Former Judge to Review Files Seized in Searches

NEW YORK — Barbara S. Jones, a former federal judge, was selected Thursday to oversee the process of screening materials seized in a recent FBI raid from President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

It has been two weeks since federal agents descended on Cohen’s office, apartment and hotel room and hauled away at least eight boxes of documents and more than a dozen cellphones, iPads and computer hard drives. But because the government and lawyers for Cohen and Trump have been sparring about whether the seized materials are privileged, the prosecutors working on the case have not yet been able to look at them.

The selection of Jones, by a federal judge in Manhattan, to determine whether any of the materials are protected by attorney-client privilege appeared to resolve, at least for now, the dispute over who should be permitted to review the materials and how the process should proceed.

Bringing on Jones to serve as what is known as a special master could speed up the review, but it also introduced another layer of scrutiny — and thus a note of caution — to the process.

The judge who selected her, Kimba M. Wood of U.S. District Court, said that she had asked Jones how much time she could devote to the special master’s role. “She has committed 90 percent of her time to it and perhaps more if needed,” Wood said.

She added, “If at any point it turns out that the special master review process is going too slowly, I’ll revisit the question of the scope of the special master’s role.”

At the hearing, prosecutors said that they had already started handing over portions of the seized materials to Cohen’s lawyers, a process that could take weeks to finish. Under a system laid out by Wood, Cohen’s lawyers will now begin to screen them for attorney-client privilege and will pass on those records that pertain to Trump to his own lawyers, who will do the same.

At the same time, Jones will begin a simultaneous review, setting aside records that she herself concludes may be privileged. Each of the parties, Wood said, will have the right to challenge decisions made by the others.

While highly technical, the findings about which records are privileged could shape the contours of the government’s investigation into Cohen. That inquiry is seeking to determine whether he broke the law by attempting to tamp down negative news coverage of the president in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Wood made it clear that Jones was well positioned to serve as an arbiter. For 17 years, she served on the bench in the same courthouse where the Cohen case is now being heard. Before that, she worked as a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. Jones was also once a senior aide to Robert Morgenthau, the former Manhattan district attorney.

As a private lawyer, Jones has worked as a monitor or a neutral party in disputes. In 2014, she was picked to hear the appeal by Ray Rice, a former Baltimore Ravens player, of the NFL’s decision to suspend him over a domestic-abuse case.

In the past week or so, Cohen has been shedding legal exposure in separate but related court cases. On Wednesday, he filed papers in California saying he planned to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in a lawsuit filed in March against Trump by Stephanie Clifford, a former pornographic film star better known as Stormy Daniels, who claims she had an affair with the president.

Cohen has admitted to paying Clifford $130,000 in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement in October 2016, a month before the election. Clifford’s suit seeks to invalidate the agreement, alleging it was void because Trump never put his name to it.

Cohen also dropped two defamation lawsuits this past week against the political research firm Fusion GPS and the website BuzzFeed related to their publication of the so-called Steele dossier, an intelligence report alleging ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. In the suits, Cohen had accused both companies of disseminating the dossier even though both knew that it contained what he described as lies.

All three moves could help Cohen avoid releasing documents or providing answers to probing questions that could have been used against him in the criminal investigation. That inquiry is said to be focusing not only on hush-money payments that Cohen made to Clifford, but also on his role in keeping quiet another woman who claims she had an affair with Trump, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model.

On Thursday, Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, filed a motion on her behalf to formally intervene in Cohen’s case in New York. In the motion, Avenatti said that Clifford’s former lawyer, Keith Davidson, had communicated with Cohen about hush-money payments he had made to her, and that records of those dealings were now in the hands of prosecutors. Davidson confirmed last week that he was contacted by federal officials after the raids on Cohen, and that he had shared some of his records with the government.

Wood declined to rule from the bench on Clifford’s motion to intervene. And when asked in court what he and Clifford wanted, Avenatti admitted that it wasn’t much.

“A seat at the table,” he said.