71 1.0 The Steele Dossier and its Enemies: Michael Cohen’s Derangement Syndrome Gives it New Life

UPDATE:

This chapter has a lot of good info but still needs to be shored up regarding content. There’s a lot of good stuff but how much to use? The point about Cohen’s continuing insistence Russia Collusion didn’t happen needs to be put in sharper relief. As for EW there’s such a goldmine of insight into the Steele Dossier-and later through the faux Durham investigation Alpha-which she has revealed was also shopped to her. So this is a chapter that might benefit from a significant rewrite

Eight Possible Explanations – Many Bad, Some Good – for SDNY’s Delay in Turning Over Cohen Files – emptywheel

Steele dossier – Wikipedia

A lot more needs to be said regarding Steele’s giving it to the FBI as well. We saw the way rogue agents tabled the information from Peter Sussman-and turned him into the suspect

EW argued she thought for a long time Alfa Bank was likely disinformation but she does also acknowledge in other posts that the FBI never even made a good faith attempt to verify the allegations but immediately dismissed it out of hand and took Alfa Bank’s own explanation at face value.

Which is pretty ironic.

The-much maligned-Dossier has had a lot of enemies and considerably fewer friends. As is typical for the Democrats once something ‘riles up’ what EmptyWheel calls ‘the Frothy Right’ they have mostly cut and run the  louder and more frothy the denouncements of ‘President Trump’ and his GOP co-conspirators the quicker Democrats scurry away.

It often seems that the Dems believe that anything that allegedly fires up the GOP base is just not a fight worth having-which is why despite Nadler’s promises to investigate the Kavanaugh confirmation fight back in September, 2018-the aborted FBI Trumpland investigation of the allegations against Kav-they have quietly dropped the matter-apparently never to bring it up again.

FN: Though it probably wasn’t Nadler’s fault-he probably wasn’t allowed.

Similarly with the Dossier-once the GOP targeted its disinformation machine on it most on the Dem side decided the best strategy was to concede the argument without a fight-the Dossier was just bad-after all ‘the Democrats funded it’-it’s a little more complicated than that, a law firm affiliated with the Dems funded it after GOP groups had funded the research during the primary-but the Dems never think it’s worth trying to add complexity to something with find distinctions once the Frothy Right has made a hue and cry over it-and besides that it was ‘salacious and unverified’ so better to just forget it.

FN: It’s not clear why with Trump’s history-of all those accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse-the idea that something is ‘salacious’ means ‘implausible’ in the mind of the conventional wisdom but clearly it has meant that.

Then came Cohen’s new book-which will go public in 5 hours and 17 minutes; but who’s counting?-which scrambles this conventional wisdom-talk about a contradiction in terms. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

End FN.

Better to concede that the Dossier is ‘garbage’-as GOP co-conspirators from Paul Manafort to Bob Woodward have called it-but hold onto the-valid point-that the Russia investigation was more than adequately predicated without the Dossier-and that despite what the GOP keeps insisting-as they did in the Nunes Memo-the Dossier wasn’t the basis for the opening of the Russia investigation anyway-but the very much glorified Coffee Boy’s big mouth when he spoke to the Australian Ambassador.

FN: The key to to getting the truth from the Coffee Boy remains playing him with liquor-it’s been totally ignored by not just the MSM but Russia investigators-both on the Mueller team-at least based on the unredacted report-and by the SSCI team.

FN: I know I’m being a little cheeky describing Woodward that way but he deserves it. In Fear he claims to ‘not have been delighted’ to end up taking sides but the record suggests he’s quite delighted-he can always be counted to give aid and comfort to the GOP co-conspirators whenever he gets the chance-remember his nonsensical blaming of Obama for the Debt Ceiling Chicken fiasco of 2011.

On January 15, five days before the inauguration, I appeared on Fox News Sunday. I said, “I’ve lived in this world for 45 years where you get things and people make allegations. That is a garbage document. It never should have been presented as part of an intelligence briefing. Trump’s right to be upset about that.” The intelligence officials, “who are terrific and have done great work, made a mistake here, and when people make mistakes they should apologize.” I said the normal route for such information, as in past administrations, was passing it to the incoming White House counsel. Let the new president’s lawyer handle the hot potato. Later that afternoon Trump tweeted: “Thank you to Bob Woodward who said, ‘That is a garbage document . . . it never should have been presented . . . Trump’s right to be upset (angry) . . .” I was not delighted to appear to have taken sides, but I felt strongly that such a document, even in abbreviated form, really was “garbage” and should have been handled differently. ”

Pg. 71

For awhile even I-reluctantly and with something of what Nietzsche would call a bad conscience-had kind of let it go. It is clear that you don’t need the Dossier to make the case for Russian Interference Collusion and Conspiracy-all which are documented extensively in both the Mueller Report and SSCI-despite the GOPers who run SSCI claiming that in fact ‘there was no collusion’ the evidence they provide clearly shows there was a ton of collusion.

Reluctantly as just because something isn’t proven doesn’t mean it’s disproven. Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Which is why what the GOP co-conspirators now that Trump is ‘President’ call ‘mere process crimes’ are in truth anything but ‘mere’ as successful obstruction means there will be no evidence even though there was very definitely a crime.

To just cut and run on the Dossier means leaving a huge number of loose ends. In his recent interview, Peter Strozk-who’s book is also coming out at 12 AM this morning-it’s going to be a big moment as Strozk, Cohen, and Seth Abramson all have books coming out.

And it was inevitable that the MSM would fall into the GOP’s trap. As EmptyWheel documents the GOP co-conspiring strategy to deny Russian Collusion was to discredit any aspect of the Dossier and thereby declare the whole thing is ‘garbage’ and therefore the entire Russia investigation was ‘garbage’ and so it had no basis-no predication-in the first place.

Indeed, just this Labour Day afternoon ‘President Trump’ declared that the Democrats had gone after him on the ‘Collusion Hoax’ based on the ‘Fake Dossier’ and so should go to prison for at least 50 years.

He’s literally claiming that Obama and his current opponent-Joe Biden-should go to prison for a minimum of 50 years. Note as always that he and his GOP co-conspirators are Kings of Projection.

Once again the moment seems to afford yet another opportunity to quote Oscar Wilde: the best lack all conviction while the worst among us are filled with passionate intensity.

The MSM-as usual-accepted the GOP terms of debate-unless 100% of the Dossier could be corroborated beyond a reasonable doubt then it was ‘false and fake’-then this false preference would be used to suggest the whole thing was a ‘hoax.’

Which, of course, is absurd for a document of raw intelligence you don’t expect anything like 100% accuracy. But the MSM-not surprising as Malcolm Nance has discussed the big difference between journalistic rules and the rules of an intel agent.

But the GOP wagered correctly that the public didn’t understand such distinctions and that the MSM wouldn’t either. If anything in the Dossier wasn’t accurate then it was ‘discredited’ and then maybe the entire story of Russian Collusion is a ‘hoax.’

According to Marcy Wheeler the GOP strategy of using the Dossier to Swift Boat the entire fact of Russian Interference and Collusion, begun with Manafort the day after it went public.

According to an old Ken Vogel story, Manafort called Reince Priebus the day the dossier came out — at a time when he’d still be in Madrid with Oganov (he returned on January 12) and suggested he discredit the Russian investigation by focusing on the Steele dossier.”

It was about a week before Trump’s inauguration, and Manafort wanted to brief Trump’s team on alleged inaccuracies in a recently released dossier of memos written by a former British spy for Trump’s opponents that alleged compromising ties among Russia, Trump and Trump’s associates, including Manafort.

“On the day that the dossier came out in the press, Paul called Reince, as a responsible ally of the president would do, and said this story about me is garbage, and a bunch of the other stuff in there seems implausible,” said a person close to Manafort.

 

According to a GOP operative familiar with Manafort’s conversation with Priebus, Manafort suggested the errors in the dossier discredited it, as well as the FBI investigation, since the bureau had reached a tentative (but later aborted) agreement to pay the former British spy to continue his research and had briefed both Trump and then-President Barack Obama on the dossier.

Manafort told Priebus that the dossier was tainted by inaccuracies and by the motivations of the people who initiated it, whom he alleged were Democratic activists and donors working in cahoots with Ukrainian government officials, according to the operative.

“From that Manafort call to the present, the push to discredit the Russian investigation by treating the dossier as the Russian investigation and discrediting the former by unpacking the (admitted, egregious) problems in the latter has been the primary response to the Russian investigation. If Manafort was tipped to the fact that the dossier was full of baseless allegations because the Russians had put them there, it would mean the entire GOP effort since has been one of the intended goals of the disinformation.”

What were these inaccuracies however? Because whatever else in the Dossier has been discredited the allegations it makes against Manafort clearly have held up well.

However, Wheeler does go on to offer a compelling list of inaccuracies. She hasn’t focused on two widely panned Dossier claims-the Pee Tape or that Cohen went to Prague to pay Russian hackers.

Better yet-and this is why for a long time I somewhat reluctantly had considered strongly that maybe she was right-she had a persuasive explanation and counternarrative as to if the Dossier is riddled with inaccuracies how they got in the report: she speculates that it was through a deliberate misinformation campaign-ie a disinformation campaign-by Russian intelligence itself after getting wind of the Dossier project.

“I was among the first people to argue that the Steele dossier had been planted either partially or predominantly with Russian disinformation.”

first suggested the dossier reflected a feedback loop — magnifying both the Alfa Bank and the Michael Cohen allegations — in March 2017 (there’s increasing evidence the Alfa Bank story was disinformation, too, which I’ve also argued). In November 2017, I showed evidence suggesting the Democrats were complacent in response to their discovery of the hack in May and June 2016, in part because the dossier falsely led them to believe that the Russians hadn’t accomplished such hacks and that the kompromat Russians had on Hillary consisted of old FSB intercepts of her, not newly stolen emails. In January 2018, I showed how the dossier would be useful to Russia, partly to thwart and partly to discredit the investigation into their operation. In August 2018, I laid out six specific false claims made in the dossier that would have led Democrats or the FBI to take action counter to their own interests:

  • Russians hadn’t had success hacking targets like Hillary
  • Russians were planning to leak dated FSB intercepts rather than recent stolen emails
  • Misattribution of both what the social media campaign included and who did it, blaming Webzilla rather than Internet Research Agency
  • Carter Page, not George Papadopoulos or Roger Stone, was one key focus of Russian outreach
  • Russia had grown to regret the operation in August, when instead they were planning the next phase
  • Michael Cohen was covering up Trump’s funding of the hackers rather than Trump’s sexual scandals and an improbably lucrative business deal

Also in August 2018, I laid out the specific risk that Oleg Deripaska, who had influence over both Christopher Steele and Paul Manafort at the time, could have been manipulating both sides. In January, I wrote a much more detailed post that, in part, showed that that’s what Deripaska seems to have done. The post also showed how any disinformation in the dossier succeeded in confusing and discrediting the most experienced investigators into Russian organized crime (both Steele and at both DOJ and FBI), as well as harming Democrats.”

Still unlike the GOP, she doesn’t extrapolate that therefore the entire Russia investigation was a ‘witch hunt.’ No she definitely believes-rightly-that there was Russian Collusion. She argues that perhaps Deripaska himself was able to plant some disinformation in it that would later be able to be used to discredit that entire story.

In retrospect there has no question been a good deal of success in this vein-wether it was disinformation or not as is clear from perusing Erik Wemple’s acute case of Steele Dossier Derangement Syndrome. 

She also argues that the disinformation-perhaps planted there by Deripaska-also led the Dems to a false sense of security even after they were hacked-as the Dossier claimed the Russians hadn’t hacked HRC’s emails. 

Here Wheeler was way back on December 24, 2017-amazing how long ago it seems! At the time I’d just begun this-what has turned out to be-marathon book!

“I get asked, a lot, why I obsess over the Steele dossier. A lot of people believe that even if the dossier doesn’t pan out, it doesn’t matter because Mueller’s investigation doesn’t depend on it. I’d be more sympathetic to that view if people like Adam Schiff and John Podesta didn’t keep invoking the dossier in ways that makes their legitimate concerns easy to discredit.

Yes this was my view for a long time-that even if she was right, and maybe she was, it didn’t matter as the investigation didn’t depend on it. Of course, the Mueller Report was disappointing in a number of crucial ways not related to the truth or lack thereof of the Dossier-starting that Rosenstein directed Mueller to only go for field goals before the game even started-Chapter A. 

If anything, I’m now reconsidering seeing the Dossier more favorably again but-we’ll get to this below. Don’t want to jump ahead!

But back to Ms. Wheeler:

“But I now believe the dossier may have done affirmative damage.”

She argues that claims like that Russia didn’t have embarrassing emails on HRC only old intercepts might have led to the Dems being complacent.

Sometime in May, Robert Johnston (who then worked at Crowdstrike) briefed the DNC on the hack. He told them how much data had been stolen, but he told them intelligence hackers generally don’t do anything with the stolen data.”

When he briefed the DNC in that conference room, Johnston presented a report that basically said, “They’ve balled up data and stolen it.” But the political officials were hardly experienced in the world of intelligence. They were not just horrified but puzzled. “They’re looking at me,” Johnston recalled, “and they’re asking, ‘What are they going to do with the data that was taken?’”

Back then, no one knew. In addition to APT 29, another hacking group had launched malware into the DNC’s system. Called APT 28, it’s also associated Russian intelligence. Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and security expert, said it’s not crystal clear which Russian spy service is behind each hacker group, but like many other cybersecurity investigators, he agreed that Russian intelligence carried out the attack.

So, Johnston said, “I start thinking back to all of these previous hacks by Russia and other adversaries like China. I think back to the Joint Chiefs hack. What did they do with this data? Nothing. They took the information for espionage purposes. They didn’t leak it to WikiLeaks.”

So, Johnston recalled, that’s what he told the DNC in May 2016: Such thefts have become the norm, and the hackers did not plan on doing anything with what they had purloined.”

On June 15, Guccifer 2.0 started posting. In his first post, he proved a number of the statements Crowdstrike or Democrats made to the WaPo were wrong, including that:

  • The hackers took just two documents
  • Only Trump-related documents had been stolen
  • Hillary’s campaign had not been hacked
  • The DNC had responded quickly
  • No donor information had been stolen

Now, you’d think this (plus Julian Assange’s claim to have Hillary emails) would alert the Democrats that Johnston’s advice — that the Russians probably wouldn’t do anything with the data they stole — was wrong. Except that (as far as is publicly known) none of the documents Guccifer 2.0 leaked in that first batch were from the DNC.

Around this same time, Perkins Coie lawyer Marc Elias asked Fusion to focus on Trump’s Russian ties, which led to Christopher Steele’s involvement in the already started oppo effort.”

On June 20, Perkins Coie would have learned from a Steele report that the dirt Russia had on Hillary consisted of “bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct.” It would also have learned that “the dossier however had not yet been made available abroad, including to TRUMP or his campaign team.”

On July 19, Perkins Coie would have learned from a Steele report that at a meeting with a Kremlin official named Diyevkin which Carter Page insists didn’t take place, Diyevkin “rais[ed] a dossier of ‘kompromat’ the Kremlin possessed on TRUMP’s Democratic presidential rival, Hillary CLINTON, and its possible release to the Republican’s campaign team.” At that point in time, the reference to kompromat would still be to intercepted messages, not email.

On July 22, Wikileaks released the first trove of DNC emails.

On July 26 — days after Russian-supplied emails were being released to the press — Perkins Coie would receive a Steele report (based on June reporting) that claimed FSB had the lead on hacking in Russia. And the report would claim — counter to a great deal of publicly known evidence — that “there had been only limited success in penetrating the ‘first tier’ foreign targets.” That is, even after the Russian hacked emails got released to the public, Steele would still be providing information to the Democrats suggesting there was no risk of emails getting released because Russians just weren’t that good at hacking.

It appears likely that the Democrats asked Fusion to focus on Russia because they believed they had been badly hacked by Russia.

Everything they learned (and would have learned, if the June reporting on cybersecurity had been produced in timely fashion) between the time they were hacked and when Wikileaks would start releasing massive amounts of emails would have told the Democrats that the Russians hadn’t really succeeded with their hacking, and any kompromat they had on Hillary was not emails, but instead dated intercepts. The Steele dossier would have led them to be complacent, rather than prepping for the onslaught of the emails.

We don’t know how Steele’s intelligence was used within the party. But if they had paid attention to it, it would have done affirmative damage, because it might have led them to continue to rely on Johnston’s opinion that the stolen emails weren’t coming out.”

But I think her last paragraph is key-this all assumes that Perkins was sharing the latest reports on the Dossier with the DNC in real time-an assumption open to reasonable doubt to say the least. Clearly Perkins himself didn’t need the Dossier to be blase about the hacks as he initially assured the DNC the hacked emails wouldn’t be used against them back in late April-before Steele started writing it.

Going by Donna Brazille’s account as a DNC insider at the time, it sure doesn’t sound like anyone there was making decisions based on reading Christopher Steele-indeed she doesn’t mention Steele in the entire book. The picture you get from reading her was that both the FBI and the DNC tripped on their shoelaces-the young DNC operative who got the phone call from the FBI thought the whole thing was a prank and the FBI rep who called said nothing to build urgency. The whole thing looks like a comedy of errors.

So I don’t know how the timeline adds up. One problem has been too many folks have taken the GOP convenient framing that ‘the Democrats funded the Dossier’ too seriously. A lawyer who represented them funded it-that doesn’t mean Dem officials knew anything about it in real time-both Hillary Clinton and John Podesta assure us they knew nothing about it at the time.

Having said that, Ms. Wheeler’s theory that there was disinformation in the Dossier-and that Deripaska was playing a double game-with Steele on the one hand and Manafort on the other-sounds plausible and has explanatory power.

For this reason for a long time I’ve considered it-and while I was far from sure it’s the truth I was also far from sure it wasn’t.

FN: After the  release of the redacted Mueller Report in late April, 2019, Seth Abramson put out a megathread arguing that the Dossier is about 75% accurate.

This part regarding Michael Cohen of it has become by far it’s most contested part as we will see below

Certainly agree with his closing tweet:

End FN.

So what happened? Michael Cohen’s book. Based on what we’ve heard about it thus far, his book certainly has no answers to the questions she raises, but, interestingly he does-while insisting both once again that he never went to Prague and that he doesn’t believe the SD allegation of the Pee Tape-actually make at least the Pee Tape seem more rather than less likely.

Regarding the Pee Tape denial it’s not clear what it is worth-was Cohen in Trump’s Moscow Hotel room with him every night back in 2013? If not how does he know it didn’t happen-even if Cohen himself wasn’t involved? But the irony is that even as he denies it in a way that raises more questions than answers as he provides other information that makes the idea that the Russians brought prostitutes to Trump’s room to pee on the bed Obama and Michelle used to sleep on when they visited Moscow actually more plausible.

Cohen reveals that he, Trump, and Agalarov went to a Las Vegas club and that Trump “was delighted” to see one performer urinate on another. Trump had argued to Comey that the idea of a Pee Tape was prepostorous on its face as he’s a germaphobe-of course, the Dossier didn’t claim the girls peed on him so that doesn’t actually rule it out of hand, but the news that Trump was delighted to see these Vegas performers engage in a golden shower tells you that watching call girls urinate on the bed of someone he literally hates-President Obama-was exactly his speed.

FN; That Emin Agalarov is particularly striking as the Dossier asserts that it was Aras Agalarov who was in charge of taping the Pee Tape

Add on the fact that Trump actually had a Black man dress like Obama and come to his office just so he could verbally dress down and then “fire” the first AA President it’s further underscored that wether or not the Pee Tape happened it certainly was up his alley preference wise.

Then there’s the fact that Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, admits that the Russians offered to send call girls to the room-and in Trump’s 2013 letter to Putin he had asked for girls.

In any case the idea of the Pee Tape can no longer be dismissed as preposterous on its face-as Jason Risen wrongly does here. 

The story of Trump’s alleged Moscow affair is in keeping with the bipartisan and comprehensive nature of the Senate report, which is at turns both reassuring and alarming. While it debunks the so-called Steele Dossier, which was highlighted by a wild accusation that Trump had two women urinate on his bed in his Moscow hotel room in 2013, the Senate report examines in detail the less tawdry, but far more plausible, story that Trump had a brief affair on his earlier trip to Moscow and the Russians knew about it.”

But post Cohen’s revelations-just going on what’s already been reported-while you can argue the allegation of the Pee Tape is false you can no longer argue it’s implausible. Again the idea that something about Trump is implausible because it’s tawdry has always been curious. But post Cohen’s book it’s now impossible to do this.

FN: OTOH Risen is on the nose regarding the ways in which the SSCI put the Mueller Report to shame-Chapter A for more.

So ironically Cohen who sued Buzzfeed for publishing the Dossier and again denied its allegations in his book inadvertently breathes new life in it. The Pee Tape very well may be real.

Ok but what about Cohen in Prague? Stedman argues that THAT allegation should be accepted as debunked.

But I disagree.

Sorry but how can you conclude this solely on the strength of Cohen’s denial?

I certainly don’t subscribe to the school of thought that because Cohen lied-at Trump’s direction and to his benefit-you simply can’t believe anything he says and simply discount everything.

Jeet seems to be urging that folks simply not buy Cohen’s book-too late for me I preordered weeks ago!-but I think that would be a mistake. I always want as much information as possible. I always want to hear what anyone has to say. Now by all means discount what Cohen says but personally I at least want to hear him. But even in listening that doesn’t mean you accept everything he says uncritically. It seems clear just from the CNN quote above that he still pulls punches where he can and where he thinks it helps his case.

FN: And indeed you got a taste of this last night in his interview on Maddow-I’d only been waiting for this for a month. Cohen attempted to rationalize his bullying behavior towards Stormy Daniels-I never threatened Stormy Daniels I never spoke to her at all I spoke to her lawyer-he declared to Maddow.

Ok, but this is obtuse as he very well knows-you don’t have to threaten someone you can communicate it through their lawyer. This is just one example of why SDNY didn’t give him a good deal-they drove a hard bargain and sentenced him to 3 and a half years; they drove a much harder bargain than Mueller not that that’s saying much as Mueller was a walk in the park-by design now that we know the orders he got from Rosenstein-Chapter A. 

With SDNY you have to reveal all your criminal activity not just that relevant to the conduct you want to cooperate on. Yet Cohen took a three and a half year prison sentence over revealing all his own criminal conduct-not just that related to Trump-which kind of makes you wonder what was so damning he’d rather take 3 and a half years in prison.

Indeed, the Dems’ impeachment lawyer, Dan Goldman, was on later on Lawrence O’Donnell and explained that the fly in the ointment in indicting Trump when he leaves Office for his own role as #IndividualOne is that SDNY can’t use him-because he isn’t willing to meet their stringent rules-as a witness.

OTOH, the Manhattan DA which is investigating Trump’s financial malfeasance doesn’t have such stringent requirements-and it’s quite likely Cohen is cooperating with them-may well get the goods on Trump.

UPDATE: More evidence of the fact that he still pulls his punches where he thinks he can get away with it.

Cohen’s moment of defiance on his own strong arm tactics against Ms. Daniels  actually came in the context of Maddow asking about his relationship with Jerry and Becky Falwell. In the book Cohen reveals that he was able to ingratiate himself with the Falwells by getting first class Justin Bieber tickets for their 12 year old daughter-she got a seat just a few feet away from the Bieb.

See Pg. 117

Indeed, Cohen discusses Trump’s utter cynicism in sucking up to the religious leaders then after he left them laughing at how stupid their beliefs are.

But then many of these religious leaders are themselves phonies, as the Falwells clearly are. While these Holier Than Thou folks inveigh against ‘worldly pop music’ and gay sex, Jerry Falwell Jr is actually all about this stuff. 

And indeed, it turns out Cohen did for the Falwells what he did for Trump against Stormy Daniels, and many other women-he strongarmed those making terrible accusations against them.

Indeed, one thing I found pretty surprising was Cohen’s revelation to Rachel that he still speaks to the Falwells all the time-that he in fact spoke to them in prison, and the the same day he did her show. After all, Cohen flipped on Trump and is totally personal non grata.

And Falwell has gone as far as to claim that “that because the Russia investigation turned out to be a “corrupt failed coup,” Trump should receive “reparations” in the form of two years being tacked onto his first term.”

Yet he’s still friends with someone excommunicated from TrumpWorld? It makes you wonder what else Cohen is hiding. In the Falwells’ case it might be they still hope he will help them with the allegations coming from their pool boy…

Later in 2012, after the Falwells befriended Granda, Trump was invited to speak at Liberty University. Michael Cohen accompanied him, and the Apprentice star and his fixer developed a relationship with Fallwell. (Granda was in attendance, as well; the Times published a photo of him holding a copy of The Art of the Deal on a private jet.) In 2015, as the potential release of the compromising photos was becoming a problem for Falwell, he enlisted the help of Cohen, a revelation reported by Reuters last month. Cohen reportedly then flew to Florida to meet with the attorney of the mystery figure who possessed the photos. The issue was resolved, and the attorney told Cohen that the photos were destroyed.

 

As if the story couldn’t get any stranger, Cohen’s involvement was initially revealed through a March 2019 phone conversation he had with comedian Tom Arnold, who secretly recorded it. (Click here to read Rolling Stone‘s story on Arnold’s quest to take down Trump and his relationship with Cohen.)”

Ok so now enter Trump-Cohen.

What do President Trump and Michael Cohen have to do with this?

What indeed?

Later in 2012, after the Falwells befriended Granda, Trump was invited to speak at Liberty University. Michael Cohen accompanied him, and the Apprentice star and his fixer developed a relationship with Fallwell. (Granda was in attendance, as well; the Times published a photo of him holding a copy of The Art of the Deal on a private jet.) In 2015, as the potential release of the compromising photos was becoming a problem for Falwell, he enlisted the help of Cohen, a revelation reported by Reuters last month. Cohen reportedly then flew to Florida to meet with the attorney of the mystery figure who possessed the photos. The issue was resolved, and the attorney told Cohen that the photos were destroyed.

As if the story couldn’t get any stranger, Cohen’s involvement was initially revealed through a March 2019 phone conversation he had with comedian Tom Arnold, who secretly recorded it. (Click here to read Rolling Stone‘s story on Arnold’s quest to take down Trump and his relationship with Cohen.)

“There’s a bunch of photographs, personal photographs, that somehow the guy ended up getting — whether it was off of Jerry’s phone or somehow maybe it got AirDropped or whatever the hell the whole thing was,” Cohen said on the recorded call. He described the photos as “personal” and “between husband and wife,” and said that he had one of them. “It’s terrible,” Cohen said.

Cohen is notorious for his efforts to suppress potentially compromising information, and he is currently serving a three-year prison sentence in part for arranging hush money payments to keep the details of Trump’s alleged affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal under wraps during the lead-up to the 2016 election. Sorting out Falwell’s troubles with a few racy photos is well within Cohen’s skillset as Trump’s fixer, and the fact that the issue was handled during the campaign, and only months before Falwell’s surprising endorsement of Trump, raises more than a few questions about what motivated Falwell’s surprising endorsement of Trump. This is especially true considering, as Reuters reported, Cohen is the one who ultimately convinced Falwell to make the endorsement.”

 

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/tom-arnold-trump-tapes-michael-cohen-709843/

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-falwell-exclusive/exclusive-trump-fixer-cohen-says-he-helped-falwell-handle-racy-photos-idUSKCN1SD2JG

Reuters:

“Cohen would later prove successful in another matter involving Falwell, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Cohen helped persuade Falwell to issue his endorsement of Trump’s presidential candidacy at a critical moment, they said: just before the Iowa caucuses. Falwell subsequently barnstormed with Trump and vouched for the candidate’s Christian virtues.”

“Cohen’s connection to the Falwells sheds light on the formidable alliance between Trump and a man who, through his university, is one of the most influential evangelical figures in America. Falwell’s backing helped galvanize evangelicals and persuaded many Christians concerned about Trump’s past behavior to embrace him as a repentant sinner.”

During the campaign, Cohen worked closely with Liberty University to help promote Trump’s candidacy. It was around that time that Cohen heard from the Falwells about the photographs, said the source familiar with Cohen’s thinking.

The Falwells told Cohen that someone had obtained photographs that were embarrassing to them, and was demanding money, the source said. Reuters was unable to determine who made the demand. The source said Cohen flew to Florida and soon met with an attorney for the person with the photographs. Cohen spoke with the attorney, telling the lawyer that his client was committing a crime, and that law enforcement authorities would be called if the demands didn’t stop, the source said.

The matter was soon resolved, the source said, and the lawyer told Cohen that all of the photographs were destroyed.

Yet another Quid pro Quo?

Months later, in early 2016, Trump faced what seemed like an enormous challenge. The Iowa caucus was coming up, and Cohen — then deeply loyal to Trump — was concerned about how Trump would fare, the source said. Cohen felt Trump “was being slaughtered in that community,” and “didn’t want to see him embarrassed or, you know, without support,” said the source familiar with Cohen’s thinking. Cohen repeatedly reached out to Jerry Falwell, and pleaded with him to back Trump, the source said.

Soon after, according to this account, Falwell made his historic announcement. “I am proud to offer my endorsement of Donald J. Trump for President of the United States,” Falwell was quoted saying in a statement issued by the Trump campaign. “He is a successful executive and entrepreneur, a wonderful father and a man who I believe can lead our country to greatness again.

 

UPDATE:

A major reason I’d started to open myself a little more to EmptyWheel’s theory of disinformation is that it did seem that the Dossier claim that Cohen went to Prague to pay off Russian hackers didn’t really fit the picture we’ve seen develop since he begun to cooperate in 2018.

It’s clear he lied about the depth-and length-of his work on Trump Tower Moscow and that he facilitated Trump’s hush money payments but nothing that we’ve seen has linked him to Russian Collusion. Indeed, I started to think that maybe the Russians-Deripaska et al-put in the information about Cohen paying off the hackers to wrongly suggest that Cohen was the QB of Russian Collusion while it’s clearly emerged the QB was Paul Manafort.

Yet when you look at the actual Dossier claim it indeed has Manafort as the QB. It has Cohen as the mopup man after Manafort’s public role on the Trump campaign blewup thanks to the news of his huge payments from the Russian connected Ukrainian oligarchs-Deripaska…

Ok but didn’t the Mueller Report deny Cohen went to Prague? Sort of but it’s vague and at least in the redacted version doesn’t show its work.

Here’s McClatchy after the release of the Mueller Report-who in 2018 reported that there was ping action with Cohen’s cell phone in a tower in Prague and that four Eastern European intel agents overheard the Russians talk about Cohen being in Prague.

The newly released report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller says Donald Trump’s fixer and personal lawyer was not in the Czech Republic months before the 2016 election.

The redacted report is silent on whether investigators received information placing one of Cohen’s devices in or near Prague, as McClatchy reported.

Which is notable as according to McClatchy’s 2018 report Mueller was aware of the evidence regarding the ping action.

McClatchy reported in April 2018 that Mueller’s office had been presented with evidence of Cohen entering the Czech Republic via Germany in late August or early September 2016. Cohen denied the allegation.

In a subsequent story in December 2018, McClatchy reported that it was a pinging cell signal, picked up by a foreign intelligence agency, that geo-located Cohen’s phone to the Prague area. While a contradiction to the assertions in the dossier, compiled by Christopher Steele, this scenario raised the possibility that Cohen was not there but one of the many phones he used was.

In that December 2018 story, McClatchy had also reported that the Eastern European intel agents had overheard the Russians attesting that Cohen was visiting.

A mobile phone traced to President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.”

During the same period of late August or early September, electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague, two people familiar with the incident said.”

According to McClatchy, the Mueller team was aware of this information.

“Both of the newly surfaced foreign electronic intelligence intercepts were shared with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, people familiar with the matter said. Mueller is investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference and whether Trump’s campaign colluded in the scheme. Mueller also is examining whether Trump has obstructed the sweeping inquiry.”

Yet at least the redacted MR has no information about it-wether they did in fact attempt to corroborate this reporting.

What was also interesting at the time was that very soon after McClatchy’s April 2018 reporting, Cohen dropped his lawsuit against Buzzfeed after 16 months. True this was also soon after the FBI raided his office but, one more interesting correlation.

Then there’s Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis. In his interview on Rachel Maddow back in August, 2018 he came pretty close at one point to asserting Cohen knew first hand that the Trump campaign had engaged in what can be described as conspiracy to commit computer crimes.

He later backpedaled furiously. Then at Cohen’s Congressional testimony in March 2019 continued to deny Prague but did testify that he overheard Roger Stone tell Trump about the coming DNC leaked emails before July 22, 2016.

So in retrospect the natural read would be that Cohen was simply referring to overhearing Stone tell Trump about the coming leak of the DNC emails a little bit before the fact. Maybe-maybe not.

But looking at the language he used on Rachel sounded like more than just overhearing a phone call of Trump and Stone colluding in action.

Indeed, Davis had claimed that Cohen had information that went beyond the intent to collude-that was by then already pretty clearly present without Cohen’s revelation about Trump’s phone call with Stone.

Davis said Cohen’s knowledge reached beyond “the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude” and included information on whether Trump participated in a “criminal conspiracy” to hack into the emails of Democratic officials during the 2016 election.”

Beyond collusion… Conspiracy to commit computer crimes-which is a felony. Of course, thanks to the utter failures of the MSM-and the Dem leadership to push back against these failures-No Collusion became ‘reality.’

Even though the Mueller Report has plenty of evidence of collusion-and a decent amount of conspiracy.

On “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Davis, a veteran of the Clinton White House, said his client had “knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on.”

It was already clear, Davis said, that Trump “publicly cheered it on” — an apparent reference to then-candidate Trump’s appeal to Russia in July 2016 to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The question that Trump’s former attorney might be able to answer, Davis said, is “did he also have private information?”

Regarding payments to hackers, in yet another post Marcy Wheeler suggests Peter Smith may have paid the hackers after the drop of the Podesta emails-Chapter A for more.

But now we come full circle. During Trump’s illegitimate regime, a truism is that there’s always a tweet. True and in the same vein regarding Russian Collusion there’s pretty much always an EmptyWheel post. Here’s the post she wrote on April 14, 2018-the day after the original McClatchy article about Cohen in Prague which turns out to be pretty relevant to this discussion:

FN: It’s now 12:06 Tuesday, October 8, 2020. When I begun this chapter on October 7, 2020 there was over 5 hours till this glorious moment. Just checked my Kindle and have Strozk’s, Cohen’s, and Seth Abramson’s books waiting for me. Talk about Christmas come early…

“As you know, I’ve long asserted that the Steele dossier has not been proven — and I extend that caution to the recent report about investigators having found evidence that Michael Cohen traveled from Germany to Czech Republic sometime in 2016.”

Indeed, though, again, to say something hasn’t been proven isn’t the same as declaratively  disproving it-a subtlety not appreciated by the Erik Wemple MSM. And indeed, she herself makes something like this point regarding what Cohen’s lawyer-this was before Lanny Davis, who as a Clinton friend only showed up after Cohen flipped-said in court at the time.

“But as I was writing about something else I couldn’t help but notice something about this paragraph from his lawyers’ motion to show cause (basically, his request to put someone other than the government — preferably his own lawyers — in charge of determining which of the materials they’ve seized are subject to attorney-client privilege).”

“This arduous journey began for Mr. Cohen over 16 months ago with the publication of his name in the so-called Steele dossier. The references to Mr. Cohen in the Steele dossier are false and have been completely debunked. Nevertheless, because of those false allegations, Mr. Cohen has had to spend the last 16 months defending himself in front of numerous government investigatory agencies.”

“It t appears in the statement of fact section, meaning it is supposed to be backed by a statement in the declaration submitted by his attorney, Todd Harrison, as almost every other sentence in that section is.”

But the entire paragraph claiming that the investigation into him derives from the Steele dossier — aside from being false both in this investigation into his taxi business and hush payments, and false in the larger Russia investigation that also pertains to his attempts to set up a Trump Tower in Moscow — is not backed by a sworn declaration at all. Indeed, Harrison is silent on the issue of the Steele dossier.

Cohen would like Judge Kimba Wood to believe that the dossier has been debunked. But his lawyer is unwilling to stake his own legal reputation on the claim.

This is a more subtle version of what Cohen tried in his declaration to the House Intelligence Committee. That declaration stopped short of outright denying the dossier’s allegations (aside that he went to Prague) then, and this one falls even further short.

So whether or not Cohen went to Prague, it seems that his lawyer is unwilling to claim the other things in the dossier are false.”

Above I noted that around the same time the original McClatchy story broke, Cohen dropped his 16 month lawsuit against Buzzfeed.

Emptywheel later updated this post with this:

 “I’ve come up with something that may be a plausible explanation of the new Cohen in Prague news: Buzzfeed hired Anthony Ferrante to conduct an investigation into the dossier claims, in hopes of corroborating enough of it to defeat the several lawsuits — including Cohen’s — against it. His team is precisely the kind of investigator that might be able to scan border crossings with sufficient attention to see Cohen traveling across one. Certainly, if they found anything they would also share with Mueller’s team.”

Wait a minute-how did Ferrante’s investigation go?! Here I am with this deep dive into the Dossier and Buzzfeed has an FBI agent attempt to corroborate it? Excuse me have a little reading to do…

Ok, I’m back. Here is CNN’s story about Ferrante’s investigation almost a full year since the original McClatchy article about Cohen in Prague-and EW’s response.

It looks like overall, Buzzfeed’s investigation worked out pretty well:

Documents unsealed this week lend credence to a theory about Russian election meddling that was first put forward in the Trump-Russia dossier, however they do not corroborate the more explosive claims that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin in the 2016 campaign.

A report from a retired agent who worked for the FBI’s cyber division, submitted as expert testimony in a civil lawsuit, presented new evidence about how Russian intelligence might have exploited a private web hosting company when it fooled top Democratic targets into giving up their passwords. The fruits of those hacks formed the basis of the WikiLeaks email dumps that roiled the race.

The controversial dossier had accused Russian hackers of using those companies, Webzilla and its parent company XBT, as part of their scheme to meddle in the presidential election. The memos, written by a retired British spy, Christopher Steele, also claimed that Russian entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev assisted the cyberattacks “under duress” from Russian intelligence.”

As we saw above, EmptyWheel had included the Dossier’s claims about Webzilla among examples of possible disinformation.

“Misattribution of both what the social media campaign included and who did it, blaming Webzilla rather than Internet Research Agency.”

CNN finished off the article with some mud in Erik Wemple’s eye.

The most salacious allegations in the dossier remain unverified to this day. But the claims that form the bulk of the memos have held up over time, or at least proved to be partially true.

This notably includes Steele’s claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw an effort to interfere in the 2016 election. It also includes allegations of secret contacts between Trump’s team and the Russians during the campaign. Steele gathered this stunning information months before the Russian meddling campaign was publicly confirmed by US intelligence agencies and in court filings from special counsel Robert Mueller.

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article227819279.html

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/15/politics/unsealed-documents-trump-russia-dossier/index.html

There’s always an Emptywheel post 2.0

Emptywheel suggests that ultimately Mueller ended up charging of the stuff that the Dossier alleges Cohen did against others.

She also conjectures Deripaska was one of Steele’s sources-to be sure this implication was in the

above links on the ‘double game’ Deripaska may have been playing.

More intriguing still, as I noted above, Kilimnik was Manafort’s go-between with Oleg Deripaska. That’s interesting because in 2016, Christopher Steele was attempting to convince DOJ’s Bruce Ohr that Deripaska could be a useful source on Russian organized crime. If Steele thought Deripaska would be a useful source for DOJ, he may well have been relying on Deripaska himself. If so, the report that Cohen (who in fact did have communications with Peskov!) was containing the damage of Manafort’s ties to Russian oligarchs might be an attempt to distract from the way that a Russian oligarch was actually working through his handler, Kilimnik, to minimize that damage himself.”

 

Someone Has Already Been Charged for Most of the Actions the Steele Dossier Attributes to Michael Cohen

But she does hold out the possibility that Cohen made at least a small payment to hackers.

Cohen paid some tech company $50,000 in connection with the campaign.

That’s not a whole lot of money, in any case. And if it went to pay off part of the information operation, it would have to have involved some part of the operation not yet publicly identified. Even the one known instance of Trump supporters reaching out to hackers in Europe — Peter Smith’s reported consultation of Weev — is known to have been paid for by other means (in that case, Smith’s own fundraising).

Still, it’s certainly possible that that $50,000 went to some still unidentified entity that played a role in the information operation that, for some reason, didn’t get paid for by Putin’s cronies or the Russian state.

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