Cohen Says He’ll Plead the Fifth in Lawsuit by Porn Actress

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, will invoke his Fifth Amendment right in a lawsuit filed against the president by Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film star better known as Stormy Daniels.

Cohen’s decision, disclosed Wednesday in a court filing in California, where the suit was filed, came a day before a federal judge in Manhattan was set to hold a hearing regarding materials seized from Cohen during an FBI raid earlier this month.

Cohen cited the Manhattan investigation in his filing Wednesday, saying that, if called as a witness in Clifford’s lawsuit, “I will assert my Fifth Amendment rights in connection with all proceedings in this case due to the ongoing criminal investigation by the FBI and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.”

Clifford was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about claims that she had an affair with Trump. She sued last month to get out of the nondisclosure agreement she signed in October 2016, alleging that it was void because Trump had never signed it.

Citing the Fifth Amendment in the Clifford case allows Cohen to avoid being deposed and revealing sensitive information in the more important criminal investigation. That investigation — which prosecutors say has been going on for months — became public in dramatic fashion on April 9, when agents from the New York office of the FBI raided Cohen’s office, apartment and a room at the Loews Regency Hotel he had been using. The inquiry is said to be focusing on hush-money payments Cohen made to — or helped arrange for — Clifford and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who has also said she had an affair with Trump.

For days now, prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan have been sparring with Cohen’s lawyers — and with lawyers for Trump — for the right to review the records first, a step that will shape the contours of how the government presses its investigation into whether Cohen tried to suppress negative news coverage of the president in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Lawyers for Cohen suggested on Wednesday that they were already taking steps to gird themselves for battle. In new court papers, they said they were setting up “war rooms” to review the seized materials, testing and vetting “systems” to process them, and marshaling what seems to be a small legal army of “operations and technology personnel, paralegals, discovery experts, associates and senior reviewing partners.”

The martial tone of Cohen’s filing was in contrast to a similar letter submitted to the court by lawyers for the Trump Organization, who merely noted that they were “fully capable of processing and reviewing the materials.” In a third submission, Trump’s lawyers said they would “consult closely with Mr. Cohen’s counsel to assist in identifying the seized materials that relate to the president.”

All of the papers were requested in advance by Judge Kimba Wood, who, in a hearing on April 16, put off a decision on how to resolve the conflict over the attorney-client privilege review, saying she might appoint a special master to oversee the process. Two days later, the prosecutors and Cohen’s lawyers submitted to Wood lists of potential candidates.