Court documents released Tuesday show that special counsel Robert Mueller was seeking search warrants against Michael Cohen for nearly a year before the former Trump lawyer’s office was raided by the FBI, and that Mueller could have emails from Cohen dating back to when Cohen first joined Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Tuesday released a warrant application that reveals the extent of Mueller’s effort to monitor Cohen. The application, which is more than 200 pages long, was approved on April 8, 2018, and allowed officials to raid Cohen’s home, office, hotel, and deposit box the following day.
That document showed that the FBI previously obtained search warrants on a series of email accounts belonging to Cohen as early as July 18, 2017. It also showed a warrant that FBI sought to gain access to Cohen’s emails from as far back as June 1, 2015, just two weeks before Cohen joined Trump’s campaign.
The document included 19 redacted pages related to what the warrant application called an “illegal campaign contribution scheme.” In one section that is poorly redacted, the words “contribution reporting requirements, and campaign contribution limits” are partially visible.
The warrant application reveals a warrant was granted on July 18, 2017 for access to a Cohen Gmail account related to emails sent and received between January 1, 2016 and July 18, 2017. Another was obtained on August 8, 2017 for the content stored on Cohen’s Apple iCloud account. A third warrant obtained on Nov. 13, 2017 gave authorities access to a Cohen Gmail account related to emails sent and received between June 1, 2015 and Nov. 13, 2017.
The FBI also gained access to information on two of his cell phones in the days prior to the FBI raid.
The documents show the FBI had access to up to three years of Cohen’s communications, and that the FBI thought it learned enough about Cohen to justify the raid on April 9, 2018. That information covered his personal finances, financial statements, ownership of taxi licenses, debts, business structures, consulting work, communications with banks, and more.
“The investigation has revealed that Cohen has made misrepresentations in and omitted material information from financial statements and other disclosures that Cohen provided to multiple banks in connection with a transaction intended to relieve Cohen of approximately $22 million in debt he owed on taxi medallion loans from banks,” the warrant said.
The FBI also revealed that it had been tracking wire transfers and other payments being made to Essential Consultants, which Cohen had set up. The payments Cohen received were from domestic and foreign sources and totaled in the millions of dollars. Cohen would eventually use the Essential Consultants account to pay $130,000 to Stormy Daniels in 2016.
The FBI said it had conducted a series of interviews stemming from what it had learned from reviewing and monitoring Cohen’s digital communications. The FBI spoke with Sterling National Bank employees about millions of dollars in loans that Cohen had secured, and said it issued subpoenas to First Republic Bank and had conducted interviews with First Republic employees. These revealed that the FBI believed Cohen was misrepresenting his finances to banks.
Cohen was still reportedly Trump’s personal attorney at the time of the raids on April 9, 2018. In May of 2018, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said that Cohen was no longer Trump’s lawyer. By July 2018, Cohen said he’d be willing to cooperate with prosecutors. Later that month he revealed he’d been secretly recording Trump.
Cohen provided high-profile testimony in front of the House Oversight Committee last month, where he made a series of allegations against President Trump, including implicating him in a scheme to skirt campaign finance laws.
Cohen is scheduled to head to prison on May 6th.
