Mueller opens floodgates
Federal court filings say Trump lawyer met Russian intermediary offering “political synergy”
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 Trump and his campaign by playing to his political aspirations and his personal business interests.
The filings, in cases involving Cohen and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, cap a dramatic week of revelations in Mueller’s ongoing investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
They make clear how witnesses previously close to Trump — Cohen once declared he would “take a bullet” for the president — have since provided damaging information about him 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 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 hushmoney payments during the campaign to a porn star and Playboy model who say they had sex with Trump a decade earlier.
In one of the filings, Mueller details how 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 Trump and 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 Trump’s business hundreds of millions of dollars. 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.
Cohen told prosecutors he never followed up, although 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 Manafort lied to them about his contacts with a Russian associate and Trump administration officials, including in 2018.
The court papers say that 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.
Manafort, who has pleaded guilty to several counts, violated his plea agreement by then telling “multiple discernible lies” to prosecutors, they said.
Prosecutors in Cohen’s case said that even though he cooperated in their in- vestigation into the hushmoney 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.”
Cohen, dubbed Trump’s “legal fixer” in the past, also described his work in conjunction with Trump in orchestrating hush money payments to two women — adult actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal — who said they had sex with Trump.
Prosecutors in New York, where Cohen pleaded guilty in August in connection with those payments, said the lawyer “acted in coordination and at the direction” of Trump, suggesting they had implicated him in Cohen’s crime.
Despite such specific allegations of Trump’s actions, the president quickly tweeted after news of the filings: “Totally clears the President. Thank you!”
In addition, the filings reveal that Cohen told prosecutors he and Trump discussed a potential meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in 2015, shortly after Trump announced his candidacy for president.
Mueller’s team writes that Cohen conferred with Trump “about contacting the Russia government before reaching out to gauge Russia’s interest in such a meeting.”
In meetings with Mueller’s team, Cohen “provided information about his own contacts with Russian interests during the campaign and discussions with others in the course of making those contacts,” the court documents said.
Cohen provided prosecutors with a “detailed account” of his involvement, along with the involvement of others, in efforts during the 2016 presidential campaign to complete a deal to build a Trump Tower Moscow, the documents said. He also provided information about attempts by Russian nationals to reach Trump’s campaign, they said.