Raid on Trump’s Lawyer Sought Records on ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape
By Maggie Haberman, Matt Apuzzo and Michael S. Schmidt
The New York Times
April 11, 2018
The F.B.I. agents who raided the office and hotel of President Trump’s lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, were seeking details on his relationship with the Trump campaign and his efforts to suppress negative information about Mr. Trump, according to three people briefed on the matter.
Prosecutors are interested in whether Mr. Cohen, who had no official role in the 2016 campaign, coordinated with it to quash the release of anything detrimental to it and whether that violated campaign finance laws — a new front in the investigation into Mr. Cohen.
The warrant executed Monday by the agents was striking in its breadth, according to those people. It demanded documents related to the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Mr. Trump was heard making vulgar comments about women, and to other materials related to secret agreements Mr. Cohen made with women in exchange for them not speaking publicly about sexual encounters with Mr. Trump.
The warrant also covered emails and other documents that could reveal Mr. Cohen’s private communications with Mr. Trump during a tense period in the presidential campaign when Mr. Trump confronted the possibility of embarrassing details of his extramarital affairs. And it delved deeply into Mr. Cohen’s past, including documents about Mr. Cohen’s personal and business finances, including his work as a New York taxi fleet manager.
The additional details the agents were seeking came a day after it was revealed that the authorities sought documents from Mr. Cohen related to payments made to two women who claim they had affairs with Mr. Trump, Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels, as well as information on the role of the publisher of The National Enquirer in silencing the women.
The investigation is being run by Robert S. Khuzami, whose boss, Geoffrey S. Berman, the interim United States attorney in Manhattan, has recused himself. Mr. Khuzami is a veteran federal prosecutor who spoke at the 2004 Republican National Convention in support of President George W. Bush and later led the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Obama administration.
Though the raids on Mr. Cohen’s office and hotel room were overseen by Mr. Khuzami, people close to Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen regard the investigation as a surreptitious attempt by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to pry into Mr. Trump’s personal life by using other prosecutors as his proxy in focusing on a lawyer who has represented him for more than a decade.
Asked for comment on Wednesday, Stephen Ryan, a lawyer for Mr. Cohen, referred to his earlier description of the raids as “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.” He has described the raids as an overreach by prosecutors into the privileged communications between Mr. Cohen and his client, Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump, furious about the raids, has cooled on the idea of sitting for an interview with Mr. Mueller and is considering a more adversarial approach to the special counsel’s investigation.
Since Mr. Mueller was appointed last May, Mr. Trump had taken a largely nonconfrontational approach to the investigation, providing tens of thousands of pages of emails, notes, memos and other documents as part of an effort to show he has nothing to hide and to hasten the end of the investigation.
As recently as December, Mr. Trump said he believed Mr. Mueller would treat him fairly. And Mr. Trump has repeatedly said in public and in private that he wanted to sit with Mr. Mueller for an interview. After the search warrant, Mr. Trump now is convinced that his initial belief that Mr. Mueller is simply out to destroy his presidency was correct.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, criticized Mr. Mueller’s investigation on Wednesday for going beyond its mandate to look into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and into the ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.
“The president certainly has been clear that he has very deep concern about the direction that the special counsel and other investigations have taken,” Ms. Sanders said in response to a question about a report that Mr. Trump came close to firing Mr. Mueller in December. “This investigation started off as Russian collusion, of which there was none.”
It is not clear what role, if any, Mr. Cohen played regarding the “Access Hollywood” tape, which was made public a month before the election on one of the more memorable days of the campaign. On that day, Oct. 7, the Obama administration called out Russia for meddling in the election and the first batch of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign were released.
But Mr. Cohen has acknowledged paying $130,000 to Ms. Clifford, who said she had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump and signed a nondisclosure agreement promising not to discuss the matter. Mr. Cohen has insisted there was no relationship, but that he sought to keep a damaging story from emerging regardless.
Mr. Cohen also had a long relationship with David J. Pecker, the publisher of The National Enquirer, who is also friends with Mr. Trump and who engaged in the practice of “catch and kill” with negative stories, meaning women who made accusations of sexual relationships with the candidate received payments or contracts with the magazine.
Mr. Cohen had no formal role on the campaign, and Mr. Trump and his top campaign aides sought to limit his involvement. Still, Mr. Cohen was able to fill certain political voids that no one else seemed able to, such as forming a so-called diversity coalition of African-American, Hispanic and Muslim supporters, and he also raised money for the campaign and later for Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee.
Perhaps equally significant for Mr. Trump was Mr. Cohen’s presence on television, particularly after the “Access Hollywood” tape, when the candidate had few defenders.
“I have never heard Mr. Trump say anything even remotely close to the statements that I heard,” Mr. Cohen said about the tape in one appearance on CNN. “When I first heard that there was a tape that was going to be coming out, I said it’s got to be fake because — and I spend thousands of hours with Mr. Trump a year. And I can tell you I have never heard him say anything, anything even close to that.”
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