Acting like he’s lobbyist could be a fed crime

Stormy att’y: It’S pay to play

ADD POTENTIAL lobbying law violations to Michael Cohen’s list of legal woes. The embattled attorney and personal fixer to President Trump might have broken federal law by reportedly billing himself as an informal White House lobbyist, promising sweeping access to the President to corporations with business before the government. It started Tuesday when porn star Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti released a bombshell dossier revealing that several companies, including one with ties to a sanctioned Russian oligarch, paid Cohen’s consulting firm, Essential Consultants, millions of dollars in the early days of the Trump administration. The transactions are murky and the exact nature of many of them remains unclear. But on Wednesday, an employee at pharmaceutical giant Novartis revealed Cohen approached the company as a “lobbyist” while it was trying to gauge an idea of how the Trump administration would approach health care policies. “He reached out to us,” the employee told health-oriented trade publication Stat. “We were trying to find an inroad into the administration. 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.” Telecom giant AT&T, aircraft manufacturer Korea Aerospace Industries and Manhattanbased investment firm Columbus Nova all paid Essential Consultants for a variety of services between the election and this past January, according to Avenatti’s records. But the Novartis transaction appears particularly problematic, according to former federal Illinois prosecutor Renato Mariotti. “The main issue that came to me right away is that he’s not registered as a lobbyist,” Mariotti, an expert on white collar crime, told the Daily News. Mariotti said unregistered lobbying isn’t in and of itself a crime. “It typically results in a fine,” Mariotti said. However, Cohen could have committed a crime if he actively tried to conceal the fact that he was operating as an illegal lobbyist. Mariotti said the concealment factor could be at play in the case of Cohen’s consulting firm. “He didn’t advertise his services as a lobbyist anywhere,” Mariotti said of Essential, which doesn’t have a website or any other public visibility. “Hiding it would be making it a crime.” Avenatti agreed with Mariotti’s assessment. “Evidently, the personal attorney to Mr. Trump (NOT a lobbying firm) was actively soliciting clients and trying to sell access to the highest office in the land,” Avenatti tweeted. But Mariotti said lobbying law violations are likely the least of Cohen’s worries. “It’s a really bad time for Michael Cohen right now,” he said. “You don’t need to be a lawyer to realize that when the FBI raids your office and your home you’re in really bad trouble.”