Hindustan Surkhiyan Desk:President Trump blasted NBC as “wrong again” early Friday over its erroneous report suggesting the phone lines of his attorney Michael Cohen had been wiretapped in the weeks leading up to the FBI raid on his properties.
“NBC NEWS is wrong again! They cite ‘sources’ which are constantly wrong. Problem is, like so many others, the sources probably don’t exist, they are fabricated, fiction! NBC, my former home with the Apprentice, is now as bad as Fake News CNN. Sad!” Trump tweeted.
The president’s tweet came after NBC News issued a correction to its original report released Thursday. Initially, the outlet reported that Cohen’s phones were wiretapped prior to the FBI raiding his home, office and hotel room last month.
But NBC later said other officials clarified that investigators were only logging phone numbers, but not listening in.
Fox News also confirmed that federal investigators kept a register of phone calls made by Cohen, while not recording those calls. Sources with knowledge of the proceedings told Fox News Thursday afternoon that investigators used what’s known as a pen register, or a dialed number recorder (DNR), on at least one of Cohen’s phones. A pen register records all numbers dialed from a given phone number, as well as the length of each call.
The National Security Agency (NSA) gathers similar information, which is sometimes referred to as metadata.
In an April 13 court filing, federal prosecutors also revealed they had “already obtained search warrants…covert until this point…on multiple different email accounts maintained by Cohen.”
“We already have considerable amounts of information about Mr. Cohen’s activities,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas McKay said during the hearing last month in reference to the warrants obtained throughout the course of the investigation.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which is leading the probe, has been investigating Cohen for months.
Cohen is under criminal investigation as part of a grand jury probe into his personal business dealings, which include a $130,000 payment made in the weeks prior to the election to adult film star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence over an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.
The NBC report added to widespread speculation about what exactly federal agents were able to seize in their April raid. Cohen’s lawyers and Trump’s team have been in court arguing for access to the materials.
Fox News
