Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  From a preliminary survey of published reports, Fusion saw that, since joining the Trump Organization in 2007, Cohen had been involved in a portfolio of Trump’s sketchiest overseas projects. He worked on the failed Trump Tower project in the Republic of Georgia and sponsored mixed martial arts events with Russian fighters under a Trump MMA brand. He pursued a catering hall on Long Island that would carry Trump’s name. The project stalled, but Cohen knew this world well. His uncle Morton Levine owned a Brooklyn club and catering hall called El Caribe, notorious throughout the city as a mob hangout.

  Fascinated by these strands, Fusion asked Steele in the fall of 2016 to see whether Cohen rang any bells among his sources in Russia. On October 18, Steele filed a memo with the first mention of Cohen. “Kremlin insider highlights importance of TRUMP’s lawyer, Michael COHEN in covert relationship with Russia.” The memo stated cryptically that Cohen was playing “a key role in the secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship.” Steele didn’t know much more than that. Simpson and Steele’s theory was that when Manafort resigned from the campaign in August, Cohen likely became an important liaison for contacts in Russia.

  At the time, Trump was denying any business interactions with Russia, and no one outside the Trump Organization knew that Cohen had actually been pursuing a major Moscow tower project since late 2015, a quest that lasted at least into the early summer of 2016. Nor did anyone, back in the United States, realize how closely he was working with Trump and the National Enquirer to bury negative stories that involved Trump’s alleged history of adultery, spousal abuse, and other sordid matters. As Trump’s Mr. Fix-it, Cohen was putting out myriad fires all the way up to Election Day, sometimes with big cash payments.

  At Fusion’s urging, Steele kept pushing his sources for more information on Cohen. Two days after his first memo mentioning Cohen, he came back with more: In August, Cohen had held a secret meeting with “Kremlin officials” in Prague, Steele’s source said.

  It was a stunning report. While there was no way to immediately verify Cohen’s whereabouts, other aspects of the Prague reporting fit with information coming in at the time from independent sources. One of the Russians who Steele said was at the meeting ran the Prague office of a Russian government cultural organization that the U.S. authorities believed was a front for Russian intelligence.

  Cohen largely faded from view in the post-election scramble. He hung on for a few months with his Trump Organization job but then, after being rebuffed for an administration post, sought to cash in on his ties to the incoming president.

  Fusion had long believed that Cohen shouldn’t be forgotten so easily. A month after the election, Simpson raised his concerns about Cohen with Bruce Ohr during their December 10 meeting at Peet’s Coffee. “Simpson identified Michael Cohen, a lawyer in Brooklyn, NY as having many Russian clients in the Brighton Beach, NY area,” an FBI summary of the meeting recounted. “Cohen may have attended a meeting in Prague, possibly in September, regarding the Trump Campaign and the Russians.”

  Most Americans first heard of Michael Cohen one month later, on January 10, 2017, when BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier and its allegation that Cohen had had one or more secret meetings with Russian representatives in Prague the summer before. It was a simple, tangible, and shocking allegation, and one that Cohen swiftly rebutted on Twitter. “I have never been to Prague in my life. #fakenews,” he posted that same evening, along with a photo of the cover of a passport. He appeared live the next day on both Sean Hannity’s radio show and Fox News, laughing off suggestions that there were photos of him with Russian oligarchs. He thanked Trump for savaging the dossier in a press conference that afternoon. “Where do you go to get your reputation back? You go to Donald Trump,” he told Hannity. This did little, however, to put to rest the swirl of accusations about Cohen’s role as a liaison to the Russians.

  A month later, Cohen was in the headlines again. In February 2017, news broke that he had tried to back-channel a secret Russia-Ukraine peace deal that would have paved the way to lifting sanctions on Moscow. His cohort in this secret diplomacy? None other than Felix Sater. By May 2017, both Congress and the special counsel had begun to investigate Cohen.

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  Despite stories about his dubious business past, Cohen was still something of a puzzle to Fusion in early 2017. Here was a guy with a history of working with suspected organized crime members who was still acting as Trump’s personal lawyer and would soon move on to positions as a top RNC fundraiser and a rainmaker for a fancy D.C. lobbying shop. His was a profile you don’t often see for someone in close contact with a sitting president.

  Fusion set out to dig more deeply into his past.

  As the Trump-Russia drumbeat grew, Fusion began working with a small but experienced investigative firm based in New York City to start pulling old public court and business records involving Cohen to get a better sense of where he came from. This was a team of sleuths with a track record of unearthing documents and leads in obscure and hard-to-find places. They were also skilled interviewers with deep contacts in law enforcement and the courts.

  Sure enough, there were organized crime ties everywhere they looked: among his early legal clients and his Facebook friends, within his taxi medallion business, even in his political fundraising. The New York team set out to amass all archived records in New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey involving Cohen and his business partners. It was no small task—thousands of pages in all. The records showed that Cohen had racked up a significant personal fortune. He had several Trump-branded apartments and even invested in his own side real estate projects, including several with mysterious LLCs as partners.

  The Fusion team found that, over time, Cohen had built up significant taxi medallion holdings in New York City and Chicago, a onetime booming asset class that had begun to slip during the emergence of Uber and other ride-shares. They knew that, beginning as far back as the early 1980s, the FBI believed that Soviet émigré taxi operators based in Brighton Beach (and Chicago) belonged to “a loosely knit organized criminal community” with possible links to Russian intelligence.

  Cohen had partnered through the early 2000s with two major ex-Soviet taxicab magnates to manage the taxi business, one of whom had faced convictions for assault, burglary, and criminal possession of a weapon. Cohen was even on the paperwork for a taxi company in Russia.

  Stranger still, Cohen built up his taxi ventures while working as a personal injury lawyer out of a ramshackle office in a storefront on Long Island. The Fusion team discovered that the world surrounding Cohen’s own legal practice was small and suspicious. His first boss in the industry was arrested for bribery. The taxi office Cohen worked in was run by a man named Simon Garber, a Ukrainian American known as the Taxi King of New York. Several of Cohen’s legal partners in Garber’s company were disbarred for filing false personal injury cases against rival cab companies.

  The Fusion team pieced together the various records and found that some of the people Cohen represented in his legal practice, as business clients, were caught up in a major insurance fraud scheme that prosecutors pursued through 2016. After weeks of often mind-numbing work, the New York investigators figured out that Cohen had registered medical companies for several Brighton Beach doctors who had then collectively bilked Medicare for questionable medical claims for well over a decade—a story that had yet to be told. Cohen was never charged in the scheme, but many of his doctor clients were.

  In 2006, Cohen made the leap to a white-shoe law firm in New York. Less than a year later—and for reasons that were never entirely clear—Cohen was working for Trump. A decade after that, Cohen was helping to get Trump elected to the White House. And now, in early 2017, he was setting himself up as a corporate lobbyist to profit off his proximity to the president.

  Reporters were fascinated by Cohen’s backstory but had a hard time justifying spending a lot
of time reporting on a guy who was no longer in the Trump Organization and not in the administration, especially with all the Trump-Russia news then breaking on an almost daily basis. As a result, through much of 2017, reporters had a hard time telling the full story of Michael Cohen.

  Cohen splashed back into the picture in late summer, when news broke of his work with Sater on the Trump Tower project in Moscow. Trump had scoffed throughout the campaign, and after the dossier emerged, at suggestions that he had anything to do with Russia. “I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away,” he said at a news conference a day after the dossier came out. That denial became a mantra for Trump, repeated over and over without qualification on Twitter and in press appearances for all of 2017. But here was an internal Trump Organization document from October 2015, backed by emails and other records, that showed Cohen and Sater had pursued a Trump Tower Moscow deal during the presidential campaign—a deal that would have netted Trump millions.

  Still, it wasn’t until early 2018—right around when Cohen decided to sue Fusion for defamation—that the storm clouds finally began to open up over the president’s personal lawyer.

  When Cohen filed his lawsuit on January 9 claiming “significant financial and reputational damages,” he was still serving as the president’s personal attorney, as a deputy finance chairman for the RNC, and as a highly paid consultant to Squire Patton Boggs, a storied Washington lobbying shop.

  Cohen’s lawsuit against Fusion was yet another instance of the Trump team’s terrible timing. Three days after he called attention to himself as the putative victim of a Fusion smear campaign, Cohen got hit by a story in The Wall Street Journal showing that he had arranged a $130,000 payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels—a line of inquiry Fusion hadn’t pursued. The Cohen payment had been made just weeks before the election, to keep Daniels quiet about an affair she’d had with Trump. There was no direct connection between the alleged Cohen hush money operation and the Fusion allegations, but the Journal report buttressed Steele’s contention that Cohen was Trump’s go-to man for clandestine assignments in the months leading up to the election.

  Cohen fumed at the Journal for “raising outlandish allegations against my client,” but dodged any reference to the payoff. The bluster lasted barely a month. In March, the Journal unearthed documents marked HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL PROCEEDING that tied the payment to Daniels directly to the Trump Organization—credible evidence that Trump’s company, working with his personal attorney, had sought to skirt federal election laws. Cohen then switched up his story, conceding that he had made the payments, but insisted it was without Trump’s knowledge or involvement, another lie that would not hold up for long.

  As Cohen struggled to stay afloat, Fusion became more taken by the idea of using his defamation suit to pry some information out of the secrecy-obsessed Trump World. Cohen’s case was a flimsy one to start with, but the avalanche of accusations now swirling around him made it even weaker. Both Simpson and Fritsch began to relish the thought of answering Cohen’s lawsuit with a motion to proceed immediately to discovery.

  Months and months of depositions and exchanges of records, though, would mean big money in legal fees—certainly well north of a million dollars. So the Fusion partners put out feelers among a few past supporters. Who might be game to back a full discovery campaign against President Trump’s now famous personal attorney? A couple of arms shot up, and one made a pledge to cover the entire tab.

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  Despite the legal setbacks and the continued congressional entanglements, Fusion was riding a wave of goodwill in early 2018 as developments affirmed the company’s work on the Russia front.

  A report in The New York Times had identified a chatty Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, as the initial trigger for the FBI’s Russia investigation. The story made clear that Simpson was right in telling the Judiciary Committee that the FBI had an additional source for its Russia allegations. The tide of the overall Mueller investigation had also markedly shifted in Fusion’s favor in the wake of some prominent indictments. Mueller brought charges against thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges of interfering in the 2016 election. Mueller also filed a raft of new financial charges against Manafort based on evidence provided by his longtime partner, Rick Gates.

  Also helpful had been the release of a second transcript of Simpson’s congressional testimony, this one from his time before the House Intelligence Committee.

  The transcript outlined Fusion’s suspicion that the Russians had conducted a larger operation in 2016 to compromise and gain sway over not just the Trump campaign but the Republican Party and the conservative movement. It appeared, said Simpson, “that the Russian operation was designed to infiltrate conservative organizations,” including the religious right and the NRA. The Russians had also targeted Democrats over the years, he added, describing “a pretty elaborate attempt by the Russians to target and infiltrate our softer institutions” that took place over many years and included the famous FBI case in 2010 against a team of Russian spies including Anna Chapman, inspiration for the television show The Americans.

  Simpson also ran through Trump’s many business activities that smacked of money laundering. “There were a lot of real estate deals where you couldn’t really tell who was buying the property,” he told the committee. “Sometimes properties would be bought and sold, and they would be bought for one price and sold for a loss shortly thereafter, and it really didn’t make sense to us.” Most suspicious of all were Trump’s golf courses in Ireland and Scotland, where “hundreds of millions of dollars” seemed to disappear. “They’re sinks,” he said. “They don’t actually make any money.”

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  The Journal stories on Stormy Daniels rekindled interest in Fusion’s accumulated Cohen research. Reporters were now seeking to explore some of the dingier back alleys of his past. Building on what Fusion had gleaned over the past year, they would produce a flurry of deep examinations of Cohen’s career, in print, TV, and radio. The picture that emerged was of a man who sought his fortune first among a wide array of underworld operators and seamy lawyers, and finally with a man who would become president of the United States.

  Things came to a boil on April 9, when FBI agents swooped into Cohen’s Rockefeller Center office, a Park Avenue hotel room, and his apartment, carting off boxes of records, cellphones, and recordings. Word quickly got out that they were investigating possible bank fraud.

  It was an extraordinary moment. Few men had worked more hand in hand with Trump for the past decade, or been closer to the seamier side of his business and personal life. And now, more than a year into Trump’s presidency, the FBI had multiple search warrants to dig through all the correspondence and legal records of his personal attorney and cleanup man. Even more worrisome for Trump, the orders had come from the Justice Department proper, not from the special counsel’s office.

  Hours after the raid, Trump went on a tirade. “A total witch hunt,” he fumed on Twitter. “Attorney-client privilege is dead!” He called the search “an attack on our country in a true sense” and suggested that he would fire Mueller over the incident, even though the search was conducted by a team outside Mueller’s orbit.

  Cohen’s woes only got worse. He tried to look resolute through the firestorm, saying right after the FBI raid that he would “rather jump out of a building” than turn on Donald Trump. But Trump soon began downplaying Cohen’s importance to the Trump Organization, making it all the more likely that Cohen would crack and seek to protect his own interests.

  With his reputation in tatters, and facing likely federal prosecution on several fronts, Cohen dropped his lawsuits against BuzzFeed and Fusion on April 19, ten days after the feds raided his office and residences. The dismissal deprived Fusion of the months of discovery it relished, but no one mourned the demise of
another lawsuit.

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  By mid-May, Cohen’s multiple lies were catching up with him on all sides. Trump’s new personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, blurted out on Sean Hannity’s show that Trump had in fact known about the Stormy Daniels hush payment and had actually paid Cohen back for it, undercutting months of denials. Investigators also found Cohen texts and emails showing that his work on the proposed Moscow Tower project had gone well into the late spring of 2016, at least five months longer than he originally told Congress.

  Then came the revelations of Cohen’s unexplained consulting contracts with corporate America, a true window into the unseemliness of Trump’s Washington.

  Cohen’s Essential Consultants had even received nearly $600,000 for investment consulting from a company connected to Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin. Cohen had met with the billionaire businessman at Trump Tower eleven days before Trump’s inauguration, shortly before he left his post within the Trump Organization. The monthly payments began twenty-two days later, just as Cohen was embarking under his own shingle, and continued into the summer of 2017.

  With the pressure mounting, Cohen flashed the first sign that he was going to crack on June 13, when he fired his legal team and resigned his post at the RNC. Trump’s sturdiest of loyalists—his pit bull, his Mr. Fix-it, his version of The Godfather consigliere Tom Hagen—was getting ready to flip.