Federal prosecutors investigating President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen are poised to receive on Wednesday one million files from three of his cellphones seized last month, according to a filing submitted to the court by special master Barbara Jones Tuesday night.
In her update to the court, Jones said investigators from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York have already been given access to nearly 300,000 pieces of potential evidence seized from Cohen’s office and residences in an April raid.
Jones was appointed by U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood late last month to review the material seized after attorneys for Cohen and President Trump said many seized documents and communications could be protected by attorney-client privilege.
Jones, a retired judge who served on the federal bench for 16 years in the Southern District of New York, is a former organized-crime prosecutor who was chief assistant to Robert M. Morgenthau, the longtime Manhattan district attorney.
Cohen is being investigated for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations as part of a probe looking at his efforts to suppress damaging stories about Trump in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
In their initial request for a special master, Cohen’s attorneys said thousands of the seized documents might be covered by attorney-client privilege.
But in her update Tuesday to the court, Jones noted that so far only 252 items have been flagged by Cohen’s or Trump’s attorneys as privileged. She is set to make a recommendation about that material to the court by June 4.
Another 292,006 items that were not designated by Cohen or Trump as privileged or highly personal were turned over to prosecutors on May 23.
Jones is set to release another 1,025,063 items from three of Cohen’s phones on Wednesday, pending her final verification, according to the filing. Material from two other phones released to Jones this month have not yet been scheduled for release.
Jones also reported having received additional electronic data over the past two weeks, including “[e]lectronic data from a video recorder, two computers, and mobile storage devices” which “includes various video, electronic communications and documents as well as data typically associated with computer usage.”
Attorneys for Cohen, the government and the president will appear at a hearing on Wednesday morning to update Wood about the status of the transfer of the potential evidence.
At the hearing, Wood will also consider whether to allow Michael Avenatti, the attorney for adult-film star Stormy Daniels — who Cohen paid $130,000 in 2016 to remain silent about an alleged affair with Trump — to intervene in the proceedings.
