Michael Cohen is the most selfless man in the entire world, at least according to Michael Cohen: a man who will, without telling you, borrow against his own home to pay a six-figure sum to an adult film star whose story about your extramarital affair threatens to torpedo your presidential candidacy. He will do it without hope or expectation of repayment, and will act not in his capacity as an attorney or employee, but as a friend. He will do it because this is America, and because he can, and because he loves and respects you that much, dammit.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, it appears, is not willing to take Michael Cohen's word for it. On Monday, authorities raided Cohen's office in New York City, seizing records related to, among other things, his transfer of hush money to Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 election—a payment that many have argued could be an unreported, unlawful campaign contribution. The FBI, according to the New York Times, appeared to be acting on a tip from another lawyer who figures prominently in Donald Trump's life these days: special counsel Robert Mueller.

Cohen's lawyer noted that Cohen has "cooperated completely with all government entities," provided "thousands of non-privileged documents to the Congress," and testified before Congress under oath. (Yes, the lawyer has a lawyer. These people are a Russian nesting doll of lawyers, a descriptor that works for more reasons than one.) And while Cohen's attorney cited his client's history of cooperation as evidence that the raid is "completely inappropriate and unnecessary," it also begs the question of what information Cohen wouldn't provide that required the FBI to go a judge, get a search warrant, and take it against his will.

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One tantalizing wrinkle here is that under normal circumstances, attorney-client privilege protects communications between, uh, attorneys and their clients. But the Times notes that the records seized by the FBI include correspondence between Trump and Cohen. This is probably not an accident. The Fourth Amendment requires that authorities have probable cause to believe that a search would turn up evidence of criminal activity, and that the warrant application specifically describe the things to be seized. This means that in order to get at Trump-Cohen communications, the FBI would have had to convince a judge—and other DOJ officials, since special guidelines apply to this type of search of an attorney's office—to let them take something to which they usually have no right.

I say "usually" here because there are exceptions to every rule, and a very important one is that the privilege does not apply to communications that further a crime or perpetrate a fraud. (Again, DOJ has procedures it follows to separate the legitimate attorney-client privileged communications from the criminally adjacent ones.) In other words, you cannot shield conversations between co-conspirators just because one of the people with whom you're committing crimes went to law school. In other other words, it is probably good that Michael Cohen has his own lawyers, and he should consider getting more of them.