Big biz paid Don lawyer millions for access
A CADRE OF companies with business before the government confessed Wednesday to funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to Michael Cohen after the 2016 election — and the longtime Trump attorney reportedly promised at least one of them a direct line to the White House in return.
Cohen created Essential Consultants — which does not have a website or any other public visibility — in 2016 and used it to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels, who was about to go public with claims of an affair with soon-tobe President Trump.
But the personal fixer to Trump also used the shadowy shell company as a vehicle for what some experts suspect could amount to pay-to-play illegal lobbying.
Novartis, a Suisse pharmaceutical giant, landed at the center of those suspicions after an employee revealed Cohen promised the company “an inroad” to the Trump administration in exchange for a one-year contract worth $1.2 million.
“He reached out to us,” the employee told health-oriented news website Stat on Wednesday. “Cohen promised access to not just Trump, but also the circle around him. It was almost as if we were hiring him as a lobbyist.”
Novartis claimed its unconventional contract with Cohen related to consulting services “as to how the Trump administration might approach certain U.S. healthcare policy matters.” The pharma corporation said in a statement that executives met with Cohen once and realized he was “unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated” and decided “not to go further.”
But Novartis nonetheless continued paying Cohen $100,000 a month for the remainder of the one-year contract. Novartis also admitted it was contacted last November by lawyers from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office regarding the company’s deal with Cohen’s firm.
In a striking coincidence, Trump had dinner with Novartis’ soon-to-be CEO Vasant Narasimhan, along with other European executives, at the World Economic Forum in Davos shortly after the date of the final payment to Cohen.
The other big-name corporations who contracted Cohen came up with some creative and at times odd excuses Wednesday.
Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd. said it signed a contract with Essential Consultants last year for “legal consulting concerning accounting standards on production costs.”
Cohen has no known experience of accounting practices, and the arrangement came as the company competed for a $16 billion contract to sell trainer jets to the U.S. Air Force.
KAI also claims it had no individual dealings with Cohen, but didn’t provide details of its dealings with the firm.
AT&T said it hired Cohen to offer advice on working with the new administration in early 2017, around the time of Trump’s inauguration.
The Trump administration at the time was considering the telecom giant’s $85 billion proposal to buy Time Warner Inc.
Columbus Nova, a Manhattan-based investment firm with close ties to sanctioned Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, said it paid Cohen $500,000 between January and August 2017 for consulting services relating to potential real estate ventures.
Mueller’s investigators interviewed Vekselberg and his cousin, Andrew Intrater, the owner of Columbus Nova, about the payments to Cohen earlier this year, according to multiple reports.
Mueller is investigating possible collusion between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign. One of the elements of his investigation is looking into whether Russian operatives tried to make illegal campaign donations via American straw donors.
Attorney Michael Avenatti, who is representing Daniels in a defamation lawsuit against Cohen and Trump, released a cache of documents Tuesday detailing the payments from KAI, Novartis, AT&T and Columbus Nova, among others. Cohen received at least $4.4 million from corporate sources with an interest in the Trump administration between the election and this past January, according to Avenatti’s documents.
Avenatti said the financial transactions reveal Cohen was “selling access to the President of the United States.”
On Wednesday, Avenatti declined to say where he got the information from and called on the Treasury Department to release a trio of suspicious activity reports filed against Cohen’s corporation, which he called a “pay-to-