Remember, Michael Cohen only became a “Rat” after the FBI did something which was absolutely unthinkable & unheard of until the Witch Hunt was illegally started. They BROKE INTO AN ATTORNEY’S OFFICE! Why didn’t they break into the DNC to get the Server, or Crooked’s office?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
December 16, 2018
Of course he's still pushing the 'DNC never gave the FBI its servers!!!' bullshit. It's nonsense, and the claim that obtaining a search warrant and then searching an attorney's office is 'illegal' is simply a lie.
1. The DNC gave the FBI cloned copies (images) of its servers. This is
standard procedure in cybercrime investigations.
When cyber investigators respond to an incident, they capture that evidence in a process called “imaging.” They make an exact byte-for-byte copy of the hard drives. They do the same for the machine’s memory, capturing evidence that would otherwise be lost at the next reboot, and they monitor and store the traffic passing through the victim’s network. This has been standard procedure in computer intrusion investigations for decades. The images, not the computer’s hardware, provide the evidence. Both the DNC and the security firm Crowdstrike, hired to respond to the breach, have said repeatedly over the years that they gave the FBI a copy of all the DNC images back in 2016.
2. Though it's not common, the FBI does occasionally find it necessary to
search attorneys' offices, and of course if it does so it follows the law by first obtaining a search warrant. Any information gained through a warrantless search would almost certainly be inadmissable in support a prosecution case.
CUOMO: Now a lot of people picked up on this and said, "I can't believe they did this. This is illegal. You cannot go after the attorney-client privilege. It is sacrosanct." It's nice to see the legal profession respected for a change. However, that's just not true.
TOOBIN: It is not true. And this is not the first lawyer's office that's ever been searched. As I said earlier, it's unusual, but it has been done many, many times.
3. Calling Cohen a 'Rat' echoes the language of career criminals which isn't surprising coming from Trump, I suppose, but neither is it any reassurance that Trump is innocent of wrongdoing.
