Russian promised campaign ‘political synergy’
Cohen: Putin meeting offered by Kremlin
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was in touch as far back 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 Mr. Trump and his campaign by playing to both his political aspirations and his personal business interests.
The filings, in cases involving Mr. Cohen and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, cap a dramatic week of revelations in Mr. Mueller’s ongoing investigation of potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
They make clear how witnesses previously close to Mr. Trump — Mr. Cohen once declared he’d “take a bullet” for the president — have since provided damaging information about the president in efforts to come clean to the government and in some cases get lighter prison sentences. One witness, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, provided so much information to prosecutors that Mr.
Mueller this week said he shouldn’t serve any prison time.
The interviews with prosecutors have yielded intimate information about episodes under close examination, including possible Russian collusion and hush money payments during the campaign to a porn star and a Playboy model who say they had sex with Mr. Trump a decade earlier.
In one of the filings, Mr. Mueller details how Mr. Cohen spoke to a Russian who “claimed to be a ‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign ‘political synergy’ and ‘synergy on a government level.’” The person repeatedly dangled a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s business hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Cohen admitted last week to lying to Congress by saying discussions about a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016 when in fact they stretched into that June, well into the U.S. campaign.
Mr. Cohen told prosecutors he never followed up, though the offer bore echoes of a proposal presented by Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who raised the idea to other advisers of leveraging his connections to set up a Putin encounter.
In an additional filing Friday evening, prosecutors said Mr. Manafort lied to them about his contacts with a Russian associate and Trump administration officials, including in 2018.
The court papers say that Mr. Manafort initially told prosecutors he didn’t have any contact with anyone while they were in the Trump administration. But prosecutors say they recovered “electronic documents” showing his contacts with multiple administration officials. The officials are not identified in the court filings.
Mr. Manafort, who has pleaded guilty to several counts, violated his plea agreement by then telling “multiple discernible lies” to prosecutors, they said.
Prosecutors in Mr. Cohen’s case said that even though he cooperated in their investigation into the hush money payments to women he nonetheless deserved to spend time in prison.
“Cohen did provide information to law enforcement, including information that assisted the Special Counsel’s Office,” they said. “But Cohen’s description of those efforts is overstated in some respects and incomplete in others.”
Mr. Cohen, dubbed Mr. Trump’s “legal fixer” in the past, also described his work in conjunction with Mr. Trump in orchestrating hush money payments to two women — adult actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal — who said they had sex with Mr. Trump.
Prosecutors in New York, where Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in August in connection with those payments, said the lawyer “acted in coordination and at the direction” of Mr. Trump, suggesting they had implicated him in Mr. Cohen’s crime.
Despite such specific allegations of Mr. Trump’s actions, the president quickly tweeted after news of the filings: “Totally clears the President. Thank you!”
In addition, the filings reveal that Mr. Cohen told prosecutors he and Mr. Trump discussed a potential meeting with Mr. Putin on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in 2015, shortly after Mr. Trump announced his candidacy for president.