HIDDEN DEPTHS
Cohen probe began 6 mos. into Don’s term
Special counsel Robert Mueller suspected Michael Cohen was secretly working as a foreign agent and began investigating the former fixer to President Trump nearly a year before FBI agents raided his Manhattan homes and office, according to a trove of search warrants made public Tuesday.
The 895 pages of heavily redacted warrant applications reveal Mueller asked for a court order for Cohen’s emails in July 2017, far earlier than previously known and less than six months after Trump became President.
The email warrant appears to have been one of Mueller’s first moves after he was appointed in May 2017 to probe possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians before the 2016 election.
In a search warrant application for one of Cohen’s email accounts, Mueller said he suspected Cohen had committed bank fraud, money laundering and acted as an unregistered foreign agent.
It isn’t clear which country Mueller suspected Cohen of working for, but at the time he was using a shell company, Essential Consultants, to accept payments from numerous entities seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration.
Among them was Columbus Nova, a New York investment firm controlled by a company owned by Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch who has been sanctioned by the U.S. and maintains close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Columbus Nova funneled more than $580,000 into Cohen’s company in seven payments between January and August 2017, according to the court papers.
Vekselberg, who has been interviewed by Mueller’s investigators, denies wrongdoing and claims the payments related to Columbus Nova contracting Cohen for potential real estate deals.
Cohen, 52, was never charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent, and Mueller referred prosecution to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which raided his Midtown apartment, hotel room and office in April 2018. FBI agents also raided a bank safety deposit box and tapped two of his cell phones and at least five email accounts.
Cohen also used Essential Consultants to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign after she threatened to go public with claims of an affair with Trump over a decade previous. He used the same shell company to cover personal expenses, including credit card bills and fees from a private social club in Manhattan called The Core Club.
Prosecutors were also eyeing Cohen for violations of campaign finance law relating to the payment to Daniels. Cohen separately committed campaign-finance crimes by brokering a deal before the election to buy the silence of Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate who also claims to have had an affair with Trump.
Details of what the feds called an “illegal campaign contribution scheme” were redacted from the documents. A 19-page section detailing the scheme was blocked out — a sign that the investigation is ongoing.
Cohen has been sentenced to three years in prison for the various crimes he pleaded guilty to, which included lying to Congress, and campaign-finance crimes.
The Cohen search warrants were released by Manhattan Federal Judge William Pauley in response to a request filed by the Daily News and other outlets.
Before the mass release, Cohen attorney Lanny Davis said the publication “only furthers his interest in continuing to cooperate and providing information and the truth about Donald Trump and the Trump Organization.”