Prosecutors say they have reconstructed 16 pages of documents that Michael Cohen had put through a paper shredder, in the latest bit of lamentable news for Donald Trump’s former lawyer.
Cohen’s home, office, and hotel room were raided in April by federal prosecutors investigating possible wire fraud and campaign finance crimes related to a $130,000 payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Daniels and her attorney Michael Avenatti have alleged that the payment, made shortly before the November 2016 presidential election, was hush money to keep her from publicly talking about a sexual tryst she had with Trump in 2006.
In a June 15 letter to Judge Kimba Wood obtained by Politico, US government attorneys say that “the contents of a shredding machine were seized on April 9, 2018. The reconstructed documents were produced today, and are approximately 16 pages long.”
They have offered no specifics about the content of these documents.
Prosecutors also told the court that they have successfully retrieved 315 megabytes of data from one of the two Blackberries seized from Cohen during the same raid. Additionally, 731 pages of messages and call logs, that had been encrypted through the use of messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp, have been recovered.
“The government has conferred with counsel for Cohen and the parties jointly proposed to the court that — with the exception of the second Blackberry, from which data has not yet been extracted — all of the foregoing material will be reviewed by Cohen by June 25, 2018,” said the letter signed by Robert Khuzami, one of the prosecutors working on the case.
It’s the latest in the drip, drip, drip of bad news for Cohen, Trump’s one-time consiglieri, who according to CNN and other news reports, is considering a plea deal to avoid prosecution in the case.
Should Cohen cooperate with prosecutors it could potentially be an unwelcome turn of events for Trump, as Cohen is believed to have intimate familiarity with both the president’s various hush-money deals with women, as well as his sometimes-dodgy business dealings and other compromising information.
As ThinkProgress’ Judd Legum wrote in April, “for years, Cohen has secretly done the dirty work for Donald Trump and his associates under the protective umbrella of ‘attorney-client privilege.’ This isn’t really legal work but pretending it was helped ensure it stayed secret. The gig may be up.”