FBI is reconstructing shredded documents from 'raid' on Michael Cohen: 'This will not end well for

[Julian Englis]

Source: Raw Story

Federal prosecutors revealed on Wednesday in the Michael Cohen case that they will present to the court shredded documents that have been reassembled.

During a hearing in federal district court on Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rachel Maimin said that prosecutors would provide "the contents of a shredding machine" in coming days, according to New York Daily News court reporter Stephen Brown.

Link to tweet

"AUSA Maimin says that the government expects to produce "the contents of a shredding machine" to the special master within three weeks."

Former FBI Special Agent Asha Rangappa noted that the FBI has an "amazing" ability to reassemble shredded documents.

"This will not end well for the defense," she wrote on Twitter.
"I've watched people piece together shredded docs. It's amazing. This is not going to end well for the defense. "

Link to tweet

Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/2018/05/fbi-reconstructing-shredded-documents-raid-michael-cohen-will-not-end-well-defense/

---

Be still my heart.

Additional tweet on this by Asha Rangappa:

Link to tweet

[div class"excerpt"]Also, the fact that they are recovering the shredded docs explains why they conducted the raid: There was (obviously a justified) reason to believe that evidence was being destroyed.

Link to tweet

...
11:47 AM - May 30, 2018

[RandySF]

1. Oh wow

Trump’s so cheap that he won’t hire competent crooks. The

[olegramps]

25. All of this shows me just how deep the Republicans are into illegal activities.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars being transferred in payoffs like its nothing. Just how damn crooked are these damn politicians? It looks like it will take 100 Mullers to uncover the depths to which this scandal extends. I hope I am around to see the conclusion since this could be life time job. For every one person they investigate they uncover ten more.

[mac56]

2. You know, just like an innocent person with nothing to hide would do.

[Rabrrrrrr]

3. Yikes! I'd hate to be anyone involved with Donald.

And not just because it would mean I'm probably a criminal complicit in something underhanded who is soon to go to jail, either.

It's also because it makes my skin crawl to think that I could have become the kind of person who want to be connected with that POS in some way or other.

Everyone who sold their soul to ride the Donald Train is on a large gauge express passenger service to hell.

[ProudMNDemocrat]

4. Get used to the color ORANGE, Mikey!!!!!!

You and Donald are going down.

[Qutzupalotl]

5. They say there was not much in the shredder.

I’m guessing they tried to destroy the most incriminating stuff. I can only imagine...

[lagomorph777]

35. Looks like they needed a better shredder.

[Champion Jack]

6. Makes you wonder about those strange Fires at Drumph Tower...

[Judi Lynn]

44. And, the complimentary death of a tenant, as well.

It would be hard to reassemble any papers burned to cinders.

Interesting idea. Sounds very possible.

[klook]

47. Scientists have been able to recover burned ancient scrolls

in some cases. I'm not sure how Office Depot paper compares in that regard, but maybe it's possible.

[PoliticAverse]

7. Ever since the Iranians reassembled the shredded documents at the US embassy in 1979...

everyone should know that shredding isn't really effective against a determined foe.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Documents_seized_from_the_U.S._Embassy_in_Tehran

[JustAnotherGen]

8. My immediate thought

Just like in Argo!

[TexasBushwhacker]

30. Argo is a great movie

I just watched it again recently on DVD.

[Haggis for Breakfast]

43. Remember Ken Taylor

Mr. Taylor was in charge of the Canadian Embassy when the Iranians overwhelmed the U S Embassy in Tehran in 1979. "Operation Canadian Caper," the joint operation between Ottawa and the CIA to shelter and protect six Americans from the Iranians, was no small matter. Mr. Taylor wore his anxiety with typical Canadian "jois de vivre" but inside he was a nervous wreck the entire time. He had taken an enormous risk. For his courage, Taylor was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1981. He passed away in October 2015 of colon cancer at the age of 81.

[leftynyc]

16. The only way to destroy

paper is by fire.

[forgotmylogin]

19. Yep. A personal shredder is mainly to prevent casual identity theft.

The FBI can science the shit out of stuff in pieces.

[getagrip_already]

21. nowadays computers do the work

they scan in all of the pieces and the computer does the rest. Very fast. The slowest part is the scanning.

[lagomorph777]

37. can you imagine just trying to get all those little pieces onto the glass?

Or maybe they have some way to automatically blow them through on an air current... I suppose the tech here is more advanced than we can imagine.

[klook]

46. They use a tiny, tiny sheet-fed scanner.

[lagomorph777]

48. And nanotweezers

?cb=1340086914

[klook]

54. Nice! (nt)

[lagomorph777]

49. PS that's a very cool product line!

[BumRushDaShow]

26. Crosscut or micro-crosscut shredded material would be way harder to reassemble compared to standard.

[mopinko]

33. i'm shocked a lawyer wouldnt have a better shredder.

but in my shopping around for a high volume shredder, they seem to only come in the strip type.
things that make you go hmmmm.

[BumRushDaShow]

38. At work (before I retired)

as a fed, we had an somewhat "industrial" shredder that did crosscut. The bulk shredding was actually contracted out to one of those companies that rolls up the big truck with a huge shredder, like this (where they would take the stuff boxed or in a locked rolling dumpster thing) -



I have seen nearby towns offer this to residents on occasion too!

[mahatmakanejeeves]

52. There's a micro-cut shredder in the room where we get our ID cards.

The carpet in front of the shredder looks as if snow has fallen on it.

[BumRushDaShow]

53. I can imagine!

Heck, Staples has "pro" type consumer micro-cut shredders for a couple hundred bucks and a small model for under $100.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

29. Ha. First thing I thought

[jiminvegas]

9. And the lesson for today is:

Don't hire a lawyer that is not smart enough to use a cross-cut shredder.

[TrogL]

13. Cross cut doesn't help

They scan each individual fragment then use an algorithm to piece it back together. It’s the same software used to reconstruct ancient manuscripts.

[BumRushDaShow]

28. Micro crosscut would take who knows how long just to assemble the near "dust" for scanning.

[forgotmylogin]

20. And don't hire a lawyer who always provides confetti for New Year's Eve.

Or cruise ship launchings!

[Vinca]

10. I would love to be part of the piecing together team. It must make for interesting reading.

[PoliticAverse]

11. Some people do prefer doing their jigsaw puzzles without seeing the picture on the box first. n/t

[Historic NY]

12. Imagine whats on Cohen's cell phone collection.

Add to that the copy machine and printer documents caches. The Feds will have a full accounting of the law office of Michael Cohens operations.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

14. I'm lovin' this... YES!!!

[Doodley]

15. Easy to see why Trump is getting more and more desperate.

[Sunlei]

17. hopefully they get hands on that table full of 100s of 'folders' trump took out of 5th street tower.

he 'pretended' they were business records.

[yonder]

31. I've always wondered about those "files".

I keep thinking it would've been fun for a heads up press person to fake a fall and do a Chevy Chase header into those stacks. How neat to see all those unused manilla folders with blank paper scattered about the floor for all to see. It would be interesting to see how they would go about splainin that.

Everything about drump is phony.

[malthaussen]

18. Shoula burn-bagged them.

Didn't have time.

-- Mal

[Grins]

22. This is nuclear! You CAN EASILY reconstruct shredded documents!

Just before the fall of East Germany in 1989 the Stasi began furiously shredding the files they had on them, the programs they ran, and the East (and West) Germans who cooperated with them.

But they didn't disposed of those bags and bags of shredded paper!! And so they were saved. In billions of shreds, but saved.

Sometime later someone (I think a West German) figured out a way to image those shreds and then run them though a computer program and - Viola! - un-shredded documents and now very readable! And surprisingly fast, too.

And if you don't think every intelligence agency (i.e., the CIA that hates Trump, the FBI, the NSA, the British, French, etc.) didn't grab that technology in a nano-second you are badly mistaken.

Cohen is hosed.

[Grammy23]

23. So when the time line of this whole saga emerges, it is going to be a page turner.

Apparently the Feds had an inkling that the shredder was smoking from over use and if they were going to get the goods, they had to act quickly and with no advance warning. Talk about just in the nick of time!!

This really can be thought of as a gigantic jigsaw puzzle with pictures on both sides of the pieces and in three D. I cannot wait to see the whole thing pulled together for the whole world to see. Just trying to figure it out ahead of time has shown me it is waaayyy beyond my imagination. (I need to get out more. LOL! 😂😂😂 ) Hang on tight, Buckeroos. tRump is going go even more off his beam as the noose tightens around his pudgy neck. Expect this story to take lots of twists and turns before we get to the finale. ie. Who woulda thought a Porn Star might have begun the unraveling of tTump’s BEAUTIFUL Plan to take over the world??

[llmart]

24. I'm having deja vu...

and remembering Ollie North and Fawn Hall. Anyone else remember that?

[annabanana]

34. yep . . .n/t

[NewJeffCT]

27. Asha Rangappa

has proven to be a very reliable source from what I've seen.

with her background - good sense of humor, former FBI agent, now Yale professor who also does improv comedy, I think somebody should offer her some sort of TV show, or at least a regular guest spot?

Link to tweet

[BobTheSubgenius]

32. You cheap bastard, Cohen.

Don't get me wrong. I am MORE than grateful that these docs are being reassembled. If you ever have occasion to again have sensitive documents in your possession (prolly not in the prison laundry, or whatever min wage job you're going to have, but....hypoethetically...) spend the extra couple of bucks and get a confetti shredder.

I used to use one, and without a word of a lie, it could turn 12 pages of office paper into thousands of tiny disc-shaped bits of paper, each considerably smaller than the ID of a Bic pen, in a couple of seconds. No possible way of reassembling them.

[Vinnie From Indy]

39. I would bet that might not be as true as you think.

Computing power, advanced photography and sophisticated material handling might make the job easier than you think.

Burn your most sensitive docs

[csziggy]

41. Where will you burn them in an apartment, office, or hotel room in New York City?

Seriously, I doubt they have fireplaces where you can burn reams of paper. Do buildings in NYC still have incinerators in the basements? Even if they do, I wouldn't trust throwing large quantities of papers down a chute hoping they will be burned before the FBI gets there with their warrants.

While burning the papers might be the best insurance I can't see that it is practical anywhere in NYC.

A few years back we were clearing out a couple of file boxes worth of old financial documents. We live on a farm and have a burn barrel so my husband threw them in there and lit them up. Yeah they burned brightly for a while but once the flames died down there was a solid core of papers that were only singed on the edges. He had to stir them up, trying to separate the individual pages so oxygen could get to them and start again - at least twice - before they were burned enough for us to feel they had been destroyed.

Now he hauls our sensitive papers to be destroyed down to the FedEx Office store where he used to work. Once a month a shredding service comes by to pick up stuff like that to be shredded.

If I were paranoid about it or handled stuff that I really, really wanted to destroy, I would shred it, then burn the shreds. Then make sure to stir up the ashes because there are techniques to recover information from burned paper.

[B Stieg]

36. The FIRST place the cops always look is the garbage...

Surprised a crook like Cohen didn't realize that.

Odds of a "smoking gun" here?

[Kaleva]

40. Shredding documents seems like a waste of effort.

[SWBTATTReg]

42. Not really...it also depends on how you dispose of the shredded material...

If you throw it out w/ the trash, throw only a little bit, and then disperse the rest in bits and pieces too, until multiple trips by the trash folks have finally hauled it all away. Or, you can burn a little of it at a time (at least a minimum amount, so if any reconstruction is attempted, big chunks will be missing and impede the reconstruction process)...

My mom and dad lived in the country and she was a CPA so she had lots of old tax papers to dispose of when retention guidelines were up, we would take the shredded materials (she already shredded them when she reviewed retention periods on her papers) and have a bon fire on a wet day (and not windy), so the fire was nice and hot, and burned everything 100%. Again, this was in the country, and most of us can't do this.

[mr_lebowski]

45. Apparently Cohen isn't even a GOOD bag man ... lololololol ... how apros-pos, really (nt)

[JohnnyRingo]

50. They must scan the sheds into a computer.

then have a program assemble the pieces back into documents.

I never knew the FBI could do that, but it makes sense.

[exboyfil]

51. Scene from Batman Returns

Max: If there were such documents - and that's not an admission - I would have seen to it they were shredded.
Penguin: [grins] Good idea...
[He next gets out some paper - shredded and stuck back together]
Penguin: ... But a little patience - and a LOT of tape - make all the difference.