CORRECTION (as per @matt ): Earlier today, NBC News reported that there was a wiretap on the phones of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal attorney, citing two separate sources with knowledge of the legal proceedings involving Cohen.
But three senior U.S. officials now dispute that, saying that the monitoring of Cohen’s phones was limited to a log of calls, known as a pen register, not a wiretap where investigators can actually listen to calls.
NBC News has changed the headline and revised parts of the original article.
A real bombshell!
The wiretap has been in place for many weeks (and maybe more). At least one call with the White House was recorded – see below. " Wow!
Federal authorities wiretapped phone lines of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, and intercepted at least one call between a Cohen line and the White House, NBC News reported Thursday.
It is not known when the wiretap on Cohen was authorized, but it was in place in the weeks before the April 9 raid on his New York City home, hotel room and office by FBI agents, according to NBC News.
UPDATE: Just as this news was breaking, the reporters who wrote the story, Tom Winter and Julia Ainsley, appeared on a panel on MSNBC’s “Live with Craig Melvin” (Kasie Hunt was standing in for Melvin). Winter and Ainsley explained how difficult it is to obtain a warrant for a wiretap. The bar is set very high when it comes to convincing a judge there is sufficient probable cause for issuing such a warrant. My conclusion from these remarks: The Federal prosecutors must have already had very compelling evidence that Cohen had committed crimes before they even applied for this warrant.
Some other highlights:
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Michael Avenatti (Stormy Daniels’ lawyer) was also on the panel. He said, “Here’s what I think ultimately we’re going to find out. I don’t think we’re going to find out that this was confined just to email or voice wiretaps, I think they also, my understanding is that they were also wiretapping text message communications for the weeks leading up to the FBI raid.” Later in the discussion, Kasie Hunt, circled back and asked Avenatti if he was “speculating” about text messages being recorded. He replied, “No I’m not speculating. That’s a fact.”
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Avenatti also said he believes the wiretapping revealed that Cohen was making plans to destroy evidence and that’s why the search warrants were issued – to obtain relevant documents before they were destroyed.
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Tom Winter interjected this teaser: “I have a little bit of an understanding as to why the warrant came in when it did, but that’s not something I’m ready to report at this point.” Mmmm… more bombshells ahead…