Sixteen
A CHILLING RAID
On April 5, 2018, when Michael Cohen visited Miami Beach, a delegation representing a Qatari sovereign investment fund greeted him at the Four Seasons as a dignitary. They bowed at Cohen’s feet. The dazzling treatment of Cohen impressed one of his clients, the Tennessee billionaire Franklin Haney, who had hired the longtime Trump lawyer and fixer as a consultant to help him win the Qatari government’s financial backing for a nuclear project that could make Haney even richer.
“He was treated like royalty with the Qataris because he was the president’s lawyer,” Haney told his hometown paper, the Daily Memphian. “They treated him like we had went to dinner with a prince and all that sort of stuff.”
Haney was among more than half a dozen wealthy business executives who paid Cohen generous consulting fees, wagering that his influence with Trump would translate into profits for them and their companies. Cohen spent the night aboard Haney’s $35 million yacht moored at a Miami Beach harbor before flying back to Manhattan the next day.
Also on April 5, Trump traveled to West Virginia and was asked by reporters aboard Air Force One about payments to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film star who claimed Cohen gave her $130,000 to keep quiet about a sexual encounter with Trump.
“Did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?” asked Catherine Lucey of the Associated Press.
“No,” Trump said.
“Then why did Michael Cohen make [the payment], if there was no truth to her allegations?” Lucey asked.
“You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen,” Trump replied. “Michael’s my attorney, and you’ll have to ask Michael.”
Jenna Johnson of The Washington Post tried another question: “Do you know where he got the money to make that payment?”
“No,” Trump said. “I don’t know.”
On April 9, four days later, federal law enforcement officers used search warrants to get some ironclad answers to that question. It was a crisp spring Monday morning in Manhattan, just thirty-two degrees outside, the sun rising in a clear sky, when a team of FBI agents showed up at the Loews Regency hotel on Park Avenue. At about 7:30 a.m., they knocked on the door of the room where Cohen and his wife, Laura, had been staying. This was their temporary home while repairmen were fixing damage from a water leak at their Manhattan apartment.
The federal agents in blue windbreakers were polite but firm. They told Cohen they would need to search the premises and asked him to hand over his phones, as well as any laptops or other electronic devices in his possession. Simultaneously, agents showed up at his apartment as well as his office, cordoning off the areas to collect computers, servers, and boxes of files, including tax returns and other financial records. They had to break into the front door of Cohen’s office; nobody was there at that hour to let them in. The morning raid was extraordinary. Cohen was not merely Trump’s attorney. He was his virtual vault—the keeper of his secrets and executor of his wishes, from business deals to personal affairs. “This search warrant is like dropping a bomb on Trump’s front porch,” remarked Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney.
The three criminal statutes listed near the top of the warrant they presented were a confusing blur to Cohen. But within hours Trump’s trusted fixer would understand that they conveyed a double-barrel threat. The sections of the U.S. criminal codes typed on the legal document showed that FBI agents, overseen by the famously aggressive prosecutors of the Southern District of New York, had significant evidence to suspect that Cohen had engaged in three kinds of federal crimes: bank fraud, mail fraud, and campaign finance violations.
The investigation put Cohen in significant legal peril because prosecutors would dig into whether he had lied to banks to get millions of dollars in loans for his taxi business. The probe was also well on its way to exposing the conspiracy to pay off Trump’s mistress at a crucial stage of the 2016 campaign to help him win the White House. This was something much bigger.
Cohen’s lawyer Steve Ryan was up early that Monday morning and already at the offices of his Washington law firm. Ryan had been working closely with Cohen to represent him in his handling of testimony to congressional committees regarding his Russian contacts as part of the various election interference probes.
His firm’s headquarters were mostly white and sun filled and had sweeping views of the U.S. Capitol and Union Station just blocks away. But at that moment, Ryan was in the basement gym for his regular 8:00 a.m. session with his trainer. He had told his staff he would appreciate their not interrupting this small bit of personal time he had carved out of his deadline-crushed work schedule. So he was surprised when his assistant walked into the gym a few minutes after he had begun his workout.
“You have to come upstairs,” she said.
“Why?” Ryan asked. “What is it?”
“They’re doing a search warrant on Michael,” she said. “It’s on live TV. He called you.”
Ryan blinked. He rushed to the locker room to quickly get cleaned up and headed upstairs to his corner office. Once he got to his desk, he couldn’t reach Cohen. The FBI had seized his phone.
Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers Michael Bowe and Jay Sekulow and some of their associates were meeting at Sekulow’s D.C. offices. They were preparing for a meeting that very afternoon with Robert Mueller and his lieutenants, the first one since John Dowd had summarily quit as the president’s lead counsel. Sekulow’s cell phone rang, and he turned his head away from the conference table to take the call. In his year representing Trump, darting from one drama to the next, Sekulow had proven himself a pretty calm cookie. So his stunned reaction to the caller got everyone’s attention.
“What?” Sekulow said in a loud voice.
Everyone went silent and turned their heads toward the lawyer. When he hung up, Sekulow appeared shell-shocked.
“That was Ryan,” Sekulow announced. “The FBI is raiding Michael’s office.”
Ryan told Sekulow what he knew at that hour, which was only the basics about the raid of the three locations, including that agents had to bust open the door of Cohen’s law office in Rockefeller Center because no one was there. Later, Trump would get the details slightly wrong when he said agents “broke into” Cohen’s office, when they had a proper court-approved warrant to search the premises.
Over the next hour, Ryan would learn worrisome new details about the purpose of the multipronged raid. He called the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan asking to speak to the prosecutor in charge of the Cohen matter and got the gist of the warrant. Ryan immediately realized the magnitude: investigators had opened a new front in their investigation of the president.
The warrant specified that Cohen turn over all of his communications with Trump going back several years, as well as records related to payments Cohen negotiated with two women who had claimed extramarital affairs with Trump—Daniels and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate. Because Cohen had counted himself as Trump’s personal lawyer for most of that time, their communications would normally be sacred and protected by attorney-client privilege. But that protection was useless if prosecutors could show the communications were part of a criminal scheme, which was likely the case for Cohen’s hush-money payments to porn stars and models on Trump’s behalf.