Cohen, Russian met before inauguration
Video footage shows billionaire oligarch at Trump Tower
Eleven days before the presidential inauguration last year, a billionaire Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin visited Trump Tower in Manhattan to meet with Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, according to video footage and another person who attended the meeting.
In Cohen’s office on the 26th floor, he and the oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, discussed a mutual desire to strengthen Russia’s relations with the United States under the Trump administration, according to Andrew Intrater, a U.S. businessman who attended the meeting and invests money for Vekselberg. The men also arranged to see one another during the inauguration festivities, the second of their three meetings, Intrater said.
Days after the inauguration, Intrater’s private equity firm, Columbus Nova, awarded Cohen a $1 million consulting contract, a deal that has drawn the attention of federal authorities investigating Cohen, according to people briefed on the inquiry.
Intrater said in an interview that Vekselberg, his cousin and biggest client, had no role in Columbus Nova’s decision to hire Cohen as a consultant. When asked about the meeting at Trump Tower during the presidential transition, Intrater described it as a brief and impromptu discussion and said Vekselberg had not originally planned to attend.
“Obviously, if I’d known in January 2017 that I was about to hire this high-profile guy who’d wind up in this big mess, I wouldn’t have introduced him to my biggest client, and wouldn’t have hired him at all,” Intrater said. He agreed to be interviewed about his dealings with Cohen, he said, because he had done nothing wrong.
The disclosure sheds additional light on the intersection between Trump’s inner circle and Russians with ties to the Kremlin. The meeting came months after Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. met at Trump Tower during the campaign with a Kremlinlinked lawyer claiming to have damaging information on the candidate’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and a former campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, met with Russian intermediaries in Europe. During the campaign, Cohen himself was pursuing a deal to build a Trump high-rise in Moscow, which did not come to fruition.
Cohen’s meeting with Vekselberg happened during his final days as a Trump Organization employee, at a time when his position in Trump’s orbit seemed uncertain.
Cohen’s goal for the meeting — and whether it may have been related to his consulting business — remains unclear.
His lawyers, and lawyers for Vekselberg, did not respond to requests for comment when told about video footage from C-SPAN showing Vekselberg and Intrater arriving at Trump Tower on Jan. 9, 2017. Intrater said the meeting included only a brief discussion about relations between the United States and Russia.
The meetings and Columbus Nova’s payments to Cohen have attracted scrutiny from Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election, as well as federal prosecutors in Manhattan examining Cohen’s business activities and finances, the people said.
Early this year, Mueller’s investigators stopped Vekselberg at a New York-area airport after he arrived on a private plane. Mueller’s investigators have interviewed Intrater twice, focusing on his dealings with Cohen.