Special Counsel investigation (2017–2019)

Who was the head of the SDNY team that carried out the raid?

The warrant was personally approved by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and carried out by the public corruption unit of the SDNY. Geoffrey Berman, the interim head of the SDNY, was recused from the matter; a Trump appointee, he had worked as a volunteer attorney on the Trump campaign. Further, due to the sensitive nature of the raid and the attorney–client privilege, a special "taint" team is required to review the documents to carefully separate out privileged and protected documents that may have been seized in the raid to ensure those inadmissible documents are not passed on to investigators. Legal blogger and former federal prosecutor Ken White of Popehat published a New York Times op-ed giving some background on the DOJ procedures required to approve such a raid, saying the search "suggests that the prosecutors believe they can convince a judge that communications between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen fall under the crime-fraud exception" of attorney-client privilege. It called the raid "highly dangerous" for both Cohen and Trump. White posted further analysis on Popehat, citing section 9-13.320 [sic] [recte 9-13.420] of the United States Attorneys' Manual, which sets the guidelines and regulations for searches of attorney premises.


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