The FBI is piecing together shredded documents found in its raid of Michael Cohen’s home and office while investigating President Trump’s personal attorney for suspected financial crimes.
Prosecutors told a federal district judge on Wednesday that agents are working to reconstitute the contents of a shredder machine seized by the bureau during the raid.
CNN reported that there is not a large amount of shredded material.
The federal government has so far turned over 3.7 million seized documents for Cohen’s attorneys to assess whether anything is privileged information. The FBI continues to pore over the shredded documents and an additional 19 storage devices including hard drives and thumb drives, as well as several Blackberry phones.
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Cohen’s team is reportedly working around the clock, under supervision by a special master appointed by the court, to review what the FBI has released.
Judge Kimba Wood on Wednesday gave Cohen’s team until June 15 to finish going through the nearly 4 million documents.
Todd Harrison, an attorney for Cohen, has said the team needs more time to complete the task. So far, they have tagged 252 items as containing privileged information, and turned over about a million items to the prosecution, Bloomberg News reported.
Former FBI special agent and CNN analyst Asha Rangappa said Wendesday that the existence of shredded documents in Cohen’s office showed a “reason to believe that evidence was being destroyed” ahead of the FBI raid in April.
“This is not going to end well for the defense,” she said on Twitter.
Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said the news that the FBI is piecing together shredded information is “bad news for [Cohen].”
“[The FBI] are very good at reassembling shredded documents. It’s something they do well. They are looking at a huge volume of evidence,” Matt Miller, who is a MSNBC justice and security analyst, told “Andrea Mitchell Reports.”