Cohen, Trump’s Lawyer, Appears at Manhattan Court Hearing

NEW YORK — Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s embattled lawyer, appeared in a courtroom in Manhattan on Monday as prosecutors and Cohen’s lawyer continued to argue over the fruits — and future — of the extraordinary raids that federal agents conducted last week on Cohen’s office, home and hotel room.

Investigators were seeking evidence of possible attempts to suppress negative media coverage of Trump in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Last week, Cohen ignored an initial hearing in the case, opting instead to smoke cigars in the sun outside the Loews Regency Hotel, a move that prompted Judge Kimba Wood of U.S. District Court in Manhattan to tell his lawyer to make sure Cohen was present at the next court appearance. Cohen was not alone at Monday’s hearing: Adult film star Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, was at the courthouse as well, setting the stage for a remarkable face-to-face confrontation.

Todd Harrison, one of Cohen’s lawyers, sought a temporary restraining order to stop the government from reviewing what he called thousands of pages of documents seized in the raids — some of which, authorities have said, were related to a $130,000 payment Cohen made to Clifford to keep her from discussing an alleged affair she had with Trump. In response, prosecutors filed a memo explaining that they took great pains to avoid violating the attorney-client privilege in the case and planned to have a team of prosecutors who are not involved in the investigation — a so-called taint team — review the material to determine if they are protected by Trump’s legal relationship with Cohen.

The prosecutors also said that they have been investigating Cohen for months for a range of possible crimes and had already been secretly reading his emails.

Cohen’s lawyers have objected to the use of a taint team and, in yet another unusual move, a lawyer for Trump filed an emergency motion to the court Sunday night, saying that the president also objected to that “extraordinary measure.” In her motion, the lawyer, Joanna C. Hendon, asked Wood to give the documents to Cohen first so that she and the president can look at them and decide if any are protected by attorney-client privilege.

The issue before Wood is, at least for now, a relatively narrow one: Who should be the first to read the seized material and thus be in a position to decide if any of them should be excluded from the case and avoid further scrutiny — the taint team, a special master appointed by the court or Cohen and Trump themselves? It remained unclear Monday morning if the judge would rule from the bench or issue a written decision at another time.

The documents could shed light on the president’s relationship with a lawyer who has helped navigate some of Trump’s thorniest personal and business problems. Cohen served for more than a decade as a trusted fixer and, during the campaign, helped tamp down brewing scandals about women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.

In a new filing Monday, Cohen’s lawyers claimed that agents from the FBI seized more than a dozen electronic devices during the raids, some of which, they added, contained information that had nothing to do with the investigation. The lawyers also acknowledged that Cohen had once represented Elliot Brody, the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, who resigned Friday after reports emerged that Cohen had helped him make a $1.6 million payment to a former Playboy model who became pregnant during their affair.

Echoing several of Trump’s supporters, the lawyers also noted in their filing that there was “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.”

“It is in this climate,” they wrote, “that the government executed an unprecedented search warrant — instead of using its less onerous subpoena power — upon the personal attorney of the president of the United States.”

But Michael S. Ross, a lawyer who specializes in the attorney-client privilege and teaches the subject at both Brooklyn and Cardozo Law School, questioned the legal reasoning by Cohen and Trump’s lawyers, especially when it came to the attorney-client privilege.

“The notion that attorney-client privilege is so sacrosanct that the government cannot review the documents or the court cannot determine these issues is not only antiquated, it’s no longer viable,” Ross said. “It’s not a common-sense argument. The legal community lives with the fact that privilege issues are determined by taint teams or special masters.”