The feds have reconstructed the contents of one of Michael Cohen’s shredders — 16 pages’ worth — and extracted 731 pages of encrypted messages from his phones in their probe of the former President Trump lawyer, it was revealed Friday.
Prosecutors investigating Cohen’s business dealings — including his $130,000 hush-money payment to stripper and alleged former Trump lover Stormy Daniels — said in a letter to a judge that the FBI was able to reconstruct the shredded documents and finally able to crack content from encrypted messaging applications, such as WhatsApp and Signal, on Cohen’s various phones.
The FBI was also able to recover information from one of two Blackberries seized in the raid, resulting in approximately 315 megabytes of data, authorities said. The second of Cohen’s two seized Blackberries remains uncracked, they added.
The feds made the disclosures in a letter to Manhattan federal Judge Kimba Wood as part of a process to ensure that prosecutors don’t review seized information protected by attorney-client privilege, including Cohen’s conversations with Trump.
Wood has ordered the feds to turn over all the seized material to Cohen and Trump so that they can flag documents they think are protected by attorney-client privilege.
That material then gets turned over to a court-appointed “special master” who makes the final call on whether it’s protected and therefore off limits to the feds.
Wood has given Cohen and Trump until today to tell the “special master” what they think is protected of the materials they have received so far.