A special master reviewing a trove of documents and electronic files seized in April from Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, said that, at least so far, only a tiny fraction of the materials are protected by the attorney-client privilege, the New York Times reports.
That means that most can be used by the federal prosecutors who are conducting a wide-ranging criminal investigation into Cohen.
Jonathan Swan: “On election night 2016, shortly after Donald Trump’s team realized he would win the presidency, Michael Cohen told a handful of people on the 14th floor of Trump Tower about his own dreams for the future — to be mayor of New York.”
Said Cohen: “This is the beginning of a dynasty.”
He added: “I’ve already got the bug. Nobody’s going to be able to fuck with us. I think I’m going to run for mayor.”
NPR published the audio of President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, making threats against a reporter for the Daily Beast in 2015.
A sample: “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. Do you understand me? Don’t think you can hide behind your pen because it’s not going to happen. I’m more than happy to discuss it with your attorney and with your legal counsel because motherfucker you’re going to need it.”
“Eleven days before the presidential inauguration last year, a billionaire Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin visited Trump Tower in Manhattan to meet with Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen,” the New York Times reports.
“In Mr. Cohen’s office on the 26th floor, he and the oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, discussed a mutual desire to strengthen Russia’s relations with the United States under President Trump… The men also arranged to see one another at the inauguration.”
Michael Cohen “received a secret payment of at least $400,000 to fix talks between the Ukrainian president and President Trump,” sources in Kiev close tell the BBC.
“The payment was arranged by intermediaries acting for Ukraine’s leader, Petro Poroshenko, the sources said, though Cohen was not registered as a representative of Ukraine as required by US law.”
“The meeting at the White House was last June. Shortly after the Ukrainian president returned home, his country’s anti-corruption agency stopped its investigation into Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.”
“A significant business partner of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, has quietly agreed to cooperate with the government as a potential witness, a development that could be used as leverage to pressure Mr. Cohen to work with the special counsel examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election,” the New York Times reports.
“Under the agreement, the partner, Evgeny A. Freidman, a Russian immigrant who is known as the Taxi King, will avoid jail time, and will assist government prosecutors in state or federal investigations.”
Michael Cohen worked secretly to negotiate a business venture and a meeting between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow aven after Trump denied doing business in Russia, BuzzFeed News reports.
“While fragments of the Trump Moscow venture have trickled out — most recently in a report last night by Yahoo News — this is the definitive story of the Moscow tower, told from a trove of emails, text messages, congressional testimony, architectural renderings, and other documents obtained exclusively by BuzzFeed News, as well as interviews with key players and investigators. The documents reveal a detailed and plausible plan, well-connected Russian counterparts, and an effort that extended from spearfishing with a Russian developer on a private island to planning for a mid-campaign trip to Moscow for the presidential candidate himself.”
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.'”
“Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was informed about allegations of sexual misconduct by then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) around 2013,” Bloomberg reports.
“Trump’s potential knowledge of allegations against Schneiderman haven’t previously been disclosed, although the men have publicly feuded over Trump’s business practices. Schneiderman sought to sue Trump University in state court in 2012, and filed a complaint the next year in federal court, claiming the for-profit school defrauded students.”
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson “said in a staffwide memo sent on Friday that the company had made a ‘big mistake’ by hiring President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to advise on the telecommunication giant’s deal to buy Time Warner,” the New York Times reports.
Said Stephenson: “Our company has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons these last few days and our reputation has been damaged. There is no other way to say it — AT&T hiring Michael Cohen as a political consultant was a big mistake.”
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports the company’s top lobbyist was forced into retirement.
“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.
Drug giant Novartis paid President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen $1.2 million for health-care policy consulting work that he actually ended up being “unable” to do, CNBC reports.
Novartis said it believed Cohen “could advise the company as to how the Trump administration might approach certain U.S. health-care policy matters, including the Affordable Care Act.”
But just a month after signing the deal, Novartis executives had their first meeting with Cohen, and afterward “determined that Michael Cohen and Essentials Consultants would be unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated.”
“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.”
Rudy Giuliani told NBC News that President Trump “only recently found out that he reimbursed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 nondisclosure agreement with adult performer Stormy Daniels just days before the 2016 election.”
Said Giuliani: “I don’t think the president realized he paid him back for that specific thing until we made him aware of the paperwork.”
Giuliani said the president responded: “Oh my goodness, I guess that’s what it was for.”
“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.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.