Michael Cohen — President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney and fixer — is slated to report to prison in May. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Legal Mueller's office began investigating Michael Cohen as early as July 2017

Special counsel Robert Mueller's office began investigating Michael Cohen — President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney and fixer — as early as July 2017, according to newly unsealed court filings.

The documents, supporting search warrants used to seize Cohen's devices and records kept in four personal locations, suggest Cohen was one of Mueller's earliest targets. The special counsel was appointed in May of that year to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The newly unsealed files show Mueller began forwarding evidence of crimes to federal prosecutors in New York in February 2018.


Investigators used the search warrants in April 2018 to raid Cohen's office, home, safety deposit box and a hotel room where he had been staying. They collected evidence thatlast summer led to his guilty pleas to tax- and bank-fraud and to charges that he illegally steered hush money payments to two women who have accused Trump of extramarital affairs.

Beryl Howell, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, approved the initial batch of FBI search warrants, which included permission to obtain access to Cohen's Gmail account on July 18, 2017, and his iCloud data a month later, according to the filings. The warrants permitted Mueller's team to sift through Cohen's Gmail account as far back as June 2015, the same month that Trump announced a longshot bid for the White House.

According to the documents, the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York in April 2018 received permission to obtain "historical cellphone location information" for some of Cohen's devices.

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McClatchy reported in December that prosecutors had obtained Cohen’s cellphone information and that it had placed the Trump attorney in a location near Prague in summer 2016, a central claim in a hotly disputed dossier that accused Cohen of conspiring with Russian officials to help Trump win the election. Cohen has fiercely denied ever visiting Prague and told Congress earlier this month that he had no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Investigators acting on behalf of Mueller's office and the U.S. Attorney's Office used similar tracing technology to pinpoint a hotel room where Cohen had been staying temporarily. Relying on information from a hotel employee and a device known as a triggerfish, investigators placed Cohen in Room 1628 of the Loews Regency Hotel shortly before the raid.

The lengthy documents also detail millions of dollars Cohen received from corporate and foreign entities, which the FBI assessed were meant as payments to lobby the Trump administration even though Cohen was not registered as a lobbyist or a foreign agent.

Cohen has also admitted to lying to Congress about his efforts to secure a Trump Tower Moscow deal during the 2016 campaign. The 52-year-old former Trump associate is scheduled to begin serving a three-year prison sentence on May 6, likely at an upstate New York federal facility.

A federal judge in February ordered the release of redacted versions of the Cohen search warrants at the request of several media organizations.

Lanny Davis, a Cohen attorney, said in a statement Monday night in anticipation of the documents’ release that it “only furthers his [client’s] interest in continuing to cooperate and providing information and the truth about Donald Trump and the Trump organization to law enforcement and Congress.”

Cohen earlier this month met for closed-door interviews with the House and Senate intelligence committees and also served as the star witness at the House Oversight Committee’s first hearing.

In his public testimony, Cohen accused Trump of directing him to lie about the president’s knowledge of the hush-money payments and that Trump was told ahead of time about plans to release Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign.