"Muller might have made a strategic move by referring the Cohen case to another jurisdiction, New York. If Trump fires him, the investigation in New York goes on. That all by itself may discover enough wrongdoing to cause impeachment."

Yes, there was a big reason why Mueller's investigation could not touch this. Primarily because the warrants they got to raid Cohen's office and places he lived were some of the most difficult warrants to obtain because the documents they were recovering in the raids are documents that Mueller's team would not be allowed to see...at least at first. A separate team would need to go through them to determine which documents may be covered by attorney client privilege and those documents would be removed if they show no evidence of collusion between the attorney and client to commit a crime. This is how I understand it. So, Mueller's team would need to stay away from this as they would not be able to look at these documents without creating an issue.

So, having the Southern District of New York handle this makes sense. Plus this does, as you say, make this a separate investigation launched and run by a Trump appointee and a chain of Republicans. Also due to the fact that it is a case brought by the State of NY this means Trump has no way to interfere in it or protect Cohen.

This is not, as Trump and Hannity lie about, a partisan witch hunt run by Democrats. Democrats are not involved and have no control over this. They wish they did but they don't and they have no power to advance any of this. All Democrats can do is sit on the sideline and complain.

The only way these raids were authorized is if the FBI was able to show evidence of a serious crime or crimes being committed...and they had to show this evidence to a chain of Trump appointees and Republicans...and a judge who would not be likely to grant these warrants UNLESS they had really compelling evidence of crimes being committed.

What's fun is the US Attorney in this case was one handpicked and personally interviewed by Trump...this is the guy that approved the raids! Ha!

As I understand it the list of crimes is enough to land Cohen a 30 year prison sentence...perhaps more...and has to do with everything from election interference, bank fraud, wire fraud, to violations of the Hobbs Act. And the list goes on. Cohen is screwed and if he flips on Trump and cooperates to get a plea deal or lesser sentence...well...Trump is screwed.

Which brings me back to Felix Sater. I posted about him a while ago. According to what I have read it is not likely that this raid happened entirely due to Trump's idiotic comments about not knowing about the payment to silence Stormy Daniels and that people would need to speak to his attorney Michael Cohen about that...this may have only sped up the need for the raid because Trump threw Cohen under the bus and essentially made him the fall guy for all the wrongdoing in the Stormy Daniels case.

This would have made it likely that Cohen at this point would have wanted/needed to destroy any existing evidence of payments, threats, communications of any kind, business deals, that were done to silence Daniels. So, hence they needed to rapidly raid his offices and places he lived.

However, to get this done they needed to be able to show some really hardcore evidence of Cohen being involved in criminal activity and who happened to be a friend to Cohen since they were kids, worked on business deals with him within the Trump organization, including the Trump Tower Moscow project? That's right, Felix Sater...he knew quite a bit about Cohen and his dealings and how he worked. So, is it likely that Sater may have also been one of the people that provided information about Cohen and his criminal activities? You bet it is.