Probe turns up contact with Russia
Trump lawyer met Russian offering ‘political synergy'
President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was in touch as early as 2015 with a Russian who offered “political synergy” with the Trump election campaign and proposed a meeting between the candidate and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the special counsel said Friday.
Court filings from prosecutors in New York and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office lay out previously undisclosed contacts between Trump associates and Russian intermediaries and suggest the Kremlin aimed early on to influence Trump and his campaign by playing to his political aspirations and personal business interests.
The filings, in cases involving Cohen and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, cap a dramatic week of revelations in Mueller’s ongoing investigation into potential co-ordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
They make clear how witnesses previously close to Trump — Cohen once declared he’d “take a bullet” for the president — have since provided damaging information about him in efforts to come clean to the government and in some cases get lighter prison sentences.
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn provided so much information to prosecutors that Mueller this week said he shouldn’t serve any prison time.
Mueller details how Cohen spoke to someone who “claimed to be a ‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign ‘political synergy’.” The person repeatedly dangled a meeting between Trump and Putin, saying such a meeting could have a “phenomenal” impact “not only in political but in a business dimension as well”.
That was a reference to a proposed Moscow real estate deal that prosecutors say could have netted Trump’s business hundreds of millions of dollars. Cohen admitted last week to lying to Congress by saying talk about a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016 when in fact they stretched into that June, well into the US election campaign.
Cohen told prosecutors he never followed up.
In an additional filing, prosecutors said Manafort lied about contact with a Russian associate and Trump administration officials.
The filings also reveal that Cohen told prosecutors he and Trump discussed a potential meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in 2015, shortly after Trump announced his candidacy for president. The meeting never took place.