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Special Agent Andrew Cohen

He has been a special agent in the FBI since 2014. He is assigned to violent crime task force.

Direct Examination

• He was requested to assist the EPSO when Gannon went missing; he was lead case agent. Information obtained would be compiled and go through him.
• The FBI has a lot of resources nationwide and it helped them with the investigation from Colorado to South Carolina.
• A lead agent is responsible for the case, maintaining case file, and making investigative decisions.
• Cohen is also sitting as an advisory witness in the case; he may testify more than one time.
• He has been involved in several wiretap investigations throughout his career.
• A wiretap is the interception of oral or electronic, wire, communication.
• In essence they are able to listen to phone calls or view text messages as they’re sent.
• A wiretap is considered an intrusive investigative method; it is not always used.
• It is the most intrusive technique they have. It’s a lengthy process to get a wiretap; there has to have been an exhaustion of all other techniques and other techniques have to be ineffective.
• During a wiretap if you hear something outside of the scope of the investigation, they have minimization instructions which instructs them to pause the listening for a period of time and pick it back up to see how the conversation was progressing.
• They attempt to gather only relevant information.
• It was apparent to Cohen that Letecia was switching the way she was communicating.
• Her original phone was seized by law enforcement. She left Colorado and purchased a new phone at Walmart (Trinidad, CO) with a different area code under the name of a person who may or may not exist but was not her.
• Search warrants for financial records found the Walmart purchase.
• Commonly, people involved in criminal activity change their phone number or download wifi only calling applications that let them switch their number frequently, mainly to avoid being detected by law enforcement. These are intentional acts.
• Wiretaps record the phone calls so they can be listened to later.
• Cohen points out the defendant as the person he heard talking on the wiretap.
• He was familiar with her voice due to the body cam and the news interview she gave.
• Cohen recalls Letecia talking about polygraph results during her call with Al; she told him she passed a polygraph and she was innocent.