Courtesy of Pam Martens
Michael Cohen Leaves Federal Court in Manhattan, April 16, 2018
It’s clear from the prosecutors’ filings in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that they believe President Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, has lied to them and is concealing information from them.
Last Friday evening, McClatchy newspapers dropped a bombshell that provided some insight into what some of those black redacted passages in the government’s court filings in the Cohen case might refer to. McClatchy reporters Peter Stone and Greg Gordon write that Special Counsel Robert Mueller “has evidence” that Cohen did, in fact, make a “late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign.”
Cohen has publicly denied any such trip and produced his passport to back up his story. The McClatchy article says “Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany, apparently during August or early September of 2016… He wouldn’t have needed a passport for such a trip, because both countries are in the so-called Schengen Area in which 26 nations operate with open borders.”
The allegation that Cohen had traveled to Prague and met with a powerful Russian oligarch close to Putin first appeared in the dossier prepared by former MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, as part of his work for Trump’s political opponents, one of which was the Hillary Clinton campaign. Steele eventually turned the dossier over to the FBI. Buzzfeed published the dossier in January 2017.
The McClatchy reporters write that they gave both Cohen and his lawyer an opportunity to comment for their story, but neither responded to the requests. If no such meeting in Prague occurred, why not say so as Cohen had been doing for months? The reporters cite two unnamed sources for their information and note further that Cohen has failed to provide investigators with hard documentation for his whereabouts at the time of the alleged Prague meeting. The reporters also note that “Cohen has publicly acknowledged making three trips to Europe that year – to Italy in July, England in early October and a third after Trump’s November election.” That’s a lot of European travel when your major client is in the contest of his life – running in a close campaign to be President of the United States.
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