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Michael Cohen's calls with the White House were reportedly monitored by the feds

NBC News reports the feds obtained a "pen register" to see numbers associated with incoming and outgoing calls.

CORRECTION May 3, 2018, 5:39 p.m.: A prior version of this story reported the phone of Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen had been wiretapped, according to NBC News. That story was corrected to report that the feds had obtained a log of calls called a pen register, which allowed investigators to know who was called but not listen in.

Federal investigators monitored Michael Cohen’s phones, including at least one conversation he had with the White House, two people close to the investigation told NBC News on Thursday.

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Cohen, the longtime personal lawyer for President Donald Trump who made a payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged affair with Trump, has been under criminal investigation for months.

It isn’t clear how long federal investigators had been monitoring Cohen, but NBC News reported that it was happening at least since the beginning of April when investigators raided Cohen’s offices, hotel room, and home, all in New York.

The monitoring, according to NBC News, allowed federal investigators to record the number of the phone that made a call and the number that receives it. Unlike a wiretap, which NBC originally reported, it does not record the contents of the conversation.

At least one phone call between Cohen and the White House was logged, an anonymous source told NBC News.

The U.S. Attorney's Office, the DOJ, the FBI, and the FBI in New York were not immediately available for comment.

In the press briefing Thursday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders could not confirm or deny the validity of the originally reported wiretap, and was not asked about the newly reported logged phone calls.

This news comes less than a day after Trump’s newest attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, told Sean Hannity on Fox News that Trump repaid Cohen the $130,000 payment Cohen made to Daniels. This directly contradicted Trump’s statements that he had no idea about any payment.

Sanders told reporters on Thursday that Trump did not know what the payment was for but repaid Cohen anyway.

NBC’s original report that the feds had wiretapped Cohen, and by extension the White House, drew a furious reaction from Giuliani. “It’s not appropriate. I mean, he’s a lawyer. You mean, I call up my lawyer and the government is wiretapping him? That’s pretty damn — I mean, they’ve already eviscerated the attorney-client privilege. This would make a mockery of it,” Giuliani told the Washington Post.

But the corrected NBC News story says the monitoring was done via a “pen register,” which allows authorities to collect a list of incoming and outgoing phone numbers.

Cover image: Michael Cohen, longtime personal lawyer and confidant of President Donald Trump, leaves the United States District Court Southern District of New York on April 26, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)