The judge in Cohen trial chose her own "special master"

Although Judge Kimba Wood told Cohen and the prosecutor to both submit names for the special master requested by Cohen to review the seized documents for privilege, and they did, she picked her own who wasn't on either list.

Judge Kimba Wood named Bracewell partner Barbara Jones, a former mob prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office and longtime U.S. District judge, to sort through material seized earlier this month from the office, hotel room, and apartment of Cohen, President Trump’s longtime fixer.

Jones’ work for both the government and in private practice lent her “all of the different points of view you would want to bring to these documents,” Wood said.

[...]

Stephen Ryan, Cohen’s lead attorney, called her a “wonderful choice” to lead the review of materials seized as part of a wide-ranging federal grand jury investigation into Cohen’s personal and business dealings.

Joanna Hendon, the lead attorney representing Trump in the Cohen matter, said the situation represented a “compromise” for her client. She said Trump wanted to make initial privilege determinations about documents relating to him, but called the judge’s decision “acceptable.”

  TPM

How kind of her. Trump objected to the seizure of documents on the grounds of attorney-client privilege (which apparently doesn't extend to fixer-client relationships), but he somehow thought he ought to be able to review the documents himself without concern for the attorney-client privilege of any other potential Cohen clients. He obviously doesn't believe rules apply to him.

Both Jones and the Cohen team will be permitted to use keywords to sort through all of the seized documents to root out anything they consider privileged, the government agreed. But it was “very important,” assistant U.S. Attorney Tom McKay said repeatedly, that once that process was finished, a government “filter team” receive all of the materials deemed privileged “for the sole purpose of lodging any exception” to those designations.

[...]

Wood said Cohen, like any criminal defendant, would likely feel uncomfortable having the government rifling through deeply personal documents like a child’s medical records.

After a brief volley, McKay insisted the government had no interest in doing so, but that the matter at hand was attorney-client privilege, not Cohen’s privacy. There was “no precedent,” he said, for a special master determining what personal materials that may have been seized could be relevant to their probe.

McKay suggested that “Cohen’s personal relationships” were in fact pertinent, and that he was concerned about “mission creep” and “slippage” if Jones or Cohen’s attorneys were to pull out specific documents that they deemed utterly unrelated to the investigation.

All parties ultimately agreed that privilege was the priority. If Jones or Cohen’s team happened in the course of their privilege review to come across a document that was, as Wood put it, completely “unresponsive,” they could set it aside, Wood said.

Will they be in a room together? Will Jones know if Cohen's team sneaks some documents out?

There were also vague hints of tension between lawyers for Cohen and Trump, who until now have been largely on the same page.

There may be more than "vague hints" before this whole shebang is over.

Also present at the hearing was Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for adult film star Stormy Daniels. Avenatti asked to intervene in the case on behalf of his client [...] . After the government expressed concerns about the privilege review getting “sidetracked” by Avenatti’s involvement, Wood said she’d take a few days to review their arguments and make a formal decision.

Next court date: May 24.