Professor Bruce Green is quoted in an Associated Press article looking at why federal prosecutors in Manhattan only charged Michael Cohen in the hush-money scandal that the president was publicly implicated in.
There was no news conference or press release announcing the end of the investigation this week. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, has stayed silent on the matter. His office declined to answer questions.
The closure of the case became public only because news organizations, including The Associated Press, petitioned a judge to release search warrants related to the FBI raid of Cohen’s office and hotel room last year.
It was amid that litigation — and at the behest of a federal judge— that prosecutors revealed in a court filing this week that they had closed their investigation into the campaign finance violations Cohen committed when he arranged payments to silence two women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump.
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Bruce Green, a former prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, disagreed, saying it is “unusual and extreme” for federal prosecutors to explain a decision not to prosecute.“It’s not the ordinary practice,” said Green, who directs the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics at the Fordham University School of Law. “I don’t think there’s an exception in this case.”