I saw that slatten and am mortified that Napolitano actually said that. One has to be completely open & honest with one's attorney in such matters. Period. No ifs, ands or buts. It's part of the process.

If you remember back that far, liberals were horrified at the Nixon people's burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office & I agree with them. In Nixon's pathetic speech he cited he cited priest-confessor, attorney-client and excluded doctor-patient as privileged.

The FBI Director and those agents should be arrested and tried for crimes.

I saw that slatten and am mortified that Napolitano actually said that. One has to be completely open & honest with one's attorney in such matters. Period. No ifs, ands or buts. It's part of the process.

If you remember back that far, liberals were horrified at the Nixon people's burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office & I agree with them. In Nixon's pathetic speech he cited he cited priest-confessor, attorney-client and excluded doctor-patient as privileged.

The FBI Director and those agents should be arrested and tried for crimes.

The Justice Department has extensive rules about seizing records of lawyers that could typically fall under attorney-client privilege. Prosecutors are required to consult with the the Criminal Division at Main Justice, and to get the sign off of the U.S. attorney overseeing the investigation or the relevant assistant attorney general. It’s also recommended that a special team of attorneys who are walled off from the prosecutors overseeing the inquiry be set up to review the potentially privileged documents.
“It’s procedurally cumbersome, it’s sensitive, it raises the hackles of the bar,” Sam Buell, a former prosecutor who worked on the Enron investigation, told TPM. “It’s not done on a fishing expedition. It’s only done when you’re reasonably confident that you’re going to find evidence of criminality and you need to do it with a search warrant.”
Investigators’ willingness to go the route of a high-profile raid, instead of a less intrusive subpoena or even a voluntary request for documents, suggested to outside experts that there’s at least some concern that Cohen could be withholding evidence.
“It tells you that, one, they had some pretty compelling reason to think that Cohen was not or would not produce the records they were trying to get in response to a subpoena” Sanchez said, adding that he’d, “infer that they have some evidence he has already withheld something that he claimed to have turned over.”

Secondly, Sanchez said, the move suggests that the prosecutors would have reason to believe that the records that they are seeking would be exempt from attorney-client privilege. The most obvious exception, Sanchez said, is the crime-fraud exemption which applies to communications made in the furtherance of a crime.
“If you’re talking to your attorney about a crime you’ve already committed, that’s privileged,” Sanchez said. “If you’re talking to your attorney to get them to help you to commit crime, that’s the part that’s not privileged.”
Former prosecutors also said that move to hand off the inquiry to federal prosecutors in New York once Mueller f**gged the information shows that the special counsel is playing it by the book, even as President Trump and his allies suggest that he’s on a witch hunt.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/michael-cohen-fbi-raid-experts-react

Brilliant bumpkin. The client attorney relationship must be sacrosanct for our judicial system to work. Think about where this started. There was a very questionable Russia, Trump investigation started by ardent anti-Trumpers.. The entire investigation was centered around supposed Trump, Russian collusion. What came out. Trump has had no collusion with Russians that is illegal. However; there is strong evidence that a corrupt FBI and DOJ conspired to bring down a duly elected President. Exactly why the million or so documents subpoenaed by the over site committee have been slow walked to them. Of course you and you ilk don't care about this. You are more about party than country. Before you say your an independent don't waste your time. We know what you are.

Fox News explains exactly why the Michael Cohen raid should terrify Donald Trump

Attorney-client privilege doesn't apply if there's "a serious allegation of illegal activity."

Addy Baird, Apr 9, 2018, 6:32 pm

On Monday, FBI agents raided the office and residences of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney. The search warrants reportedly included conversations between Cohen and Trump, who has been Cohen’s only client for years.

The search reportedly included, possibly among other things, documents related a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, which Cohen made just days before the 2016 e******n. Daniels, an adult film actress, says she had an affair with Trump in 2006.

But it was the approval of the search warrants themselves that should terrify Trump. The best explanation, remarkably, came from Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News legal analyst. Napolitano explained that, under normal circumstances, communications between Trump and his attorney are privileged. But this privilege does not apply if there is “a serious allegation of illegal activity, by the lawyer with the client,” he said.

“There must be some evidence presented to a federal judge here in New York City sufficient to persuade that judge to sign a search warrant to permit the FBI in broad daylight to raid an attorney’s office, particularly when that attorney has one client and it happens to be the president of the United States,” Napolitano told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto.

“That evidence would have to be such as to persuade a neutral observer, the federal judge, that it is more likely than not, that among these seized documents is evidence of crimes by Mr. Cohen or Mr. Cohen and the president,” he continued.

The crime in question, Napolitano speculated, could be related to the $130,000 payment to Daniels.

Napolitano did echo some of Fox News’ favorite arguments about the ongoing investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 p**********l e******n, saying there “seems to be no limit” to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. But then Napolitano reiterated that a judge would only issue the warrant if there was sufficient “evidence of crimes.”

“You’re talking about the most confidential and protected relationship there is — lawyer and client — and the federal government has just invaded that with the express authority and approval of a federal judge, who may only permit that invasion when she or he, the federal judge, has been satisfied that it’s more likely than not that in those materials are evidence of crimes,” he said.

It would be a crime, Napolitano went on to say, if the Trump campaign accepted a gift of $130,000, and if the funds came from the campaign. In that instance, “all bets are off,” as Cavuto put it.

What makes Napolitano’s comments Monday even more interesting is that when Napolitano talks, Trump listens. Trump directly echoed Napolitano’s arguments on Fox in a recent tweet about government surveillance shortly after Napolitano appeared on the network, and the White House has cited Napolitano’s claim, without evidence, that British intelligence operatives had surveilled Trump Tower as a favor to Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign.

According to a report from February, the president and Napolitano have spoken a number of times in recent months, as well.

Is there any chance that that "soft power" is used when the FBI and the DOJ softwalk all their information to Congressional subpoenas? Aw hell, they don't do things like that, do they? I think there is a chance that a whole bunch of those people need to be "fired" and replaced with people who don't think that the executive branch doesn't have to work with the legislative branch. They had 8 years to get all that kind of thinking deeply entrenched in their thinking and now we are getting to suffer from that kind of thinking. Of course, the DOJ and the FBI don't make the whole branch although they seem to think they do.

Just picked up from Yahoo News:

Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is recused from the Michael Cohen investigation, ABC News has learned.

Berman was not involved in the decision to raid Cohen's office because of the recusal, two sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News

The recusal was approved by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

The raid of Cohen's handled by others in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and approved by a federal judge.

Berman is a Trump appointee with ties to Rudy Giuliani who donated money to the 2016 Trump campaign.

The U.S. Attorney's office declined to comment.