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Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former longtime personal attorney, told a House panel during closed-door hearings earlier this year that he had been instructed by Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow to falsely claim in a 2017 statement to Congress that negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016, according to people familiar with his testimony.In fact, Cohen later admitted, discussions on the Moscow tower continued into June of the presidential election year, after it was clear Trump would be the GOP nominee. Cohen is serving three years in prison for lying to Congress, financial crimes and campaign finance violations.House Democrats are now scrutinizing whether Sekulow or other Trump attorneys played a role in shaping Cohen’s 2017 testimony to Congress. Cohen has said he made the false statement to help hide the fact that Trump had potentially hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in a possible Russian project while he was running for president.“We’re trying to find out whether anyone participated in the false testimony that Cohen gave to this committee,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said in an interview. He did not comment on who, if anyone, might have instructed Cohen to lie.Jane Serene Raskin and Patrick Strawbridge, attorneys for Sekulow, said in a statement that “Cohen’s alleged statements are more of the same from him and confirm the observations of prosecutors in the Southern District of New York that Cohen’s ‘instinct to blame others is strong.’ ”“That this or any Committee would rely on the word of Michael Cohen for any purpose — much less to try and pierce the attorney-client privilege and discover confidential communications of four respected lawyers — defies logic, well-established law and common sense,” they added.It is unclear how much detailed knowledge Sekulow had about the timeline of Trump’s most recent effort to build a branded tower in Moscow, which Cohen began in September 2015 and ended in June 2016, according to court documents. Sekulow joined Trump’s legal team after he was elected.Cohen’s claims about Sekulow are laid out in transcripts of his February and March appearances before the House intelligence panel that could be released as soon as Monday.Cohen’s closed-door testimony before the committee led congressional Democrats this month to press Sekulow and other Trump family lawyers who were involved in a joint defense agreement for more information about work they did preparing Cohen’s 2017 statement. Schiff has asked four attorneys to turn over documents and schedule interviews with the panel, a request they have so far rebuffed, calling it a threat to the long-standing protection of communications between lawyers and their clients.In his public testimony before the House Oversight Committee in January, Cohen said that “Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers reviewed and edited my statement to Congress about the timing of the Moscow Tower negotiations before I gave it.”He accused Sekulow of making changes to the 2017 statement.“There were changes made, additions, Jay Sekulow, for one,” Cohen told the panel.Sekulow denied the claim by Cohen at the time, calling such assertions “completely false.”In subsequent closed-door appearances before the House Intelligence Committee in February and March, Cohen was more specific, saying Sekulow told him it would be important to use Jan. 31, 2016, as the date when discussions about the Moscow project ended, according to the people familiar with his testimony, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the panel’s ongoing investigation.Sekulow told Cohen the date was significant because it came before the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, the opening contest of the White House race, Cohen said to the committee.When asked about the account of Cohen’s closed-door testimony, Lanny Davis, an attorney for Cohen, said, “I cannot disagree with that.”Despite Cohen’s history of lying to Congress, senior Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees indicated that they are taking his allegations seriously.“If it is accurate that one of the President’s personal attorneys encouraged him or edited his testimony to give Congress a false date, it’s further evidence that the President had some reason for not wanting the American people, or the Senate Intelligence Committee, to know the truth about his dealings with Russia as a candidate,” Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.Cohen’s claims were reviewed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who sought to question — but did not succeed — one of Trump’s personal attorneys about interactions he had with Cohen about the 2017 testimony.According to Mueller’s report, Cohen spoke to a counsel for Trump frequently in the days before he submitted his statement to Congress on Aug. 28, 2017. The Trump lawyer was not named in the report.Cohen told investigators that he recalled telling the president’s lawyer that the statement did not reflect the extent of communications with Russia and Trump about the Moscow project.The Trump attorney told Cohen that it was not necessary to include other details in the statement, which he advised should be kept “tight.” Cohen told investigators he also recalled that the lawyer told him “his client” appreciated Cohen and he should stay on message and not contradict the president, according to the report.Mueller’s team sought to speak to the Trump lawyer about the conversations with Cohen, “but counsel declined, citing potential privilege concerns,” according to the report.Cohen’s claims led Schiff to demand information from Sekulow and three other lawyers who played a role reviewing Cohen’s 2017 testimony: Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump; Alan Futerfas, an attorney for Donald Trump Jr.; and Alan Garten, an attorney for the Trump Organization.The four lawyers have said they cannot answer Schiff’s requests because of attorney-client privilege, which bars them from discussing confidential conversations.Schiff has promised to push ahead, threatening to issue a subpoena for the lawyers’ cooperation if necessary, noting that they had an incentive to encourage Cohen’s initial testimony.“Cohen himself stood little to gain by lying to our committee,” Schiff told The Washington Post. “Donald Trump and others around him stood far more to gain from that being concealed from our investigation. So it obviously begs the question of whether this was something he did on his own . . . or were there others who participated in the falsehood before our committee.”Schiff also warned that the privilege claim may not allow the attorneys to avoid testifying before his committee.“The privilege doesn’t apply if it’s being used to conceal a crime or a fraud,” he said. “And if the attorneys were conferring amongst themselves and Mr. Cohen about a false statement they were going to make to our committee, there’s no privilege that protects that kind of conduct.”In a letter to Schiff on Friday, attorneys for the four Trump lawyers expressed dismay at his effort to compel their testimony.“We find the Committee’s outright, blanket refusal to recognize the attorney-client privilege — a bedrock principle of common law dating back centuries — to be stunning, unwise, and unwarranted,” they wrote.They called the inquiry “an attempt to pursue a law-enforcement investigation which is outside the constitutional authority of the legislative branch.”Schiff has also expressed interest in hearing from Felix Sater, a Trump business partner who was working the Russian side of the Trump Tower Moscow proposal in 2016.Lawyers for Cohen said it appears that Sater and his attorney Robert Wolf reviewed Cohen’s testimony before it was submitted to Congress in 2017, according to documents they reviewed. Sater’s involvement negates any privilege claim, Cohen’s attorneys said.“Because it appears that the draft statement was shared with two non-privileged individuals — Mr. Sater and his lawyer — the joint defense privilege was in our professional opinion waived,” said Davis, one of two criminal defense attorneys representing Cohen.Sater and Cohen had discussions about the Moscow project into June 2016, but Sater did not correct Cohen’s original assertion to Congress that the project ended that January.Sater declined to comment on questions about Cohen’s testimony but he said he stands ready to cooperate with Schiff’s inquiries.“I have always cooperated with the U.S. government and look forward to continued cooperation,” Sater said. “I will make myself available to Congressman Schiff’s committee or any other committee as they deem necessary.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently declared questions about President Trump and Russia “case closed.” But we’ve been getting glimpses into congressional investigations that show it’s anything but, and that Congress actually has much to investigate from the Mueller report.The latest is the revelation that Michael Cohen says another Trump lawyer told him to lie to Congress about then-candidate Trump’s business dealings with Russia. We know that Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer now in jail, admitted to lying to Congress in 2017 that Trump’s attempts to build a tower in Moscow had ended before voting began in the Republican primaries. Those efforts actually went all the way through the primaries. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that in private congressional testimony, Cohen said that Trump attorney Jay Sekulow told him to give a false date to Congress. Now House Democrats are trying to get Sekulow and others in Trump world to testify.Sekulow had previously denied the allegation. But at the very least, we now know it’s possible that Cohen wasn’t acting on his own to protect Trump from appearing conflicted on Russia while running for president, right as Russia was interfering in the election to help Trump win. Was there a team working to protect Trump from that politically inconvenient business deal?That’s an unanswered question about the president’s potential conflict of interest — and how far he went to protect himself — that is left open-ended after a nearly two-year independent investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.Not that Mueller didn’t want to know. Mueller tried to get Trump and his attorneys to talk to him about this, but neither did, The Post reports.Ultimately, Mueller couldn’t determine the lengths to which Trump tried to keep his Russia business deals secret from voters. And while it’s true that Mueller did not find actions taken by Trump’s campaign that met the legal definition of the crime of conspiracy to work with a foreign power, he did uncover a number of Russia connections he felt worth noting, like how Trump and his campaign seemed to welcome Russia’s help when offered.To that end, even a Republican-led investigation appears to still have questions. The Senate Intelligence Committee is still investigating Russian election interference and it recently issued a subpoena to force Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., to come back and answer questions from senators, in what senators framed as a follow-up to Trump Jr.'s original interview with the committee last year.Trump Jr. notably responded “I love it” when told that a Russian had dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father win.So why did the eventual president of the United States have hundreds of millions of dollars on the line with Russia as he was running for president, in an election Russia tried to help him win? And how far did those under him go to cover that up from voters? And how open was his campaign to getting help from Russians?These are not questions Democrats in Congress have made up to investigate to make the president look bad. These are serious questions that could get at the heart of U.S. election integrity that Mueller was not able to answer, and that naturally fall to Congress to investigate. You could say Congress is doing its job by not closing the case on Trump and Russia.
The Republican National Committee last month paid $2 million to a law firm that employs the former White House counsel Donald McGahn and serves as the Trump campaign’s main legal firm — the largest RNC payment to the firm recorded in recent years.The payment to Washington law firm Jones Day was disclosed in new Federal Election Commission records Monday night, as a part of routine political committee filings made public every month.The RNC said in a statement that the payment was a bulk billing for two years’ worth of work.The payments went to Jones Day the same month that the House Judiciary Committee began seeking McGahn’s testimony in connection with its investigation into potential obstruction of justice by Trump. McGahn delivered key testimony on the matter that was documented in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.On Tuesday, McGahn was a no-show at a hearing in front of the committee, which had issued a subpoena for him to testify.Jones Day is the main legal firm for the Trump campaign, which has paid the firm $5.6 million between January 2017 and March 2019 for legal consulting.The $2 million payment was higher than previous payouts from the RNC to the firm. It made up the majority of what the committee has paid the firm so far in 2019, and it greatly exceeded payments to the firm in the 2018 election cycle, when the RNC reported spending about $25,000 in legal and compliance services to Jones Day.The majority of the $2 million encompassed “routine campaign and election-related legal expenses that have accrued over the course of the last few years while we worked to finalize the amounts owed,” the RNC statement read.The RNC has spent $2.7 million in legal fees so far this year, compared to $2 million by the Democratic National Committee.McGahn previously was a partner at Jones Day from 2014 to 2017, when he left to join the White House. He returned to the firm in March 2019, according to the firm’s announcement.Jones Day did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The House Intelligence Committee late Monday released two days of sealed testimony given by President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen. Given Cohen has testified publicly since these two appearances, much of the material isn’t new.But there are some key takeaways — including a big, new allegation that Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow provided him with a false timeline about the Trump Tower Moscow project to give to Congress.Below are some takeaways.The Sekulow questionWe knew ahead of the release of the transcripts that Cohen had indicated that Sekulow gave him the false timeline which he testified to and later admitted to lying about. What we didn’t know was whether Sekulow knew the timeline was false. That would be necessary to prove Sekulow suborned perjury.Cohen says Sekulow did know, but he doesn’t really substantiate how he knows that:Q: And just to be perfectly clear about this, the statement about the Trump Tower negotiations ending in January that was part of your original draft was false, and Mr. Sekulow knew that it was false?MR. COHEN: Yes, sir.Cohen also suggests that Sekulow’s denials about his role in drafting the statement were misleading:Q: Mr. Sekulow’s statement of last week only denies that the edits or changes to the statement were designed to alter the duration of the Moscow Trump Tower negotiations. He says nothing about whether he was aware that it was false to begin with. Was that correct?COHEN: That’s correct.Q: ln your view, was this an effort to make a non-denial denial?COHEN: That’s one way to put it.Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, went on TV Monday night and said “everybody” knew that timeline was a lie. But again, it’s not clear how he and Cohen know that.Suggests Donald Trump Jr.'s testimony was ‘inaccurate’The GOP-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee is bringing Donald Trump Jr. back for more questioning after a brief subpoena fight. The question is whether it’s interested in potential false statements he has made.Cohen, for one, seems to think Trump Jr. has, at the very least, slow-rolled his awareness of the Trump Tower Moscow project. While Trump Jr. testified that he was only “peripherally aware” of the project, Cohen said he believes that’s “inaccurate"Q: Did you brief or discuss periodically the Moscow Trump Tower deal with Don Jr.COHEN: Yes.Q: So he had more than a passing familiarity that you were working on the project?COHEN: Yes, because we talked about if the project got going it would be a fun place for us to go to.Q: lf Mr. Trump, Jr. said that he only had a vague familiarity with the project, would that be accurate or inaccurate?COHEN: l would say it’s inaccurate.Q: If he said that he wasn’t very involved at all, would that be inaccurate?COHEN: I would say that that’s not exactly accurate. There really wasn’t a lot of information at the time. lt was -- we were waiting still again for a piece of property, and that way we can actually design the size and the scope of the project. All the information that -- almost all the information that I had he aware of as well. And then, again, going to lvanka, who was adamant that John Fotiadis, though he’s a great guy and a great architect, you’re not going to get the highest price per square foot off of an architect who is not internationally well-regarded.Q: But you kept not only Donald Trump but his son, and Don Jr., as well as lvanka apprised of the status of your work on the Moscow Trump Tower project?COHEN: Yes, but not with the same regularity that I did with Mr. Trump.It’s worth emphasizing that Cohen doesn’t exactly call Trump Jr. a liar, and he also notes that Trump Jr. wasn’t as apprised as his father. Trump Jr.'s characterization that he was only “peripherally aware” is certainly subjective and difficult to disprove as perjury. But Cohen at the least thinks he was being evasive.Trump Tower Moscow wasn’t a huge priorityHowever serious you think it is that Cohen lied to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow timeline — or how objectionable it might be that Trump was pursuing the project even as Republicans were voting for him in 2016 — it’s evident from Cohen’s testimony that this wasn’t a huge priority.Witness this:Q: And during the time period February to May of 2016, did you have conversations with Mr. Trump about the project?COHEN:: l did.COHEN: And do you have -- can you estimate how many conversations you had with him?COHEN: I think, in total, approximately 10.Q: And were any of those conversations about the Trump Tower Moscow jump out in your mind as being particularly noteworthy?COHEN: No. They were quick conversations that I’d be, whether in his office or walking with him to the elevator or down to a vehicle, because he was leaving for a rally.Cohen basically describes waiting for documentation and responses to his inquiries and not much progress being made. It’s noteworthy that people were kept apprised, but the fact that he never had a long meeting with Trump about this project during this time period suggests it was something of a back-burner project.A weird and false recollectionCohen is nothing if not an unwieldy and unsteady witness, as evidenced by his weird claims about not wanting to work in the White House and his never being in Prague.And one exchange encapsulates it. Cohen described his conversations about Trump Tower Moscow and then proceeded to say Trump would go onstage at his rally and talk about “no collusion” and the “witch hunt.”“What would stick out in my head and be noteworthy is, right after I told him that where I’m still waiting for information regarding the property, he would be out in front of the rally talking about witch hunt and that there’s no Russia, there’s no collusion, there’s nothing here, it’s just not real, there’s no business,” Cohen said.There’s one problem: This was during the campaign. The Russia investigation wasn’t even launched at the time, much less something Trump was talking about. Trump first mentioned “witch hunt” in the context of Russia in January 2017.
The House Intelligence Committee will not enforce a subpoena against Attorney General William P. Barr as planned Wednesday, after the Justice Department agreed at the 11th hour to produce the redacted material and underlying information from the special counsel’s report that the panel sought, albeit more slowly than it wanted.Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the committee’s chairman, announced the deal in a statement Wednesday morning.,He warned that the subpoena “will remain in effect and will be enforced should the Department fail to comply with the full document request.”Schiff added that he expects the “initial production” of providing the committee with 12 categories of counterintelligence and foreign intelligence material from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of election interference by Russia would “be completed by the end of next week.”The deal is a rare instance of detente between House Democrats and Justice Department leaders, who remain bitterly at odds over the administration’s resistance to congressional requests for documents and witnesses. But just hours the agreement was announced, President Trump declared that he would not work with congressional Democrats on any legislative ventures so long as investigations of his campaign, finances and foreign ties continue.Trump made the announcement during a news conference at the White House in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) accusation Wednesday morning that Trump was “engaged in a coverup” — something Trump vehemently denied.It is not clear if the president’s declaration jeopardizes the deal the House Intelligence Committee struck with the Justice Department; a spokesman for Schiff did not immediately return a request for comment on that matter.In a letter Tuesday to Schiff, Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd wrote that “the Department is willing to move forward with efforts to accommodate the Committee’s legitimate interests” to view the items it requested.,But he argued that the Justice Department would need more time to produce them. Boyd made the counteroffer contingent on the committee’s promise “that it will not pursue any vote on an ‘enforcement action,’ either on May 22, or while such good-faith accommodation measures continue.”“To be clear should the Committee take the precipitous and unnecessary action of recommending a contempt finding or other enforcement action against the attorney general, then the Department will not likely be able to continue to work with the Committee to accommodate its interest in these materials,” Boyd wrote.Holding off on the subpoena puts Schiff’s committee somewhat at odds with the rest of the House Democratic conference, where members have been agitating for impeachment proceedings against the president as other panels’ efforts to secure materials and witnesses are met with recalcitrance from the administration.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has resisted such calls for impeachment, even as pressure builds to take some action. Schiff’s decision to accept the Justice Department’s efforts to accommodate his requests provides her with a potential off-ramp to avoid calls for impeachment, at least in the near future, as the Intelligence Committee determines whether the Justice Department is satisfying its demands.Both the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees have been making the case to Barr that they should be able to view the full contents of Mueller’s report, plus certain underlying materials. Barr has argued that it would be illegal for him to deliver the full redacted materials to the Judiciary Committee as requested, because it would require releasing grand jury information that cannot be disclosed without a court order. He has rejected House Democrats’ entreaties to join them in making an appeal to a judge to release those materials.But Schiff made his case for seeing the same materials on the grounds that the Mueller report deals with counterintelligence matters — and the Intelligence Committee has a legal right to view materials pertaining to counterintelligence, whether they originated with a grand jury or not. Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the committee’s top Republican, had joined Schiff in letters to Barr making the case for such access, although he did not sign on to the eventual subpoena that Schiff issued earlier this month.“The Department has repeatedly acknowledged the Committee’s legitimate oversight interest in these materials,” Schiff said in a statement Wednesday. “I look forward to, and expect, continued compliance by the Department so we can do our vital oversight work.”
In February 2017, a month after President Trump took office, his personal attorney agreed to provide consulting services to a major pharmaceutical company that would be affected if Trump followed through on his campaign pledge to reduce prescription drug prices.Michael Cohen’s consulting contract with Novartis was purposely vague about what services he would perform. One executive wrote to another that Cohen had pared back their contract “substantially so that it no longer provides details as to precisely what he will do for us,” according to an email quoted in a court document unsealed Wednesday.“I pushed him on this, but in his view, it would be safer for both of us to say less,” the executive wrote. But, in a separate email, another Novartis executive was clear about what the company was agreeing to pay Cohen $1.2 million a year to provide: “Access.”“I want to use him to set up meetings when I am in Washington in May,” the executive added.The emails are cited in applications for search warrants that federal prosecutors filed between July and November 2017 seeking permission to seize the contents of Cohen’s email accounts.Sent a few months after Trump was elected on a promise to drain the Washington swamp, the emails provide a remarkable window into Cohen’s efforts to leverage and profit from his personal relationship with the president.The documents also provide new insights into the early interest in Cohen’s activities exhibited by investigators working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.They show that Cohen had extensive contacts with a U.S.-based investment vehicle linked to a major Russian business mogul — exchanging more than 230 phone calls and 950 text messages with the company’s American chief executive in the year after Trump’s election. Investigators explored whether Cohen was receiving payments from the company, Columbus Nova, in exchange for promoting a peace proposal for Ukraine that would be friendly to Russia.The documents also show that by November 2017 — six months after Mueller’s appointment to investigate Russia’s contacts with members of the Trump campaign — prosecutors had made significant progress collecting Cohen’s financial information and internal documents from companies that hired him once his boss was in the White House.At that time, Cohen was being investigated for making false statements to financial institutions and money laundering, but also for potentially acting as an unregistered foreign agent. He was never charged with acting on behalf of foreign governments or with any wrongdoing related to Novartis or Columbus Nova.The documents were ordered unsealed by a federal judge in response to requests from a coalition of media organizations, including The Washington Post, which argued that the materials should be made public because Cohen’s criminal case has concluded.Cohen pleaded guilty last year to bank and tax fraud, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the presidential campaign. Cohen began serving a three-year prison sentence in May.Lanny Davis, a spokesman for Cohen, declined to comment.Cohen’s relationship with the president soured after he began cooperating with authorities, telling New York prosecutors that Trump directed him to arrange for illegal payments to be made before the 2016 election to silence two women who alleged that they had had affairs with the Republican candidate several years prior.But in the months immediately after Trump’s election, Cohen remained a trusted confidant. The documents show that Cohen stressed to corporate leaders he was having personal meetings with the president, a résumé point that appeared to help Cohen woo major consulting contracts. AT&T gave Cohen a $600,000 contract as the company sought an $85 billion merger with Time Warner, a move Trump opposed during the campaign.The new documents show that both Cohen and AT&T sought to keep the relationship a secret. An AT&T consultant emailed the company’s vice president in February 2017 to assure him that Cohen did not plan to publicize his relationship with the company. “I hope he means it,” the consultant wrote.The contracts have proved deeply embarrassing to both Novartis and AT&T. Novartis has said that the company decided to end its relationship with Cohen a month after hiring him but continued to pay him for a full year, according to the terms of his contract. A top lawyer for the company retired as result of the deal last year.A Novartis spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.AT&T has likewise apologized for its dealings with Cohen. A company spokeswoman declined to comment Wednesday.Investigators also were keenly interested in foreign money flowing into a company Cohen created, Essential Consultants, ostensibly to provide real estate consulting services to mostly domestic clients, the documents show. He earned millions to consult on Washington issues for major companies, including some with close links to foreign governments, prosecutors alleged.Of particular interest, according to the documents, was hundreds of thousands of dollars Cohen received in the first half of 2017 from an investment management firm called Columbus Nova. The firm, according to the documents, is linked to Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian business executive with ties to President Vladimir Putin.Columbus Nova has said it paid Cohen a total of $500,000 in 2017 to bring new investors into the company and that Vekselberg was not involved in the decision to hire him.A company spokesman has acknowledged that chief executive Andrew Intrater introduced Cohen to Vekselberg. Vekselberg, who is Intrater’s cousin, was sanctioned by the U.S. last year. Columbus Nova was launched as an investment management firm in 2000 by Intrater, with a commitment to invest by Vekselberg, whom the firm described last year as its largest client.Investigators seemed to be focused on whether the payments to Cohen were meant to influence U.S. diplomacy. Cohen’s cellphone records show he had had no contact with the company’s chief executive before the presidential election, the documents assert. Over the next year, however, investigators identified more than 1,000 contacts between them.They also show that investigators explored allegations that Cohen, in early 2017, was involved in presenting then-national security adviser Michael Flynn with a plan that would have the United States drop sanctions on Russia as part of a negotiated end to hostilities in Ukraine.The New York Times has reported that Cohen said he left the plan in Flynn’s office at the White House. Cohen has told The Post that he threw the plan away without opening it. Investigators wanted to explore whether the Columbus Nova payments were connected to Cohen’s distribution of the plan, according to the documents.A spokesman for Columbus Nova said it was not surprising that Cohen and Intrater communicated.“They were working together, so of course texted and called each other,” he said. “This was all known and investigated, and wasn’t even deemed worthy of being included in the special counsel’s report.”Investigators were eager to learn more about other foreign money flowing into Essential Consultants, including from Korea and the Republican of Kazakhstan. The money from Kazakhstan, authorities alleged, appeared to be tied to the majority shareholder of a bank who was the son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s ambassador to Russia.One of the search warrants indicates that a realty company tied to Cohen’s brother and his brother’s mother-in-law also came under scrutiny.The company, Bo and Abe Realty, was created in 2013 with Cohen as the organizer and his relatives identified as “Person 4” and “Person 5” in the court document. They were listed as “members” of the company.In a footnote to the August 2017 search warrant, investigators wrote that “a sizeable portion of the funds” in the realty company’s account came from another account in the name of Person 5. Investigators found that both of Cohen’s relatives “receive significant funds through a different entity operating under the name Ukrethanol, LLC.”The search warrant says Ukrethanol “has been involved in a series of suspicious transactions and has been suspected of possible money laundering or structuring. … The government continues to investigate the source of the Ukrethanol funds and the ultimate disposition of these monies.”Trump and his allies have repeatedly alleged that various members of Cohen’s family have committed wrongdoing and should be investigated. In his report, Mueller wrote that Trump’s statements about Cohen’s family “could be viewed as an effort to retaliate against Cohen and chill further testimony adverse to the President.”Separately, U.S. District Judge William Pauley III of Manhattan, who oversaw Cohen’s criminal case, said a federal investigation related to the lawyer is continuing. Pauley granted a request by federal prosecutors in New York to delay releasing sections of the search warrants issued for Cohen’s office and hotel suite, citing “ongoing aspects” of the government’s investigation.
After House Democrats requested information from dozens of individuals and organizations earlier this year as they launched investigations into President Trump’s administration, a representative for one of the subpoenaed organizations emailed The Washington Post.In our look at why the organizations were being targeted, we’d described the consulting firm Columbus Nova as being a subsidiary of a Russian company called Renova Group, owned by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. That wasn’t accurate, we were told. We were provided with a statement released last year that described the firm as “an investment management company solely owned and controlled by Americans.”The statement was released when Columbus Nova was in the news for having hired then-Trump attorney Michael Cohen shortly after Trump won the 2016 election. At the time, in May 2018, there was significant curiosity about how and why Cohen would have been interacting with a Russia-linked company. The statement sought to address that concern."Reports today that Viktor Vekselberg used Columbus Nova as a conduit for payments to Michael Cohen are false,” the statement read. “The claim that Viktor Vekselberg was involved or provided any funding for Columbus Nova’s engagement of Michael Cohen is patently untrue. Neither Viktor Vekselberg nor anyone else outside of Columbus Nova was involved in the decision to hire Cohen or provided funding for his engagement.”On Wednesday, the government released a partially redacted version of a search warrant issued for records related to Cohen in 2017. In it, the connections between Cohen and Columbus Nova — and, apparently, Vekselberg — are detailed.The first contact between Cohen and the CEO of Columbus Nova allegedly occurred Nov. 8, 2016, the day of the presidential election. The CEO of Columbus Nova is, as the statement suggests, an American. His name is Andrew Intrater, and he gave generously to Trump’s inaugural committee, to the tune of $250,000.He is also Vekselberg’s cousin. Vekselberg joined Intrater at Trump’s inauguration.Over the course of the year following Trump’s election, the warrant alleges, Cohen and Intrater communicated more than 1,000 times, including 230 calls and 950 text messages. On Jan. 10, Cohen received an email from Intrater with the subject line “About us / Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs,” the warrant claims."This is the organization that Victor was mentioning yesterday,” the email read. It added that "he is the head of this international relations committee of this group.”This appears to be a reference to Vekselberg. A biography of Vekselberg on the website of a Russian organization identifies him as “a member of the Management Bureau of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP)” and says he “chairs the Union’s Committee for International Cooperation.”The Cohen warrant also identifies a calendar entry for March 7, 2017, labeled as “Meeting with Victor” at a location identified as “Renova.”Cohen entered into a consulting agreement with Columbus Nova. At one point, one warrant suggests, he was given office space at the firm’s headquarters. Over the first six months of the year, Cohen received six payments of $83,333 from Columbus Nova’s bank account. (The money came into an account Cohen had established for a new company called “Essential Consultants LLC” — a company he established to make a hush-money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels on behalf of Trump late in the 2016 campaign.)Most of those payments, the warrant suggests, originated not with Columbus Nova but with Renova.“For example, on or about January 27, 2017, the Columbus Nova account at Bank 4 received a deposit of $83,333 from an account held in the name of Renova US,” it reads. “The same day, a check for $83,333 and drawn on the Columbus Nova account at Bank 4 was made out to Essential Consultants LLC.”This pattern was repeated on at least four occasions.What Cohen did on Columbus Nova’s behalf isn’t clear. He was not able to prevent Vekselberg from being included among targets of sanctions imposed in April 2017 by the Trump administration in response to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.Previous news reports have linked Cohen to Vekselberg directly, no doubt prompting Columbus Nova’s initial response. Reading the statement closely now reveals precise language: Vekselberg didn’t provide funding for Cohen’s hiring — but Renova US did, according to the warrant. The claim that “no one else outside of Columbus Nova” provided funding to Cohen seems to be undermined significantly by the warrant.It’s easy to see why investigators in mid-2017 would find these interactions to be significant. Over the course of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report on Russian election interference, however, neither Vekselberg’s name nor the name of Columbus Nova or Renova appear.At least in the redacted version.
It's almost like some racist, child-rapist supporting fuckstick has finally been defeated by the truth around here.#Resist