A federal judge dismissed Monday afternoon President Donald Trump’s lawyer’s request that prosecutors not review the documents seized during last week’s raid.
Judge Kimba Wood of Federal District Court in Manhattan denied an attempt by lawyer Michael Cohen and President Trump to stop prosecutors from reviewing the materials that the FBI seized from his office, home and hotel room last week saying that they are client-attorney privileged documents.
Cohen’s lawyers demanded temporary restraining order so that they could review the files and then turn over to prosecutors those that were “responsive, non-privileged items,” a request that Trump called unprecedented. Although the request was denied Cohen still got a little victory, meaning Wood did order the government to create a database of what was taken from Cohen and share it with his legal team, according to The Associated Press.
The judge still has not decided on Cohen’s second request that a neutral third party known as a “special master” be appointed to separate out the privileged materials. Prosecutors agreed that a standard “taint team” can review Cohen’s materials and decide what is privileged and cannot be given to the criminal investigators.
“I have faith in the Southern District U.S. Attorney’s Office,” she said. “Their integrity is unimpeachable.”
The Associated Press reported that Cohen’s lawyers had objected to the use of a so-called taint team to review the materials. A “taint team” is a separate team of prosecutors tapped to take the first pass at seized documents to filter out those that are subject to attorney-client privilege, before the core prosecutorial team views the materials.
The procedure is an established one laid out in the U.S. Attorneys’ Manual that’s designed “to protect the attorney-client privilege and to ensure that the investigation is not compromised by exposure to the privileged material.”
Cohen’s lawyers argued that the taint team would be made up of “colleagues of the prosecutors assigned to this investigation.”
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