Although New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet didn’t acknowledge that his paper had erred, he tried to stanch the erosion of its reputation by blocking his reporters from appearing on such partisan programs as The Rachel Maddow Show and CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, according to Vanity Fair magazine.197
So far, this is the only hint that the biggest figures in journalism see a need for remedies, a small step in the right direction.
It’s worth noting that they got off the gravy train only when the gravy ran out. By late May 2019, Maddow’s weekly ratings had plummeted to a Trump-era low, an average 2.6 million compared to the 3.1 million she had averaged in the first quarter of 2019, during the peak hysteria.198
“For two years, this grifter strung her audience along with the promise that tonight’s show will be the Trump killshot,” wrote media critic John Nolte. “But it was all bullshit, all lies, all desperate paranoid delusions of collusion invented by a con woman/conspiracy theorist who got high sniffing her own press clippings. . . . She looks foolish now, exposed, and that is something almost impossible to overcome or to live down. Her intellectual bravado comes off a little hollow now, a little shrill. . . . She’s not the old tried, true, and confident Rachel Maddow anymore and she never will be; no one is after they grift away their credibility and integrity.”199
Accuracy in Media national editor Carrie Sheffield said that Maddow had long “ignored basic journalistic, fact-checking practices and the presumption of innocence in our legal system by relentlessly pushing unproven conspiracy theories about supposed Russian collusion,” and her “lapse in journalistic balance” had contributed to Americans’ declining trust in the national media.200
“This was a long time coming, and we hope MSNBC will allow for greater balance moving forward,” Sheffield said. “We hope that Maddow’s programming will include substantive fact-checking, balanced debate and dialogue, rather than an echo-chamber monologue that further divides Left and Right. Americans deserve better.”
One can hope. However, Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson, who writes a conservative blog, has his doubts. MSNBC will stand by Maddow, he contended, “because she still has a large viewership emotionally invested in bringing down Trump. That some reporters refuse to go on her show is important, but is unlikely to change her behavior. Maddow long ago carved out her faux-intellectual paranoid niche, and she’s stuck in it.”201
Can Maddow and the rest of the Trump-hating media survive the Mueller fiasco? Audiences will continue to erode unless they reevaluate their coverage and concede their mistakes.
“The one incontestable fact was that a paid advocate who was trading on his previous profession as a British intelligence agent, in the middle of a presidential election, was being shepherded around Washington by a notorious PR schemer and promoting allegations whose truth he was unwilling to vouch for and whose source he was unwilling to reveal,” wrote Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., in the Wall Street Journal. “Unless you are an exceptionally dim journalist, whenever somebody peddles a salacious story to you, a question naturally and unbidden leaps to mind: Is the real story the one I’m being peddled? Or is the real story the fact that I’m being peddled it?”202
He pointed out the “ludicrous overkill” of the raids on Manafort and Stone. Those tactics had signaled Mueller’s desperation as he prepared to release a disappointing report that would prove that the media had been chasing their tails for two years. Those guys—and their former boss, Trump—must be really bad if dozens of FBI agents bust into their homes at dawn. Few questioned Mueller’s tactics because they fit their narrative.
“Can you imagine the horror right now in the network planning rooms?” Matt Taibbi asked.203 “This is the greatest story that has ever existed for the news media business. And you can’t separate that out from the coverage, because the financial incentive to keep hammering this home was tremendous.
“I mean this was the greatest reality show in history. It had everything. It had sex, it had cloak-and-dagger intrigue, it had the shadowy British spy [Christopher Steele], it had obscure meetings on remote islands. And it had the added advantage of being able to tell audiences, ‘You can’t turn us off, because this thing could blow up any minute. That bombshell could be coming at any time, so keep tuning in.’ ”
As Taibbi inquired: “What will they sell now?”204
What’s more, who will buy? At every turn, the media demonized President Trump by declaring him guilty of a multiplicity of crimes. In the process, journalists squandered their only currency: their credibility.
And they proved that the Scarecrow was right.
Chapter 7
Crooked Cohen Cops a Plea
I have lied, but I am not a liar. I have done bad things, but I am not a bad man.
—MICHAEL COHEN, TESTIMONY TO CONGRESS, FEBRUARY 27, 2019
The problem with liars is that, for them, truth has no meaning. They spin so many lies they lose track. They lie to themselves about their own lies. Over time, they cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. People stop listening. Credibility is lost. That’s when the serious lying begins.
And so it was with Michael Cohen when he testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee in February 2019. President Trump’s onetime personal attorney admitted that he had lied to Congress before.1 But now, he insisted, he was telling the truth. He asked the committee to believe that his lies did not make him a liar. It’s what rhetoric experts call “dissociation.”2 He then promptly blamed Trump for his lies. Liars, after all, are always blameless.
Having squandered his believability, Cohen had every reason to continue inventing stories. Facing a substantial prison term, maybe he thought he could curry favor with prosecutors and the sentencing judge if he trashed the president of the United States before the cell door clanged shut. Or perhaps revenge was his motive. Trump had refused to give him a job after the election, causing him to feel discarded and humiliated. Payback would be in order.
Whatever his motivations, Cohen’s newly revised storytelling was greeted with abiding skepticism—and for good reason. Even the chief prosecutor, who had charged him with a variety of felony crimes, portrayed him as a prodigious con artist who had peddled “lies and dishonesty over an extended period of time.”3 Though Cohen could never be called as a reliable witness against anyone in a trial, that didn’t stop Democrats in Congress from mining his skills as an expert prevaricator in their relentless effort to destroy Trump. In retrospect, it had all been carefully choreographed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller more than a year earlier.
Mueller’s spectacular dumpster dive into building a case against Trump’s personal attorney came to the world’s attention on April 9, 2018. News broke of dramatic early-morning FBI raids on Cohen’s home, office, safe-deposit box, and hotel suite, where he and his family were staying while his apartment was undergoing renovation.
Federal agents, at the direction of the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, scooped up 4 million electronic and paper files, a dozen mobile devices and iPads, and twenty external hard drives, flash drives, and laptops. A later release of government documents revealed that the extraordinary warrant had been triggered by Mueller’s team, which had referred its case involving Cohen to Manhattan prosecutors.4
Included in the haul were attorney-client privileged documents, including some regarding Cohen’s negotiations of hush money “payoffs” to two women who claimed they’d had a sexual relationship with Trump, adult film star Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
The privilege is sacrosanct, one of the bedrocks of legal jurisprudence. The raids prompted Trump to tweet: “Attorney-client privilege is dead!” Cohen’s own attorney called the action “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.”5 The move was in sharp contrast to the treatment of Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s lawyer: the FBI had given her partial immunity in return for nothing and even allowed her to be present
during its interview of her client.6
DOJ rules require prosecutors to first consider less intrusive alternatives than no-knock raids before seeking records from lawyers. Cohen had already turned over thousands of documents and sat for depositions under oath. The SDNY prosecutors justified the unusual breach of ethics by claiming that the intrusions had been necessary because they hadn’t been able to obtain access to Cohen’s Trump Organization email account or phones with encrypted apps.7
The explanation of the breach was that Mueller believed that Cohen, as a central figure in the Trump empire, could be pressured to flip on his former boss. He had avoided DOJ rules by enlisting the SDNY to carry out his dirty work. If Manhattan prosecutors found information related to his investigation of Russia collusion, they could pass it on.8
Geoffrey Berman, the Trump-appointed US attorney for the SDNY, recused himself from the case. His deputy, Robert Khuzami, a Republican, approved the raid and supervised the SDNY prosecution team, which included three highly partisan lawyers from the special counsel’s office: Jeannie Rhee, personal attorney of Obama adviser Ben Rhodes, as well as the Clinton Foundation; Andrew Goldstein, a former chief of public corruption for the SDNY who had donated $3,300 to Obama in 2008 and 2012; and Rush Atkinson, a former DOJ prosecutor under Andrew Weissmann.9
The raids on Cohen’s properties galvanized the New York media, which had watched his posturing as Trump’s devious troubleshooter and keeper of secrets for more than a decade. Cohen was involved in everything Trump. His voluminous files would surely provide abundant documentation of Trump’s corruption involving taxes, real estate deals, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, and bankruptcies. Trump would be forced to resign as president and would soon be in the dock facing charges. It was delicious to imagine what might be in the truckloads of documents hauled away by the FBI.
The government’s tawdry dumpster dive ended in a dumpster fire. Cohen, after pleading guilty to violating campaign finance laws, tax evasion, and bank fraud, repeatedly testified to Congress. He exposed himself as a duplicitous liar who couldn’t tell the truth for a twenty-minute stretch. He had committed crimes, then embroidered stories about Trump to give the prosecutors hounding him what they wanted in return for a reduced sentence. The irony is that even when he flipped, Cohen torpedoed Mueller’s grand scheme to prove that Trump had conspired with the Russian government to steal the presidential election.
Cohen and the Steele “Dossier”
The name of Michael Cohen was sprinkled throughout the Steele “dossier,” which claimed that Cohen had journeyed to Prague in August 2016 in order to conspire with Kremlin officials to make nontraceable payments to hackers for the Trump campaign. Cohen’s involvement in the collusion scheme was the tent pole holding up all the other wild claims of election collusion. Steele’s memo, dated October 19, 2016, said:
TRUMP’s representative COHEN accompanied to Prague in August/September 2016 by 3 colleagues for secret discussions with Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers. Agenda included how to process deniable cash payments to operatives; contingency plans for covering up operations; and action in event of a CLINTON election victory. Some further details of Russian representatives/operations involved; Romanian hackers employed, and use of Bulgaria as bolt hole to ‘lie low.’ Anti-CLINTON hackers and other operatives paid by both TRUMP team and Kremlin, but with ultimate loyalty to head of PA, IVANOV and his successor/s.10
You can almost see Boris twirling his mustache while Natasha pouts. The memo had been written by Steele the same day the New York Times had reported the arrest of a Russian hacker in a Czech hotel. A bit of artistic inspiration?
The Steele allegations were denied by Cohen, who said that during the time period mentioned—August 23 to 29—he had been in Los Angeles with his daughter, not in Europe. In fact, he’d never been to Prague. Czech intelligence said there was no evidence putting him in Prague; it had not monitored any such meeting between Cohen and Russian intelligence officers.11 But the story wouldn’t die. The journalist Paul Sperry identified Glenn Simpson as the source behind the discredited Cohen-Prague story, whispering in the ears of gullible journalists to keep the story alive.12 Because if Michael Cohen had not been in Prague, Steele’s credibility was torched.
Another line of investigation pursued steadily by Mueller related to a Russian-born real estate developer in New York named Felix Sater, who had pitched Cohen on building a Trump-branded tower in Moscow in late 2015. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote. He then elaborated:
I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process. . . . Michael, Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow, and Donald owns the Republican nomination. And possibly beats Hillary and our boy is in. . . . We will manage this process better than anyone. You and I will get Donald and Vladimir on stage together very shortly. That’s the game changer.13
Cohen told investigators that he had regarded Sater’s discussions as mere puffery. Though Sater had pushed vigorously to set up a deal and to connect Trump with Putin, it had never happened. The tower project had not come close to fruition.14 Trump had entertained the notion and granted permission to explore it, but it had not been his idea. Sater had been the driving force and had been unremitting in his attempts to lure Cohen into the plan.
Sater was not prosecuted. The Mueller Report, not unintentionally, created the distinct impression that Sater might somehow be working for the benefit of Russia. There is no evidence of this, and Mueller managed to omit the critical fact that Sater had “done extensive work for American intelligence agencies [author’s italics]”15 and was a “cooperator, confidential source, and intelligence asset” for the U.S.16 Far from being a Russian asset, Sater was an American asset. In fact, he had been working for the FBI and US intelligence since 1998, according to a federal judge. Sater had given the government Osama bin Laden’s telephone number before 9/11.17 (You will not find this anywhere in the 448 pages of the report.)
It was none other than Andrew Weissmann, who later became Mueller’s top prosecutor on the special counsel team, who had signed off on that cooperation agreement,18 negotiated after “Sater pleaded guilty to a federal charge of racketeering for his role in a Mafia-linked $40 million stock fraud scheme,” according to the Los Angeles Times.19 Had he or someone at the FBI directed Sater’s interactions with Cohen after Trump had announced his candidacy? Was Sater yet another informant/spy, like Stefan Halper, pushing to enmesh Trump associates in the phony Russia “collusion” story? There is strong evidence that the genesis of the Trump-Russia hoax began as early as 2015 and that Sater’s Moscow venture set it in motion.
Weissmann surely knew at the outset that the Trump Tower project in Russia had been instigated by an FBI informant, but he allowed allegations that it was somehow evidence of Trump-Russia collusion to be used to bludgeon Trump. With their dumpster full of documents, Mueller’s team homed in on Cohen’s lucrative foreign lobbying work and found material they could exploit for the purpose.
Cohen and “The Boss”
Cohen had grown up on Long Island, part of a moneyed crowd. He had driven to law school in a Jaguar but cultivated a streetwise image. He had married Laura Shusterman, whose father, Fima, had built a fortune after emigrating from Ukraine. After getting his start as a taxi driver, Fima Shusterman had gone on to invest in taxi medallions.20 At the wedding of a friend, Cohen bragged that he belonged to the Russian mob. His friend found the boast unconvincing. It was as if Cohen wanted to be seen as a tough, don’t-mess-with-me guy despite his pampered background.21
Court documents described how Cohen had become an attorney for Trump after an unspectacular early career:
Cohen is a licensed attorney and has been since 1992. Until 2007, Cohen practiced as an attorney for multiple law firms, working on, among other things, negligence and malpractice cases. For that work, Cohen earned approximately $75,000 per year. In 2007, Cohen seized
on an opportunity. The board of directors of a condominium building in which Cohen lived was attempting to remove from the building the name of the owner [Trump] of a Manhattan-based real estate company. Cohen intervened, secured the backing of the residents of the building, and was able to remove the entire board of directors, thereby fixing the problem for [Trump]. Not long after, Cohen was hired by the Company to the position of “Executive Vice President” and “Special Counsel” to [Trump]. He earned approximately $500,000 per year in that position.22
Cohen’s sharp elbows in the condo dispute had impressed Trump. He had said, “Who is this guy? My lawyers that I give thousands of dollars to couldn’t do it. I’d like to meet him,” remembered Dr. Morton Levine, Cohen’s uncle.23
Cohen’s income had more than quadrupled almost overnight, as had his prestige. In his own estimation, Cohen became Trump’s “Ray Donovan,” the TV character who acts as a fixer for his tycoon boss.24 He’d threaten lawsuits and berate reporters who maligned Trump. But in many ways, he was “always just at the edges” of Trump’s world.25
Cohen had no official role in Trump’s presidential campaign, though he had a campaign email address. He never thought Trump would win, but after the election, he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo that he “certainly” hoped he’d be asked to join the administration and would “100 percent” move to Washington, DC, if asked.26 His loyalty was so deep, so abiding, he pledged that he would “take a bullet” for Trump. “My sole purpose is to protect him and the family from anyone and anything.”27
When Trump did not offer him a post, Cohen took it badly, as if spurned by a lover. “Boss, I miss you so much,” he told the president in a phone call after Cohen had breakfast with an outspoken Trump critic, the billionaire Mark Cuban; the meeting had been photographed by paparazzi. “I wish I was down there with you.” The amused Cuban said, “I think he does it to piss off Trump when Trump is ignoring him.”28 But Trump had concluded that bringing Cohen to Washington would be risky, describing him privately as a “bull in a china shop.”29 Cohen grew frustrated, believing he deserved the White House chief of staff job.
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