By Allegra Kirkland | April 17, 2018 4:43 pm
It’s not easy to convince a federal judge to view the law enforcement process as biased and illegitimate from the outset. But that’s essentially the case that lawyers for President Trump and Michael Cohen are trying to make before U.S. Judge Kimba Wood.
Through their attorneys, the president and his longtime fixer are claiming that the current atmosphere of “toxic partisan politics” means Justice Department prosecutors can’t be trusted to sort through the reams of material that federal agents seized from Cohen to determine which are covered by attorney-client privilege. Meanwhile, they’re insisting that they aren’t impugning the government’s integrity.
Prosecutors counter that any questions about DOJ’s impartiality are the result of attacks leveled by Trump himself.
In their court filings and oral arguments, Trump and Cohen’s attorneys criticized last week’s raid as overzealous and suggested that Trump’s own Justice Department may be biased against him.
“There is a growing public debate about whether criminal and congressional investigations by the government are being undertaken impartially, free of any political bias or partisan motivation,” Todd Harrison, an attorney for Cohen, wrote in a Monday morning court filing.
Lawyers for Cohen and Trump argue that they should be allowed the “first cut” at perusing the seized material to filter out privileged conversations between the two men. They say typical DOJ protocol, in which a “filter” or “taint” team of prosecutors who are not involved in the case handles that task, will not suffice.
Harrison and Trump attorney Joanna Hendon argued at a hearing Monday that, as Hendon said, there is a “tremendous risk that privileged material may not be recognized as such” by DOJ prosecutors. Both teams have said that the incredible sensitivities involved in a raid on the office of a sitting President’s personal attorney require special treatment.
“The stakes are too high,” Harrison argued.
“The American public is watching,” and partisan attacks are “going back and forth” in the media’s coverage it,” Harrison added.
Harrison repeatedly reiterated that he wasn’t saying the government “did anything wrong.” The issue, he said, is that the situation is just too “combustible.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom McKay said this is a predicament of the defendants’ own making. He pointed out that of the three parties involved in the litigation, only two have made “inflammatory public statements” about the case.
Read more
No comments:
Post a Comment