Quote Originally Posted by ~Rocktar~ View Post
Just going off the concerns voiced by Alan Dershowitz in this segment I got on youtube. Now I am not a lawyer and Alan is, a pretty respected one and likely he knows a metric and standard ton more than you ever will about the law. He seems pretty damn concerned about this kind of thing so I think I will take his word on it over yours.

Yes- I saw the Hannity segment.

First, Dershowitz wasn't actually making a legal critique- he was making a social critique as a professional in the legal industry. He made one declaration about the attorney-client privilege element, and in it he actually acknowledged that the Public Corruption unit who executed the warrant had probable cause to search the premises.

After that- there was no discussion of case law or any insinuation that this was improperly conducted by existing DoJ or legal guidelines. Your assertion that this was an attack on attorney-client privilege had no actual backing. Literally your only evidence in this instance is that Dershowitz gave a one sentence opinion that this was a bad day for attorney-client privilege.

For the record, I actually agree with the 6th Circuit (and presumably Dershowitz, though I've never read anything by him expounding on this issue) on the issue of taint teams and would even take it one step further. I think a magistrate judge should always be appointed as a part of this process because the taint team system is too vulnerable to abuse. If the SDNY Attorney is smart- they'll actually appoint one in this situation. BUT the Courts have routinely held (ala Clark) that attorney-client privilege is not a shield to protect criminal conduct. To argue that it's always wrong to search an attorney's files is to grant unalterable criminal immunity to corrupt attorneys and clients. That would be a system that is even more prone to abuse than taint teams.

For the record, these kinds of raids are extremely rare- in part- because it's almost impossible to get a Federal judge to sign off on these warrants. But in this particular situation, the Federal judge would have had to have been presented with an extraordinary amount of evidence that Cohen likely committed a crime, that legitimate evidence of that crime would be found in his office; home; and hotel room, and that there was good reason to believe that any advance notice would have resulted in a high risk of evidence being destroyed.

Among other things, that means that the DoJ likely found evidence that Cohen had already been destroying or withholding critical evidence in ongoing investigations. It also means Cohen was already either a subject or a target of an ongoing investigation.