Attorneys for President Donald Trump's longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen refused to identify a recent client of Cohen's and also to identify the names of other past clients in a new court filing Monday.
Lawyers for Cohen — whose business records were seized by FBI agents April 9 — said the unnamed recent client had told Cohen not to disclose his name and that they believe Cohen had a duty not to disclose his name.
They also said that if Cohen's clients, other than Trump, were publicly revealed, it is "likely to be embarrassing or detrimental to the client."
The refusal sets up a showdown with prosecutors over the issue in a hearing scheduled for Monday afternoon in Manhattan federal court, where Judge Kimba Wood on Friday had asked Cohen's lawyers to identify and number his clients.
Stormy Daniels, the porn star who has said she was paid $130,000 by Cohen on the eve of the 2016 presidential election to keep quiet about her having sex with Trump in 2006, is expected to show up at that hearing.
Information about that payout was among the files seized from Cohen. Daniels is suing Trump seeking to be released from the non-disclosure agreement she signed about him. Trump was married to first lady Melania Trump at the time of the alleged affair.
Cohen's lawyers are seeking to bar prosecutors from getting first crack at reviewing a large number of files seized from Cohen's home, office, hotel room and more than a dozen electronic devices on April 9 by the FBI as part of an ongoing criminal investigation of him.
Cohen has not been charged, but prosecutors working for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York reportedly are interested in the payoff to Daniels, Cohen's taxicab investments, and other business-related matters.
Files related to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, were among those seized.
Defense lawyers claim they, not a special "taint team" of prosecutors who will not be involved in the case, should get to identify which files should not be turned over to the actual prosecutors. They say doing so would violate Cohen's clients' rights to confidentiality with their attorney.
If Cohen's lawyers are not allowed to conduct the first review, they want a so-called special master, an appointed judge, to conduct it, before prosecutors get to see any of the files.
"If the government can obtain a search warrant for particular items but then seize and review everything in an attorney's office, the protections of the Fourth Amendment are meaningless," Cohen's lawyers wrote.
Prosecutors filed a brief in response to the president's claim that he should get first crack at reviewing Cohen's files. It says "the president's proposal would set a dangerous precedent."
In their letter to Wood, Cohen's lawyers said he had given legal advice or handled dispute resolution for three clients since 2017: Trump, venture capitalist Eliot Broidy and another person.
Broidy on Friday resigned from his post as deputy finance chair at the Republican National Committee after it was revealed that Cohen had helped arrange Broidy's $1.6 million payment to a Playboy model in exchange for her silence about their affair and her pregnancy, which was aborted.
"The third legal client directed Mr. Cohen to not to reveal their identity publicly," Cohen's lawyers wrote to Wood.
The lawyers added, "As to the one unnamed legal client, we do not believe that Mr. Cohen should be asked to reveal the name or can permissibly do so."
A number of other previous clients are referred to in the letter. The clients are not named. Cohen's lawyers said in their letter that they do not know if work for those clients was seized in the raids, or whether Cohen's work for them was relevant to the information sought by the search warrants authorizing the raids.
Cohen's attorneys also took a shot at prosecutors for having spied on his emails for some time before asking for permission to conduct the raids last week.
"To the extent it bears repeating, federal prosecutors have seized the data and files of the personal attorney of the President of the United States," the lawyers wrote.
This is completely unprecedented. Prior to the execution of the warrants at issue, prosecutors from the Southern District of New York had already intercepted emails from the President's personal lawyer. They apparently executed the search warrants at issue here only after they searched for private emails between the President of the United States and his personal lawyer and realized that 'zero emails were exchanged with President Trump.'
Rather than continue less intrusive investigative means, the USAO took the extraordinary step of raiding several locations, including Mr. Cohen's home, hotel room, and law office and took everything. This is perhaps the most highly publicized search warrant in the history of recent American criminal jurisprudence. It is paramount that the review of Mr. Cohen's data and documents be handled in such a way as to eliminate, as much as possible, even the 'appearance of unfairness.'