by Nick Givas
CNN felt the need to defend the FBI’s raid on President Donald Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen Tuesday on “New Day” and called Trump’s comments on the matter “dangerous.”
“I don’t want to speculate on what they’re looking for without knowing and I also don’t want to go — there’s something that the president said that I think is really dangerous,” said New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. “And I think it is actually important to focus on where he described this as an attack on our country.”
“The president’s not listening to you,” host Chris Cuomo said. “He’s tweeted twice … First, ‘Attorney-client privilege is dead!’ Now, once again, this is another institution he is attacking and it also is not true.”
“Now a lot of people picked up on this,” Cuomo continued. “And said I can’t believe they did this. This is illegal. You cannot go after the attorney-client privilege. It’s is sacrosanct. It’s nice to see the legal profession respected for a change. However, that’s just not true.”
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin agreed with Cuomo and said the raid should be considered normal.
“It is not true. And this is not the first lawyer’s office that’s ever been searched,” Toobin said. “It’s unusual but it has been done many, many times.”
“The way this works generally when you search an attorney’s office, is you establish what you call a taint team which goes through all the documents. A group of lawyers, to determine which are covered by the attorney-client privilege and which are not,” Toobin said.
“That taint team then turns over to the investigators the documents that are appropriate to look at. The taint team is not involved in the investigation. They are the ones who just determine attorney-client privilege, then they check out of the case,” he concluded. “The documents that they see that are covered by the attorney-client privilege — the investigators never actually see. That’s how searches of attorney’s offices generally work.”
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