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Michael Cohen.
- There's a new battle brewing over the documents seized from President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer Michael Cohen.
- It deals with the objections Cohen, Trump, and the Trump Organization plan to file over special master Barbara Jones's determinations on what falls under attorney-client privilege.
- Trump's lawyer argued that those objections should be filed under seal.
- The government and lawyers for the press oppose this.
There's a new battle brewing over the documents seized by the FBI in raids on the home, office, and hotel room of President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer Michael Cohen, related to a fight over whether certain files are protected by attorney-client privilege.
Earlier this week, the special master Barbara Jones, who is tasked with overseeing the document review process, released a report on her assessment of the roughly 300,000 initial documents reviewed for privilege designations.
A small total of those documents, just 162, were deemed privileged by Jones. That means, in her opinion, they could not be used in a potential prosecution of Cohen by the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, where Cohen is the focus of a criminal investigation into whether he violated campaign-finance laws or committed bank fraud.
Meanwhile, Jones said she disagreed with Cohen, Trump, and the Trump Organization on just three items over which they claimed privilege.
'The public's right of access here cannot be overstated'
Late Wednesday, the new front in this battle opened up. Joanna Hendon, the attorney for Trump in the case, filed a letter on behalf of Trump, Cohen, and the Trump Organization requesting that they be allowed to make any objections to Jones's assessments under seal. Hendon said they were ready to file those objections on Thursday, well before a Monday deadline, if they would be allowed to file them under seal.
On Thursday, federal prosecutors explained that they were OK with the objections to Jones's determinations being filed publicly with redactions, but not under seal. The government disagreed with the rationale Hendon put forth as reason to file the objections under seal, saying that there is "no reason" the government and public "should be deprived of access to the balance of the filing."
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Joanna Hendon.
"The public's right of access here cannot be overstated," wrote the attorney, Davis Wright Tremaine, adding, "Now that President Trump and Mr. Cohen are challenging whether certain of these documents may be turned over to government investigators, the public has a right to know what they assert are the bounds of the attorney-client privilege."
"Stated simply, maintaining public confidence in the administration of justice in this case is paramount," the attorney said.
Jones still has yet to finish her review of all the documents. Cohen, Trump, and the Trump Organization have so far reviewed roughly 1.3 million documents obtained by the FBI in the raids. Cohen's attorneys said during a hearing before US District Judge Kimba Wood last week that there were 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 might turn the rest over to a "taint team" of government prosecutors to finish the review, she said. That team would be walled off 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 wouldn't take any longer than it would if it were being handled by the taint team.