A retired judge determined that almost none of the first batch of documents obtained from Trump lawyer Michael Cohen are privileged
- Special master Barbara Jones issued her latest report on the review of the documents obtained from President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer Michael Cohen's home, office, and hotel room last month.
- She said that virtually none of the documents that she's sifted through so far are covered by attorney-client privilege.
- That means almost everything could be used in a potential prosecution of Cohen by the government.
The special master reviewing the files obtained by the government during the FBI's raids of President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer Michael Cohen's home, office, and hotel room found that almost none of what she's looked over so far is protected by attorney-client privilege.
That means almost all of the documents could be used by prosecutors from the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, where Cohen is under criminal investigation for possible campaign-finance violations and bank fraud, in a potential prosecution.
In a Monday report filed to US District Judge Kimba Wood, special master Barbara Jones, a retired federal judge, said:
- Just 162 of the roughly 300,000 documents she has reviewed so far fall under the privilege designations she laid out in a May court filing.
- Of 639 paper documents, she said 14 fell under the guidelines.
- Of the 291,770 electronic files, she said 148 are privileged.
- That means that, so far, Jones assessed that less than 0.01% of the documents reviewed so far are privileged.
In addition, Jones said she disagreed with Cohen, Trump, and the Trump Organization on three items over which they claimed privilege. On Thursday, Wood issued an order saying that any objections to Jones's determinations must be filed within a week of her review.
Jones has yet to finish her review of the total number of documents. Cohen, Trump, and the Trump Organization have so far completed a review of roughly 1.3 million of the documents obtained by the FBI in the raids against Cohen. Cohen's attorneys said during a hearing before Wood last week that there are roughly 2.4 million more to sift through.
In that hearing, Wood said their review was going too slowly and ordered them to have it completed by June 15. Cohen's lawyers had argued for a mid-July completion date.
If Cohen's team can't finish reviewing the documents to make privilege designations by June 15, Wood said she might turn the rest of the documents over to a "taint team" of government prosecutors to finish the review. That team of prosecutors would be walled of from those who might prosecute Cohen.
That's exactly the option Cohen and Trump didn't want to have happen. Cohen's team successfully argued in April to have a "special master" appointed to oversee the document review. Wood agreed to do so on one condition - that the review process wouldn't take any longer than it would if it was being handled by the "taint team."