Michael Cohen Testifying to House and Senate Committees This Week

Photo source: Richard Drew/AP

Donald Trump’s lawyer has a lot of explaining to do.
Michael Cohen, 51, now listed on Wikipedia as “personal lawyer for Donald Trump,” previously served as executive vice president of the Trump Organization and special counsel to Donald Trump. His name keeps popping up in issues of interest to House, Senate, and FBI investigations into the Trump campaign and possible dealings with representatives of the Russian government. He will speak privately to the house Intelligence Committee Tuesday, and to the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday. He had been scheduled to speak to the Senate committee last week, but the meeting was postponed. He had been scheduled to speak to the House September 5, but that was also postpones.

​As reported in the Huffington Post in August:

"Cohen (and President Donald Trump) have insisted for more than a year that the Trump Organization has had no business dealings in Russia. Cohen has been one of the president’s most dogged defenders in the media on that point, taking his case to TV, Twitter ― anywhere, basically. Speaking to the Financial Times in December, he dismissed the idea of ‘any connection with Russia’ as 'yet another example of the press’s liberal bias towards Mr. Trump.'”

However, The New York Times reported on August 28 that a planned business deal was in the works in 2015, and that work continued on the deal during the campaign, while Trump and Cohen were insisting that suggestion of such a thing was a liberal plot.

From the NYT article:
 
“Felix Sater ... wrote a series of emails to Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, in which he boasted about his ties to Mr. Putin. He predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would highlight Mr. Trump’s savvy negotiating skills and be a political boon to his candidacy.

“‘Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,’ Mr. Sater wrote in an email. ‘I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.’”

Mr. Sater is an ex-felon and Russian immigrant who, while Trump has denied an association with him, worked for the Trump Organization at the time.

The NYT article on the Moscow deal can be found here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/politics/trump-tower-putin-felix-sater.html?_r=0

The Huffington Post article can be found here.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/?icid=hjx004

The Washington Post article about the Moscow deal can be found here.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-trump-organization-executive-reached-out-to-putin-aide-for-help-on-business-deal/2017/08/28/095aebac-8c16-11e7-84c0-02cc069f2c37_story.html?utm_term=.7ecf8c57df3d

NBC News reported today that “Cohen had written an email to Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, seeking help in getting the Moscow tower built. But Peskov said he never responded to the email.”

The NBC News story can be found here.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-lawyer-michael-cohen-appear-house-intel-panel-tuesday-n813521

Cohen and Sater also partnered on a back-channel plan, crafted with the help of a pro-Putin Ukrainian lawmaker, designed to bring peace to the Ukrainian-Russian conflict in Crimea. The plan was delivered by Cohen in a sealed envelope to the desk of soon-to-be-fired National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in February, according to The New York Times.

The NYT article about the back-channel plan can be found here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/us/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-russia.html

Cohen’s relationship with Trump appears to have begun while he and his family were buying up numerous Trump apartment units in New York, New Jersey, and Florida, according to a March 1 article by Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo. By 2006 or 2007, when Cohen entered the Trump orbit, he had already made a fortune: “The one common thread connecting these partnerships in businesses ranging from taxis to gambling to energy is that each involved a partnership with immigrants from Ukraine.”

The article from Talking Points Memo can be found here.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/says-who-piecing-together-the-michael-cohen-story

A Vanity Fair article about Michael Cohen from September can be found here.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/michael-cohen-interview-donald-trump

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