Cohen says he handed over phones to Manhattan DA
Source: CNN Politics
Washington CNN — Michael Cohen, former President Donald Trump’s former attorney, has handed over his cell phones to Manhattan prosecutors, he told “CNN This Morning” on Wednesday.
Prosecutors are zeroing in on the Trump Organization’s involvement in hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels as part of an effort to stop her from going public about an alleged affair with Trump days before the 2016 presidential election. A grand jury in New York has been convened to hear evidence related to the effort, sources familiar with the matter have told CNN.
Cohen met last month with the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Trump has denied the affair. “Most recently, they asked for my cell phones because they want to be able to extract from it the voice recordings that I had had with Keith Davidson, former attorney to Stormy Daniels before Michael Avenatti, as well as a bunch of emails, text messages and so on,” Cohen told CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday.
Cohen said the cell phones are “new to the district attorney,” despite being obtained by federal investigators after his home was searched by the FBI in 2018.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/01/politics/michael-cohen-manhattan-district-attorney
Article updated.
Previous article -
Prosecutors are zeroing in on the Trump Organization's involvement in hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels as part of an effort to stop her from going public about an alleged affair with Trump days before the 2016 presidential election. A grand jury in New York has been convened to hear evidence related to the effort, sources familiar with the matter have told CNN.
Cohen met last month with the Manhattan district attorney's office. Trump has denied the affair.
CNN has reported that former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker was set to meet with prosecutors this week as part of the probe.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
Original article -
Cohen met last month with the Manhattan district attorney's office as prosecutors are zeroing in on the Trump Organization's involvement in hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
= new reply since forum marked as read
for fraud and that is when they seized all of his electronics (phones, computers).
Case summary/details (in part) - https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-cohen-149
(snip)
BACKGROUND
These applications implicate the familiar tension between public access to judicial records and the integrity of law enforcement investigations—interests arguably magnified by the intense scrutiny of Cohen's criminal case by the media, the general public, and even the President of the United States. On April 9, 2018, the FBI executed searches of Cohen's residence, hotel room, office, safe deposit box, cell phones, and electronic communications pursuant to warrants authorized under Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and 18 U.S.C. § 2703. These searches, according to the Government, represented the first public step in what was by then a months-long investigation into Cohen's business dealings and potential campaign finance violations. Following the searches, Cohen pled guilty on August 21, 2018 to five counts of tax evasion based on his failure to report over $ 4 million in taxable income to the Internal Revenue Service, one count of making false statements to financial institutions to obtain a $ 500,000 home equity line of credit, and two counts of campaign finance violations based on his involvement with hush payments to women who threatened to disclose details of their extra-marital affairs with a candidate for federal office.
(snip)
You might even recall all the hullabaloo about a "Special Master" appointed at that time and after a couple months initial review, found few privileged items.
He would eventually plead guilty.
I don't know what he would be turning over at this point as most people replace phones over that amount of time and I don't know if he ever got his stuff back from the last time (including the time he was in jail). If he did and kept it, I suppose he could hand that over unless he is handing over his current phone(s).
