Trump Attorneys Waive Privilege On Secret Recording About Ex-playmate Payment
President Donald Trump’s lawyers have waived attorney-client privilege on his behalf regarding a secretly recorded conversation he had in September 2016 with his former longtime lawyer Michael Cohen in which they discussed payments to an ex-Playboy model who says she had an affair with the President, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The move comes as an attorney for Cohen openly questioned Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s claim that the tape showed no wrongdoing by the President, furthering the growing divide between Trump and Cohen, who had once said he’d take a bullet for the President.
Trump’s lawyers asking on behalf of the President to remove the privilege designation from the recording means that the government now has access to it as part of the US attorney for the Southern District of New York’s probe into Cohen.
It effectively gives prosecutors the ability to use the recording if they find it relevant to their criminal investigation of Cohen.
The prosecutors working on the case had not reviewed the recording because it, along with millions of other documents and files seized in FBI searches of Cohen’s home, hotel room and office in April, was undergoing the special master process, in which an independent party reviews whether the items should be regarded as privileged and thus withheld from prosecutors.
The special master had designated the recording as privileged, according to two sources familiar with the process, but Trump’s lawyers subsequently waived their right to maintain that designation.
After The New York Times first revealed the existence of the tape and Giuliani claimed the tape was exculpatory evidence that did no harm to Trump his legal team decided to remove any protection relating to the attorney-client relationship on this specific matter.
