Since the raids on his office, apartment, and hotel suite, Michael Cohen has put on a studied show of indifference, counting on fancy dinners and patio cigar breaks to telegraph his innocence. Inside the West Wing, however, aides to Donald Trump are admittedly rattled, rightfully viewing the Cohen case as the pre-eminent threat to Trump’s presidency—greater even than that posed by special counsel Robert Mueller. Desperate to get the evidence seized by the F.B.I. kept out of court, on Sunday Trump’s lawyers lobbed a legal Hail Mary, filing a letter with a Manhattan judge that legal experts have characterized as an “extraordinary” request: that the president be allowed to review any documents in the F.B.I.’s possession before investigators have a chance to see them.

In the eight-page letter, Trump lawyer Joanna Hendon wrote that the president “objects” to the use of a “taint team”—a group of lawyers independent from the prosecutor in the case—to determine which documents seized by F.B.I. agents last Monday are protected by attorney-client privilege. Instead, Hendon writes, “the president respectfully requests” that Judge Kimba Wood block the team from conducting an initial review and have the government turn over copies of what it obtained to Cohen’s team, which would then “identify to the president all seized materials that relate to him in any way and to provide a copy of those materials to him and his counsel.” Trump would then be allowed to assert privilege over those documents, and though the taint team would be allowed to make objections, a judge would make the final determination of what F.B.I. investigators could access. The government, Hendon wrote, has demonstrated “a disinclination to find privilege, a bias that virtually guarantees that there will not be a fair privilege review of the seized materials.”

This is essentially the same argument that Cohen’s lawyer made in court on Friday. In this case, however, attorney-client privilege may be moot. The April 9 raid was part of a broader, months-long criminal investigation by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office into Cohen that, according to individuals familiar with the case, could include possible bank and wire fraud, as well as efforts by Cohen to suppress damaging information about Trump during the election. As Sol Wisenberg, the deputy prosecutor in the Whitewater investigation, explained to me last week, in order to seize communications between Trump and Cohen, the government would have needed convincing evidence of potential illegal activity: “If the warrant specifically authorized the seizure of attorney-client communications, the government would have had to convince a federal magistrate that the crime-fraud exception was in play.”

Prosecutors have defended the raid by arguing in a court filing last week that “Cohen is, in fact, performing little to no legal work, and that zero e-mails were exchanged with President Trump.” According to the filing, at least one person informed prosecutors that Cohen said his only client is the president. In a hearing on Monday, Cohen’s lawyers are expected to inform Judge Wood how many clients he represents, as well as just how many of the seized documents he believes should be protected by attorney-client privilege. (Cohen has been ordered to appear at the hearing.)

It’s unclear whether Wood will make a ruling on the spot, but lawyers are skeptical that she’ll fulfill the president’s request. Doing so, University of Southern California law professor Orin Kerr noted, would effectively undermine the original search warrant, which officials obtained because they believed Cohen would not cooperate in handing over materials. “I’m not aware of a client ever being able to conduct the first review of whether a lawyer’s files are privileged. And for an obvious reason: If the files sought involve an alleged crime/fraud, the client will say that those e-mails are privileged,” Kerr points out. “Trump in effect wants the warrant to be executed like a subpoena to him personally, in which he gets to decide what the government sees. But that’s not how it’s done: the point of using a search warrant is to block that.” While Trump’s lawyer suggests that he would know best whether those communications are privileged, there is no precedent for Wood to defer to a subject of the investigation—no matter who that person is.