Michael Cohen

Ronan Farrow: “Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, had used a shell company to receive payments from various firms with business before the Trump Administration. In the days since, there has been much speculation about who leaked the confidential documents, and the Treasury Department’s inspector general has launched a probe to find the source.”

“That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen’s financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.”

“Seven former government officials and other experts familiar with the Treasury Department’s FinCEN database expressed varying levels of concern about the missing reports. Some speculated that FinCEN may have restricted access to the reports due to the sensitivity of their content, which they said would be nearly unprecedented. One called the possibility ‘explosive.'”

“Three days after President Trump was sworn into office, the telecom giant AT&T turned to his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for help on a wide portfolio of issues pending before the federal government — including the company’s proposed merger with Time Warner,” the Washington Post reports.

“The internal documents reveal for the first time that Cohen’s $600,000 deal with AT&T specified that he would provide advice on the $85 billion merger, which required the approval of federal antitrust regulators. Trump had voiced opposition to the merger during the presidential campaign, and his administration ultimately opposed the AT&T effort.”

“The Treasury Department’s inspector general is investigating whether confidential banking information related to a company controlled by President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen may have been leaked,” the Washington Post reports.

“One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical corporations acknowledged Wednesday morning that it paid a company set up by Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, for consulting services and that it was contacted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office regarding those payments this past fall and ‘cooperated fully,'” BuzzFeed News reports.

“In the statement, Novartis said it entered into a one-year contract with Essential Consultants LLC, a company set up by Cohen in 2016 to facilitate the payment to Stormy Daniels… The revelation means that the special counsel’s office has been looking into payments to Cohen’s company for some time — months before the Wall Street Journal broke the news of the payment to Daniels in January.”

The New York Times notes that Michael Cohen’s businesses “are private entities, making it difficult to get a full picture of their finances and operations. But a review of public records and interviews  “reveal the degree to which he has often operated in the backwaters of the financial and legal worlds.”

“While he has not been charged with a crime, many of his associates have faced either criminal charges or stiff regulatory penalties.”

“He has spent much of his personal and professional life with immigrants from Russia and Ukraine. His father-in-law, who helped establish him in the taxi business, was born in Ukraine, as was one of Mr. Cohen’s partners in that industry. Another partner was Russian. And Mr. Cohen used his connections in the region when scouting business opportunities for Mr. Trump in former Soviet republics.”

“Federal investigators monitored the phone lines of Michael Cohen, the longtime personal lawyer for President Trump who is under investigation for a payment he made to an adult film star who alleged she had an affair with Trump,” NBC News reports.

Update: NBC News issued an on-air correction reporting that federal authorities were “monitoring” Cohen’s phone calls but not listening to them as previously reported.