I was wondering the same thing. What the hell is the “highly personal” privilege. They sure didn’t tell me about that one in law school, but that was about 45 years ago.
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Huge iTunes inventory?
Hey a jacket is just a jacket, it’s not the jackets fault that some schmuck decided to wear it. It’s a spring time jacket that is appropriate for the season.
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Politico noted that the government is paying half that amount — Cohen, Trump and the Trump Organization are covering the rest.
Politico noted that the government is paying half that amount —Viktor Vekselberg is covering the rest.
FIFY
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Out of over 1.3 million items seized from Michael Cohen’s home and office, only 252 are potentially privileged, according to the Special Master. That means prosecutors were right—Cohen was not practicing law much at all. https://t.co/9UI9rFDLb7
— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) May 30, 2018
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Say someone was going through your closets looking for items that were embarrassing or incriminating. But first you were allowed to remove the very most sensitive items, the short list of things you ABSOLUTELY would be mortified to have exposed. Suddenly you’d be just a bit relieved as they rummaged around, no?
I have no problem protecting the Atty-client privilege if it’s a legitimate claim. Most of Cohen’s work is fixer work and that’s the stuff that gets Trump into trouble. All of his conversations with Vekselberg/Renova/Columbus Nova, for example, would not be privileged, even if it related to Trump. That’s a possible Steele Dossier link.
Any of the Stormy Daniels related material is privileged to Daniels, so that’s in Avenatti’s hands, not Trump’s (as Trump tries to have it both ways on whether he was or was not a party to the agreement). Any of his real estate deal work where he was putting together financing from multiple sources is not privileged.
I think the key point here is that most of Cohen’s work is in a ‘business’ not legal capacity, and the Rosens, Sapirs, Freidman, Vekselbergs, Saters, Arifs of the world won’t have their convos protected. There are also several Trump, Trump Jr, Trump Org convos that won’t be protected either.
[NOTE: I’d add that Cohen will try to assert privilege of Daniels related stuff but the claim isn’t as strong as Daniels’ and it’s somewhat moot as Avenatti will simply release the material just as he hit the WSJ last night with a letter from Davidson proving that the WSJ had the Stormy Daniels story (+ 1 other) before the election and sat on them].
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Is there a mechanism for Trump/Cohen to appeal adverse rulings by the Special Master? If there are, are they through the succession of courts we see other legal issues argued? Could contesting a ruling have to wind its way up the ladder of various appeals and appellate courts, dragging on for weeks or months? Are outside parties allowed to assert privilege, such as Sater alleging a conversation or e-mail with Cohen is privileged? Are outside parties even being notified their communications are to be found in the trove of seized materials, and are they being afforded the chance to assert some rights over how those communications are used, or provided to prosecutors? Is it the type of fight that could end up at SCOTUS?
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This is 64,085 items per phone on average. What the fuck was this mofo doing?
Many of these are just saves of the ‘Angry Birds’ games Michael started while waiting for calls.
They’re talking about that now in court. Judge Wood is skeptical of the Cohen team’s arguments b/c it would insert unreasonable delay into the process. She’s leaning towards going back to the ‘Taint Team’ and getting that process done more quickly.
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Speaking of Cohen, the Feds found his shredder and they’re piecing docs together from the shredded pages. He is so f***ed on this. Spoliage and obstruction charges could be available for prosecutors to lay on Mikey.
Federal prosecutors are piecing together papers shredded by Michael Cohen. That is bad news for him. https://t.co/vHY16gtoXA
— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) May 30, 2018
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I have a decent document shredder at home. Not very expensive, I think I paid about $130 at Target. Has some sort of “triple cut” feature. When you empty the basket the paper is seemingly one stage away from dust essentially. I’d think it would be a Herculean, tedious, time consuming, almost cost prohibitve task reconstructing what my shredder produces. Why the hell anyone hiding a crime would use a shredder that even allowed document reconstruction is weird, especially since the entire reason to bother with the process is to assure the documents are worthless when you’re done.
Feds are expert at doc reconstruction. Feels like Cohen did this hurriedly and didn’t shred a second time crosswise.
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There are NIST standards that cover how fine you need to cut stuff to make it hard to recreate, but there’s also software now that makes it a computationally intensive, but completely feasible task to feed in the bits and out comes recreated pages.
“And I would have got away with it, too if it wasn’t for you damned Comp Sci kids!” 
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I saw a guy do that with bullet fragments. Might have been a fictional encounter.
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Crime and Treason.