On Thursday, the NYT asked for the judge in the Michael Cohen case to unseal the warrant materials for the things seized on April 9, as well as the email accounts that had been searched prior to that. In their request, NYT attorney David McCraw asserted,

First, any risk of impairing law enforcement interests is minimal because the Government’s investigation of Mr. Cohen has concluded. … More to the point, Mr. Cohen has pleaded guilty to all the charges against him. And to the extent there are any ongoing investigations related to Mr. Cohen’s, any sensitive law enforcement information in the documents can be redacted.

As noted by the NYT, both Cohen and the government opposed the request.

A day later, the prosecution team wrote the judge, asking for three weeks to respond and permission to file part of its objection in sealed form

The Government intends to file an opposition to this request, and seeks permission to do so no later than November 2, 2018. In addition, because responding to this request requires describing, inter alia, the effect that unsealing would have on an ongoing grand jury investigation, the Government requests permission to file a portion of its response ex parte and under seal.

The government got two weeks, and the permission to file some of this under seal.

In response to this, I’ve seen a lot of people who assume the ongoing investigation is into Cohen — and it may well be. But the prosecution letter doesn’t say that, and given the way Cohen pled guilty in a rush to beat the campaign season and promptly started begging all prosecutors to start asking him questions, there’s no reason to believe that’s the case.

The reporting on the scope of the warrants against Cohen was always very vague, focusing on the Stormy Daniels part to the exclusion of the taxi medallion and fraud part. Just the taxi stuff was included in his guilty plea. So there’s still fraud (which is probably why Cohen pled guilty so quickly).

Some of the other crimes that might have been covered in Cohen’s warrant — such as the pay to play associated with the Inauguration — would overlap with Mueller’s investigation (and Cohen has spent some days chatting with Mueller’s prosecutors). But it’s certainly possible that (as I’ve suspected), that pay to play has already gotten spun off from Mueller’s investigation and is being led out of NY.

And, of course, there are the Trump Organization people — Executive 1 and Executive 2 (one of whom may well be a spawn) mentioned in Cohen’s plea who might also be targeting. Or, of course, Individual 1, Trump himself.