Cohen allegedly met Russians in Prague
Trump lawyer has denied campaign trip for vote meddling
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Confirmation of the trip would lend credence to a retired British spy’s report that Cohen strategized there with a powerful Kremlin figure about Russian meddling in the U.S. election.
It would also be one of the most significant developments thus far in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of whether the Trump campaign and the Kremlin worked together to help Trump win the presidency.
Trump’s threats to fire Mueller or the deputy attorney general overseeing the investigation, Rod Rosenstein, escalated last week when the FBI raided Cohen’s home, hotel room and office Monday. The raid was unrelated to the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, but instead focused on payments made to women who have said they had sexual relationships with Trump.
Cohen has denied for months that he ever has been in Prague or colluded with Russia during the campaign. Neither he nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment.
It’s unclear whether Mueller’s investigators also have evidence that Cohen met with a prominent Russian — purportedly Konstantin Kosachev, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — in the Czech capital. Kosachev, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee of a body of the Russian legislature, the Federation Council, also has denied visiting Prague in 2016. This month, Kosachev was among 24 highprofile Russians whom the U.S. sanctioned in retaliation for Russia’s meddling.
But investigators have traced evidence that Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany, apparently in August or early September 2016 as the former spy reported, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Cohen wouldn’t have needed a passport for such a trip, because both countries are in the Schengen Area, in which 26 nations have open borders. The disclosure still left a puzzle: The sources did not say whether Cohen took a commercial flight or private jet to Europe, and gave no explanation of why no record of such a trip has surfaced.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller’s office, declined to comment. First noted in Steele dossier
Unconfirmed reports of a clandestine Prague meeting came to public attention in January 2017, with the publication of a dossier purporting to detail the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia — a series of reports that former British MI6 officer Christopher Steele gathered from Kremlin sources for Trump’s political opponents, including Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Cohen’s alleged communications with the Russians were mentioned several times in Steele’s reports, which he shared with the FBI.
When the news site Buzzfeed published the entire dossier Jan. 11, 2017, Trump denounced the news organization as “a failing pile of garbage” and said the document was “false and fake.”
Cohen, in a Twitter post, said, “I have never been to Prague in my life.”
In the ensuing months, Cohen allowed Buzzfeed to inspect his passport and, again on Twitter, said, “The #Russian dossier is WRONG!”
Democratic investigators for the House and Senate intelligence committees, which are conducting parallel inquiries into Russia’s election interference, also are skeptical about whether Cohen was truthful about his 2016 travels to Europe when the interviewed him last October, two people familiar with those investigations said this week. Cohen has publicly acknowledged making three trips to Europe that year — to Italy in July, England in early October and a third after Trump’s November election. The investigators intend to press Cohen for more information, the sources said.
One of the sources said congressional investigators have ”a high level of interest“in Cohen’s European travel, with their doubts fueled by what they deem to be weak documentation Cohen provided about his whereabouts around the time the Prague meeting supposedly occurred.
Cohen has said he was only in New York and briefly in Los Angeles in August, when the meeting may have occurred, though the sources said it also could have been held in early September.
The dossier alleges that Cohen, two Russians and several Eastern European hackers met at the Prague office of a Russian government-backed social and cultural organization, Rossotrudnichestvo. The location was selected to provide an alternative explanation in case the rendezvous was exposed, according to Steele’s Kremlin sources, cultivated during 20 years of spying on Russia. It said Oleg Solodukhin, the deputy chief of Rossotrudnichestvo’s operation in the Czech Republic, attended the meeting, too.
Further, it alleges that Cohen, Kosachev and other attendees discussed “how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers in Europe who had worked under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign.” Hacking Democrats’ emails
U.S. intelligence agencies and cyberexperts say Kremlinbacked hackers pirated copies of thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta in 2015 and 2016, some of which politically damaging, including messages showing that the DNC was biased toward Clinton in the party’s nomination battle against Sen. Bernie Sanders. Mueller’s investigators have sought to learn who passed the emails to WikiLeaks, a London-based transparency group, which published them in July and October, embarrassing Clinton and her backers.
Citing information from an unidentified “Kremlin insider,” Steele’s dossier says the Prague meeting agenda also included discussion — in cryptic language for security reasons — of how to “sweep it all under the carpet and make sure no connection could be fully established or proven.” Romanians were among the hackers present, it says, and the discussion touched on using Bulgaria as a location where they could “lie low.”
It is a felony for anyone to hack email accounts. Other laws forbid foreigners from contributing money or in-kind services to U.S. political campaigns.
If Cohen met with Russians and hackers in Prague as described in the dossier, it could be the most compelling evidence so far that the Russians and Trump campaign aides collaborated. Mueller’s office also has focused on two meetings in spring 2016 when Russians offered to provide Trump campaign aides with “dirt” on Clinton — including thousands of emails.
Cohen is in the spotlight because of the FBI raids on his offices and home in New York. Various news organizations have reported that investigators principally sought evidence on non-Russia matters, including a covert $130,000 payment Cohen made days before the 2016 election to porn star Stormy Daniels to silence her about an alleged affair with Trump. The FBI raids also seized some of Cohen’s computers and cellphones, among other evidence, according to these reports.
CNN, which reported Friday that Cohen’s business dealings have been a subject of a separate monthslong investigation by prosecutors in the federal Southern District of New York, also quoted sources as saying that Cohen often recorded phone conversations and that the FBI could have those recording.
Knowledge that Cohen may have traveled to Prague during the campaign could heighten Trump’s risk of being prosecuted for obstruction of justice if news reports are accurate that he is considering firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the Mueller investigation, or Mueller.
If the Prague meeting occurred, Kosachev’s possible involvement would be especially significant given his close ties to Putin and other roles he has played in covert Moscow efforts to destabilize other countries, Russia experts said.