506
UPDATE: This chapter is also about the dossier
Consolidate?
Michael Cohen has claimed that the Steele Dossier is totally false and has-along with a wealthy Russian technology executive-sued Buzzefeed for publicizing it.
But his rebuttal of the dossier has been legalistic-all the focus has been on wether or not he really went to Prague in late August of 2016. To be sure what he’s offered up as proof-a picture of his passport on Twitter, doesn’t really answer the question conclusively in any case.
But the spirit of the accusations against him were about more than just one trip; the dossier is a piece of raw intelligence it’s plausible that it got the country wrong, or other details wrong-a document like this is not a finished product.
The spirit of the accusation was that he’d met numerous times with members of the Russian government during the election.
Fast forward to the Stormy Daniels affair-pun intended. Cohen is on the hot seat. As noted in a previous chapter, the version of events you get if you put what he and Trump have said together makes little sense.
Supposedly Cohen made this payment to Stormy Daniels although Trump didn’t have an affair with her and has no knowledge of Cohen’s payment. So was Cohen therefore making an in kind campaign donation?
Then Sarah Huckabee Sanders said they’d won an arbitration case-which suggests that Trump was part of the nondisclosure agreement (NDA).
Now there’s talk of Cohen/Trump trying to keep Stormy Daniels’ 60 minutes interview off the air.
Buzzfeed is putting itself in the middle of this-they were, to be sure, at the apex of the dossier-they were who finally leaked the whole thing-after CNN reported about it without leaking the whole thing; the allegedly liberal media managed to keep quiet about the dossier during the entire election-as it also kept quiet about Stormy Daniels. This was at the same time they were in total freakout mode over Comey maybe/maybe not reopening the email investigation at the same time the MSM was also pretty silent about Russia in general.
Buzzfeed has been fanning the flames-they were the organization to report that Trump was threatening to sue CBS to stop the 60 minutes interview from airing. Now they have a new proposal to get us out of the current impasse. Basically they are trying to ‘force’ Daniels to do what she wants to do-reveal the details of what happened between herself, Trump, and Cohen.
And they’re using Cohen’s own lawsuit over the Steele Dossier as the jumping off point.
Pretty clever:
“BuzzFeed may have found a legal opening to allow the porn actress Stormy Daniels to discuss her alleged relationship with President Donald Trump and a $130,000 payment she received just before the 2016 election as part of a nondisclosure agreement she is now trying to void.”
“The same Trump attorney who brokered the deal with Daniels, Michael Cohen, filed a libel suit in January against BuzzFeed and four of its staffers over publication of the so-called dossier compiling accurate, inaccurate and unproven allegations about Trump’s relationship with Russia.”
“Now, BuzzFeed is using Cohen’s libel suit as a vehicle to demand that Daniels preserve all records relating to her relationship with Trump, as well as her dealings with Cohen and the payment he has acknowledged arranging in 2016.”
“On Tuesday, BuzzFeed’s lawyer wrote to Daniels’ attorney asking that the adult film actress, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, preserve various categories of documents. Such preservation letters are often a prelude to a subpoena. If Daniels’ testimony is formally demanded in a deposition, the nondisclosure agreement would likely be no obstacle, legal experts said.”
“They point out that the allegations in the dossier regarding Cohen are similar to what he himself admits doing in the Stormy Daniels affair.”
Buzzfeed makes a good point about the similarity between what Cohen did in paying off Stormy Daniels and the role the dossier alleges he took in going to Prague-or some other Eastern European former Soviet satellite.
“The letter from BuzzFeed’s attorney, obtained by POLITICO, argues that Cohen’s role in paying Daniels is similar to allegations in the dossier about Cohen. The dossier alleges that Cohen met Russian legal officials and legislators in Prague in August 2016 in a bid to “sweep … under the carpet” details of the relationship between Russia and Trump campaign officials like Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Cohen has flatly denied the claim.
“Mr. Cohen’s role in President Trump’s 2016 campaign, including but not limited to any payments he made or facilitated to third parties during or in connection with the campaign, is therefore directly relevant to” Cohen’s suit, BuzzFeed lawyer Katherine Bolger wrote.
In this way, Buzzfeed is killing two birds with one stone-helping Daniels to tell her story and undermining Cohen’s suit against themselves. This is what’s tricky about alleging libel-and why while Trump makes a lot of threats, he rarely carries them out: to win a libel suit you have to show that:
1. What was said is untrue
2. The person who said it knew it wasn’t true.
This is why Trump lost his libel case vs. Tim O’Brien 11 years ago-to win he had to prove he was so a billionaire. He was not able to prove he was.
Similarly despite his big talk you don’t have to fear being sued by him for calling him a sexual predator: he’d have to prove that in court and he knows there’s no way he can prove that-and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that he is.
UPDATE: OK so a lot of water under the bridge since I wrote this chapter-way back on March, 15, 2018. Cohen would withdraw his lawsuit just a month later-very soon after McClatchy reported that Mueller did in fact have evidence Cohen was in Prague as I discussed in Chapter A.
To be sure at this point almost a year later this is one of those stories that live in a strange kind of netherworld-neither confirmed or denied by other outlets-like CNN’s story in July, 2018 that Cohen had stated he had seen Donald Jr tell his father about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians with his own eyes. CNN’s reporting hasn’t been confirmed-or falsified-by other outlets and it has stood by its reporting. Or the Guardian reporting that Manafort had visited Assange three times prior to the 2016 election-in 2013, 2014 and then March of 2016.
Now in the case of the Manafort-Asssange story the MSM has decided that this Guardian story is FAKE NEWS-despite being from a reputable reporter-and this has led them to dismiss any stories that link Manafort and Assange-even though the NY Times itself had a story that Manafort was in Ecuador in 2017-I think it’s safe to presume on behalf of the Trump Russia House-for a deal that would bring Julian Assange to the US.
Buzzfeed’s recent story that Donald Trump directed Michael Cohen to perjure himself regarding how far into the campaign they pursued the Trump Tower Moscow deal has met a similar fate-the MSM has declared it FAKE NEWS because Mueller’s office said it was false without indicating which aspect of it. It’s clear I don’t think like a MSM journalist-it seems obvious to me that what’s really suspicious is why the SCO pushed back on a story at all-they’d never done so before; even more suspicious after it was reported that someone in Rod Rosenstein’s office spoke to SCO about the Buzzfeed story and then on the Sunday shows Rudy Giuliani intimated that either he or someone else in TrumpWorld had been on the phone to SCO.
The question of politics behind what stories the MSM abandons is no doubt a subject of important study and research in itself-a whole book no doubt could be written about that. In the case of the Clinton Foundation the NYTimes had no problem putting out a very shoddy piece of junk in September, 2016 that proved nothing yet had a very incriminating sounding headline-for more see Chapter A.
Again, when the subject isn’t Hillary Clinton, the MSM is very timid in terms of making inferences and connecting the dots.I mean I tend to infer that the McClatchy story is true as Cohen withdrew his lawsuit vs. Buzzfeed so soon after the story broke. Coincidence? Uh-they take a lot of planning. If this book is about anything it’s about the idea you should be pretty skeptical of so many ‘coincidences’-investigators don’t believe in them as much as the MSM does.
Beyond that, the He went to Prague allegation of the dossier remains in a similar kind of netherworld-neither confirmed nor denied with the MSM presuming that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. And as documented in Chapter B Lanny Davis himself had intimated in an interview with Maddow that Cohen did go to Prague and knew something central to the question of collusion and later totally walked it back insisting categorically he never went to Prague.
But claim I never went to Prague has already been falsified as Cohen did go in 2002-true that was a long time ago but it falsifies I never went to Prague.
And as Seth Abramson says the reason why Davis is offering these denials may be to please Mueller-who wants to control the flow of information.
8/ Mueller wants to control the information Cohen is going to give him—when it's released, who has it, how it's framed, how it shapes his probe. He doesn't want Cohen's lawyer making those decisions. I suspect that's why Davis had *clammed up* by the time he spoke to @ChrisCuomo.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 22, 2018
But is it really plausible that Davis made up what he said on Maddow regarding Cohen’s knowledge of ‘computer crimes?’
8/ Mueller wants to control the information Cohen is going to give him—when it's released, who has it, how it's framed, how it shapes his probe. He doesn't want Cohen's lawyer making those decisions. I suspect that's why Davis had *clammed up* by the time he spoke to @ChrisCuomo.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 22, 2018
As also noted in Chapter A Patriobotics continues to be skeptical of Cohen’s denials. In any case, simply presuming it’s not true because Muelller didn’t mention it in Cohen’s sentencing memo is yet again presuming absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Why does the media presume that Mueller is divulging everything he knows in these memos-I presume the opposite.
So Mueller may-or may not-already know the answer to the question.
UPDATE: Place Below
I’m willing to agree that Cohen probably didn’t go to Prague with the luxury of much hindsight and he certainly wasn’t the point person regarding Russian Collusion, Coordination or Conspiracy.
What became very clear by the time of the release of the Mueller Report is that Cohen certainly wasn’t the ringleader on Russian Collusion and so I now believe Cohen’s denials-certainly there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that he as involved in Collusion at all much less that he made a payment to Russian hackers.
It’s clear now that Lanny Davis’s allusions in July 2018 were about Cohen overhearing Stone telling Trump about the coming dump of the DNC emails on July 18-19 not that Cohen himself was involved in Collusion-Coordination-Conspiracy.
Rather I’ve been won over to Marcy Wheeler’s view that the Dossier contained some deliberately placed misinformation from Putin’s people.
Cohen wasn’t the point person on Russian Collusion-Paul Manafort was. As to payments to the hackers we know Peter Smith did that-and may have paid the hackers who hacked Podesta-Chapter A for more.
OTOH I continue to find the Guardian story that Manafort met with Assange in 2013, 2014 and then again in March 2016 as plausible-the Times itself reported that in 2017 he went to the Ecuadoran embassy in Britain to convince the President there to hand Assange over to the US.
We further now know PACE the Mueller Report that Manafort was obsessed and euphoric over Wikileaks’ email dumps in July-August 2016.
Then there was the polling data he was handing the ‘former’ Russian intel operative Konstantin Kilimnik; Kilimnik then gave it to Russian oligarchs-Deripaska and others.
As Seth Abrmason argues it’s likely that senior campaign operative Mueller referred to who directed Stone to find out what else Assange had post the release of the DNC emails was Manafort-that the MSM has failed to make this connection is due to their deciding that the Guardian story has cooties and so any story linking Manafort and Assange has cooties.
End of UPDATE.
As for Stormy Daniels should would give her interview and, of course, Cohen would soon flip on Trump. He’s now in prison three years for committing crimes for Trump’s benefit at his direction while Trump as yet has faced no consequence-though the impeachment inquiry is now the start of that.
As EmptyWheel notes some of what the Dossier says about Cohen is true-but the notion that he was the ringleader on Collusion is clearly a canard-Cohen was pretty much completely out of the loop on Collusion.
The way this story evolved over time should have raised concerns, as should have other obvious problems with the December report. But it’s worth noting that there are two grains of truth in it. Cohen had been the key interlocutor between the Trump campaign and the Presidential Administration during the campaign, but to discuss the building of a Trump Tower in Moscow in January, not how to steal the election in October. Few people (at least in the US) should have known that he had played that interlocutor role; how many knew in Russia is something else entirely. Cohen was also someone that people who had done business with Trump Organization, like Giorgi Rtslchiladze and people associated with Aras Agalarov’s Crocus Group, would know to be Trump’s fixer. That fact would have been far more widely known.
Nevertheless, by the end of it, Cohen was the biggest Trump-associate villain in the Steele dossier. If the Steele dossier had been directing the investigative priorities of the FBI, then Cohen should have been a focus for his role in the hack-and-leak as soon as the FBI received this report. Nothing in the public record suggests that happened. Indeed, at the time the FBI briefed the Gang of Eight on March 9, 2017, Cohen was not among the people described as subjects. Just Roger Stone had been added to the initial four subjects (Page, Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Mike Flynn) by that point. Congress, including the Devin Nunes-led House Intelligence Committee, would focus closely on Cohen more quickly than the FBI appears to have.
That’s true even though Cohen was doing some of the things he would later be investigated for, including — immediately after the election — establishing financial ties with Viktor Vekselberg even while Felix Sater pitched him on a Ukraine deal.
He was involved in the scheme to build a Trump Tower Moscow and the hush money payments to women but he had no discernible role in Russian Collusion.