The government just pieced together 16 pages from Michael Cohen's paper shredder and obtained thousands of his encrypted messages

Jeenah Moon/Reuters

Michael Cohen.

• Federal prosecutors said in a Friday court filing that they've pieced together 16 pages worth of content from President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer Michael Cohen's paper shredder.
• The FBI also was able to obtain more than 700 pages of Cohen's encrypted messages and call logs.
• Cohen is under investigation in the Southern District of New York for possible campaign finance violations, bank fraud, wire fraud, illegal lobbying, and other potential crimes. He has not been charged.

Federal prosecutors said in a Friday court filing that they've pieced together 16 pages worth of content from President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer Michael Cohen's paper shredder, which was obtained in the FBI's April raids on his home, office, and hotel room.

Prosecutors also said that the FBI just obtained more than 700 pages worth of encrypted messages and call logs from Cohen's phones. The information came from apps like WhatsApp and Signal.

Finally, prosecutors said they produced to Cohen the information from one of the two BlackBerries that they previously could not get into. The government is still unable to obtain data from the second BlackBerry.

Prosecutors from the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York said in the filing that they conferred with Cohen's lawyers and that the parties jointly proposed a June 25 deadline for Cohen's team to review the newly produced documents for privilege designations. US District Judge Kimba Wood had imposed a Friday deadline for Cohen's team to finish their review of roughly 2.4 million remaining documents they had yet to sift through.

Cohen is under investigation in the Southern District of New York for possible campaign finance violations, bank fraud, wire fraud, illegal lobbying, and other potential crimes. He has not been charged. The ongoing investigation followed April's FBI raids on Cohen's home, office, and hotel room.

At the center of Cohen's troubles is a $130,000 hush-money payment that he facilitated to porn star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, just weeks before the 2016 presidential election to keep her quiet about her allegation of a 2006 affair with Trump. the FBI sought documents related to that payment and other similar agreements with women during the April raids.

'I shudder to think what was so sensitive that even Michael Cohen thought, "I better shred this"'

"The statement by the USAO that the FBI has recovered 16 pages of shredded documents and 731 encrypted messages may be ominous for Michael Cohen," Mitchell Epner, an attorney at Rottenberg Lipman Rich who was previously an assistant US attorney for the District of New Jersey, told Business Insider.

Epner said that while the encrypted messages may not prove to be incriminating, the 16 pages of reconstructed shredded documents seem "more likely to be a problem for Mr. Cohen."

"Given the lack of rigor with which Mr. Cohen apparently conducted himself, I shudder to think what was so sensitive that even Michael Cohen thought, 'I better shred this,'" Epner said.

Right now, the documents obtained by the FBI in the raids are the focus of Cohen's case. In April, Cohen and his lawyers successfully argued to have a special master appointed, which allowed them, Trump's attorneys, and the Trump Organization to make determinations over which documents were protected by attorney-client privilege and could not be used in a potential prosecution.

The special master, Barbara Jones, was appointed to oversee the review and determine which documents she believed were privileged. Last week, Jones reported that she had completed the review of the first 300,000 documents, determining that just 162 were privileged. She disagreed with Cohen, Trump, and the Trump Organization on just three documents.

If Cohen's team can't finish reviewing the remaining documents to make privilege designations by Friday, Wood might turn the rest over to a "taint team" of government prosecutors to finish the review, she said. That team would be walled off from those who might prosecute Cohen. It's the option Cohen and Trump didn't want to have happen.

Earlier Friday, Trump was asked whether he was concerned that Cohen would "flip" on him, and provide damaging information on the president to prosecutors in exchange for a favorable deal.

Trump said he wasn't worried at all.

"I did nothing wrong," he said. "You have to understand, this stuff would've come out a long time ago. I did nothing wrong. I don't do anything wrong."