Federal prosecutors in New York are investigating President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen.
Faced with a sprawling investigation by the special counsel in Washington, President Trump must also contend with an independent-minded office of federal prosecutors in his hometown, New York, who are investigating his longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen.
Mr. Trump’s administration had fired the Obama-era leader of the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York last year, after initially asking him to stay on. Earlier this year, the administration installed a Republican former prosecutor and party donor, Geoffrey S. Berman, after Mr. Trump made an unusual request to interview him personally.
Soon after assuming the Southern District post in January, Mr. Berman notified Justice Department officials in Washington of a possible appearance of conflict of interest in the then-undisclosed Cohen investigation, and officials concluded that he should be recused, according to people briefed on the matter.
The Justice Department has not specified the reason for the recusal, which left Mr. Berman’s handpicked deputy, Robert S. Khuzami, in charge of the investigation. A former terrorism prosecutor, Mr. Khuzami was chief of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Obama administration but also spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2004, defending the Patriot Act and endorsing George W. Bush for president.
With potential campaign finance law violations under scrutiny, one person said, the Cohen investigation was assigned to career prosecutors in the office’s elite public corruption unit, which has a track record of convicting politicians on both sides of the aisle.
On Monday, the prosecutors in the case will be back in court as a federal judge weighs a request by Mr. Cohen to keep investigators from reviewing the materials they gathered during searches of his office, home and hotel room as part of the inquiry.
It is one the most consequential corruption inquiries in a generation, notable even by the standards of the Southern District office, which has never been shy about reaching far beyond Manhattan to find headline-grabbing cases. And the office’s longstanding reputation for nonpartisanship and autonomy — it is jokingly referred to as the “Sovereign District” — could make it less vulnerable to attacks from either the president’s allies or his critics.
“The office has been historically known for its independence of the Justice Department,” said John S. Martin Jr., a former United States attorney in Manhattan and former federal judge. “That’s what makes it so powerful in this investigation, and such a danger to Donald Trump.”
The potential threat is not lost on the White House. Mr. Trump’s advisers now view the investigation into Mr. Cohen as more imminent a problem for the Trump presidency than the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, The New York Times reported on Friday.
President Trump has called the F.B.I. raid “a disgraceful situation” and a “total witch hunt.”
The materials seized from Mr. Cohen could open a window into the president’s relationship with a loyal aide who guided Mr. Trump through not only business dilemmas but personal and political ones as well. That includes Mr. Cohen’s role in helping to arrange payments during the campaign to women who claimed to have had affairs with Mr. Trump.
In federal court hearings in Manhattan on Friday, lawyers for Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump argued that many of the records seized by the F.B.I. were protected by attorney-client privilege. Mr. Cohen has asked for an order temporarily prohibiting prosecutors from reading the documents until the matter could be litigated.
Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Stephen Ryan, has said the search was “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.” A spokesman for the United States attorney for the Southern District declined to comment.
Mr. Berman is not known to have any connection to Mr. Cohen. A former Southern District prosecutor, Mr. Berman is a registered Republican, donated $2,700 to the Trump campaign and did some part-time volunteer work for Mr. Trump’s transition team.
Although Mr. Berman had been law partners with Rudolph W. Giuliani, another former Southern District United States attorney and one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters, that connection was not a factor in the recusal, according to the people briefed on the matter.
Also not a factor in the recusal, one person said, was the personal interview that Mr. Trump conducted with Mr. Berman last year as part of the selection process. Mr. Berman has not disclosed publicly details of any such meeting.
With Mr. Berman sidelined, Mr. Khuzami assumed responsibility for the Cohen investigation. Mr. Khuzami is in his second stint in the office, having made a name for himself as a terrorism and financial crimes prosecutor from 1990 to 2002.
He helped secure the conviction of Omar Abdel Rahman, who conspired to blow up New York City landmarks. As an outgrowth of that case, he worked on the investigation of Mr. Abdel Rahman’s lawyer, Lynne Stewart, who had her office and files searched by federal authorities.
After leaving the Southern District, Mr. Khuzami joined Deutsche Bank, where he ultimately became general counsel for the firm’s American arm. But his role as a terrorism prosecutor arose again when he was asked to give the 2004 speech at the Republican National Convention, in which he staunchly defended the Patriot Act and credited President Bush with having “the courage and the wisdom” to seek its passage.