Syria is sitting over there with nobody to help them. I predict bombs flying by tomarrow night. Right in time for the 6o’clock news.