The Washington Post details today the interest Special Counsel Robert Mueller has in President Trump's longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
WaPo:
One area of focus has been negotiations Cohen undertook during the campaign to help the Trump Organization build a tower in Moscow. Cohen brought Trump a letter of intent in October 2015 from a Russian developer to build a Moscow project. Later, he sent an email to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chief spokesman seeking help to advance the stalled project. He said he did not recall receiving a response.
Another area that Mueller’s team has explored is a Russia-friendly peace proposal for Ukraine that was delivered to Cohen by a Ukrainian lawmaker one week after Trump took office ...
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Known for his combative style and fierce loyalty to Trump, Cohen served for a decade as a top lawyer at the Trump Organization, tangling with reporters and Trump’s business competitors on behalf of the celebrity real estate mogul.
He never formally joined Trump’s campaign but was in close contact with his longtime boss from his Trump Tower office throughout the 2016 race and presidential transition.
Mueller reportedly is asking for documents and information related to the Trump Tower Moscow project and his investigators are probing the circumstances surrounding the Ukrainian peace proposal. The players involved in handling that plan have offered conflicting accounts of what took place and how involved Russia may have been.
[Convicted criminal Felix] Sater organized a Jan. 27, 2017, meeting at the Loews Regency hotel in New York during which Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii V. Artemenko gave Cohen the proposal, according to interviews last year with the three participants.
The back-channel proposal offered a pathway for resolving the Ukrainian dispute that could have led to the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russia and given Putin a prize he has long sought — undisputed control over Crimea, territory that Russia seized in 2014.
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All three men who participated in the January meeting have said that the initiative was driven solely by their joint desire for peace in war-torn Ukraine and that nothing came of the proposal.
But Cohen, Sater and Artemenko — who at the time served in the Ukrainian parliament — have offered conflicting accounts of key aspects of their interactions, including whether the proposal reached the White House, as Artemenko had intended.
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Cohen told The Post that Artemenko had announced during their brief meeting that he had devised the proposal in consultation with the Russian government.
“He said Russia was on board — the Russian government,” Cohen said.
Artemenko, who had served in the Ukrainian parliament since 2014, told The Post last year that he spoke to no Russian officials and that his proposal was the product of consultations among Ukrainians, including other lawmakers.
Meanwhile, The Daily Beast reveals someone from the House Intelligence Committee is leaking information to Cohen.
David Kramer, a former staffer for Senator John McCain (R-AZ), testified before the committee on December 19, 2017 on the role he played in bringing the Steele dossier to the FBI. Days later, Kramer's lawyer – Larry Robbins – got a call from Cohen's lawyer – Stephen Ryan – saying he heard Kramer had information that could help Cohen. When Robbins refused to help Ryan, Ryan asked that Robbins not mention the call to the House Intel Committee. Robbins did.
Cohen is facing scrutiny from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and congressional investigators regarding potential coordination between Trump’s team and the Kremlin. He featured prominently in the Steele dossier—the document that Kramer handled—and is currently suing Buzzfeed for publishing it.
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CNN reported in February that Robbins wrote a letter to the committee complaining about leaks to another client’s lawyer. The Daily Beast can now confirm that this letter was regarding Stephen Ryan and Michael Cohen.
Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen Received Inside Info From Russia Probe (Daily Beast)
Special counsel has examined episodes involving Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer (WaPo)