If Trump committed a crime in his payments, so, too, have many members of Congress. On Capitol Hill, the department that handles sexual harassment and discrimination claims, the Office of Compliance, has paid 268 victims more than $17 million in claims since the office was established in the 1990s.69 Taxpayers have footed the bill. In most cases, the information was kept quiet. It appears that none of the 268 payments was ever reported as a campaign contribution. Didn’t those payments either directly or indirectly benefit the reelection campaigns of members of Congress? Of course they did. But they also served a dual purpose in protecting members from disclosures that would personally embarrass themselves and their families. Hence, they were not considered campaign contributions under the law. Compare this to the case of Hillary Clinton, who somehow received legal dispensation from paying a foreigner for the fabricated “dossier” from Russian sources during her campaign. As noted in an earlier chapter, her payment established it as a “thing of value,” which is arguably illegal under campaign finance laws.
“That money was not campaign money,” Rudy Giuliani said regarding Daniels’s compensation. “No campaign finance violation. They funneled through a law firm, and the president repaid it.”70
Daniels offered evidence that the payment had had little to do with the campaign. “Daniels herself has said that years before Trump declared for president, she was threatened about not disclosing any affair, suggesting, if she’s telling the truth, that her silence was desired long before Trump became a candidate,” said former FEC chairman Smith.71 Mueller knew the case was weak. Former senator John Edwards (D-NC), who ran for president in 2008, was charged with a similar violation for paying his mistress to keep silent during his campaign, but federal prosecutors failed to obtain a conviction at trial.72
“Lanny Davis had his client plead guilty to a crime that isn’t a crime,” said David Warrington, an attorney who had worked with the Trump campaign. “Who’s Lanny Davis really working for, Michael Cohen or the Clintons?”73
But Cohen wanted to curry favor with the prosecutors, which would help him during sentencing, and to strike back at Trump, whom he blamed for all of his woes. The pilot fish had lost his shark and deeply resented Trump’s leaving him behind.
Davis shamelessly put out a crowdfunding request for a Michael Cohen “truth fund,” hitting every TV and radio network in a flurry of appearances. His pitch on Cohen’s behalf so galled the audience at Megyn Kelly Today that they guffawed and even booed the former Clinton attorney.74
As it turned out, the pro bono tale was nothing more than a facade. Davis would later acknowledge to two Republican members of Congress that he was getting paid, but not by Cohen.75
The Lanny Davis Spin Machine
The ink was barely dry on Cohen’s plea agreement before Lanny Davis was revealed as the anonymous source behind two “bombshell” allegations made against Trump by a CNN story that aired on July 27, 2018.76
Carl Bernstein, Jim Sciutto, and Marshall Cohen reported, based on unnamed sources, that Michael Cohen could tell Mueller that he had witnessed Donald Trump, Jr., inform his father beforehand about the infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Trump had publicly denied that. In addition, Cohen could confirm to Mueller that Trump had been aware of and encouraged Russian hacking before it became publicly known. The story specifically said that Davis had declined comment, implying he wasn’t a source. Lie number one.77
CNN hosts discussed the allegations for days, crowing that the report was the strongest evidence yet of Trump-Russia “collusion” and a cover-up. Nearly a month later, days after Cohen pleaded guilty, Davis batted down the bombshell about the meeting. “I think the reporting of the story got mixed up in the course of a criminal investigation,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “We were not the source of the story.”78 Lie number two.
However, that night, according to the editorial board of the New York Post, Davis again confirmed the story—anonymously—to a Post reporter and to the Washington Post.79 Lie number three.
Then he changed his mind and said he could not independently confirm it.80 Finally forced to admit that he had been CNN’s source, Davis told BuzzFeed that he’d “made a mistake” and “unintentionally misspoke” about the Trump Tower meeting. In fact, he’d done so three times.81
“I should have been much clearer that I could not confirm the story,” Davis said. “I regret my error.”82 He also hedged on his allegation that Cohen could confirm to Mueller that Trump had been aware of and encouraged Russian hacking before it had become publicly known. “I am not sure,” he said. “There’s a possibility that is the case. But I am not sure.” He told the Washington Post, “I was giving an instinct that he might have something to say of interest to the special counsel” about hacking. In other words, Davis had made it up.83
Davis’s flurry of deceptions—designed to turn up the heat on Trump—undermined his client’s previous closed-door testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), exposing Cohen to perjury charges. The committee’s leadership contacted Davis after the CNN story broke and asked if Cohen wanted to amend his testimony. The new version of events wasn’t lining up with his prior statements under oath. Cohen declined.
CNN, without shame or apology, declined to retract or modify the report, according to the editorial board of the New York Post, “because it suspects Davis changed his story only because Cohen could face perjury charges. . . . The network offers no justification for its own deception of reporting that Davis hadn’t commented when he actually had, though anonymously.”84
Whatever his reasons for the seesaw lies, Davis had eroded his client’s credibility and value to the government in cooperating with ongoing investigations. “To the extent that Michael Cohen knew that Lanny Davis would make (or had made) that representation and took no steps to repudiate it, that would create a credibility issue that could be used on cross-examination,” said Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor. “Special Counsel Mueller would consider that information as part of the baggage that comes with Michael Cohen.”85
Roland Riopelle, another former federal prosecutor, concurred: “Mr. Davis has done a disservice to his client, in my opinion, by presenting his case in the press and then contradicting himself and making grandiose claims about what Mr. Cohen knows or can do. These sorts of statements may very well benefit the Clintons . . . but they do not benefit Mr. Cohen.”86
Doing damage control, Davis told Bloomberg News that the thirteen references to Cohen in the Steele “dossier” were false, “and he has never been to Prague in his life.”87 The Trump-Russia “collusion” story was dead, kept on life support by gullible members of the media. Davis was looking down the road, planning to use Cohen to attack the president in the political arena. Impeachment had always been the suspected goal of the “insurance policy.” Now someone intimately familiar with Trump, with a sword of Damocles hanging over his head, could be deployed against him.
After his first guilty plea, Cohen entered a second guilty plea in November 2018, admitting he had made false statements to the SSCI in 2017, when he had claimed that the negotiations involving the Trump-branded tower in Moscow had ended in January 2016. In truth, the talks had ended in June 2016. He had also stated that his discussions with Trump regarding the project had been limited when in fact they were more extensive than he portrayed them.88
The plea marked the first time that Mueller had charged Cohen—or anyone else associated with Trump—as part of his investigation into Russia meddling and alleged “collusion.”
As Fox News political reporter Brooke Singman wrote, “Cohen made the false statements to minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1 [Trump] and give the false impression that the Moscow Project ended before the ‘the Iowa caucus . . . the very first primary,’ in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations.”89 Whether Cohen deliberately misled Congress or got his dates wrong was a moot point, given his
plea. At the very least, he should have been more forthcoming about the extent of the discussions. But his plea deal made it clear that he was cooperating, and as a result he “will not be further prosecuted criminally by this Office.”90
Since Cohen was an admitted liar and tax cheat, we have to be skeptical about how honest he was being in the second plea. “Michael Cohen is lying and he’s trying to get a reduced sentence for things that have nothing to do with me,” President Trump told reporters. “This was a project [in Moscow] that we didn’t do, I didn’t do. . . . There would be nothing wrong if I did do it.”91
As the old saying goes, guilty pleas are like paper currency: some are more valuable than others. But insofar as proving some amorphous crime of Trump-Russia “collusion” to win the 2016 presidential election, with Cohen’s second plea Mueller got something about as valuable as a crumpled dollar bill. It gave Democrats and members of the Trump-hating media—who know little about the law—something to howl about. Beyond that, it had zero value in proving that the president and his campaign had somehow conspired, coordinated, or “colluded” with Russia. And that was what Mueller was supposed to be investigating.92
Amid the hysteria over Cohen’s guilty pleas, many journalists overlooked one important and immutable fact: nothing Cohen said about the never-consummated Moscow real estate project had established an election conspiracy. It is not a crime to develop real estate in Russia, which made it all the more mystifying why Cohen lied about it. How would Russia gain favor or leverage over Trump through a deal that had never materialized? Recall that among the specious claims in the Steele “dossier” was that Trump had rejected offers for “various lucrative real estate business deals in Russia.”93
A week later, prosecutors with the SDNY filed a sentencing memo outlining Cohen’s serial lies in both his business and private life, revealing how he’d monetized his relationship with Trump to rake in more than $4 million from corporations that had hired him as a consultant even though he had provided little or no real service under the contracts. Driven by greed, Cohen had avoided paying taxes for five years, had made private loans at double-digit interest rates, and had not reported the income the loans generated. He had lied to his accountant, using unreported income to finance a lavish lifestyle. The SDNY prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Cohen to about four years in prison.94
Mueller also filed a memo regarding the lies Cohen had told Congress regarding the Moscow tower project. But Cohen was not charged with collusion regarding Russia. He had never gone to Russia and had had no contact with the Kremlin or Putin. Instead he was accused of—get this—having a “telephone call about the project with an assistant to the press secretary for the President of Russia.” That torpedoed the idea that the Trump campaign had a secret “back channel” to the Russian government.95
But the media heralded Cohen’s plea deal as a sign that Mueller was closing in on Trump. “Well into the 2016 campaign, one of the president’s closest associates was in touch with the Kremlin on this project, as we now know, and Michael Cohen says he was lying about it to protect the president,” said CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “Cohen was communicating directly with the Kremlin.” Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin announced that the plea deal was so “enormous” that Trump “might not finish his term.”96 Such declarations were fanciful at best; gibberish at worst. The plea deal read more like an exoneration. If he’d had any information about “collusion” to offer, Cohen would have laid it on the table. It had never happened.
Cohen’s negotiations with the Russian immigrant who had come up with the idea for the Trump Moscow tower project had come to nothing because Felix Sater had not had the clout to pull it off. All the FBI informant had offered Cohen was access to “one of his acquaintances, who was an acquaintance of someone else who was partners in a real estate development with a friend of Putin’s,” as the journalist Paul Sperry aptly described it.97
Despite claiming that Cohen’s payments to Daniels and McDougal had been illegal campaign contributions, the prosecutors knew that with his guilty plea the issue would never be argued in court. Trump had not violated campaign finance laws. The FEC law specifically states that campaign-related expenses do not include any expenditures “used to fulfill any commitment, obligation, or expense of a person that would exist irrespective of the candidate’s election campaign.”98 Like many billionaires, Trump had made payments out of his own funds—which was perfectly legal—to protect the reputation of his brand and save his family embarrassment.
Pleading guilty to the campaign finance counts added little to Cohen’s exposure in sentencing. “Cohen’s defense team perceived that the SDNY is trying to make a case on President Trump, so pleading guilty to two extra felonies paradoxically improved his chances for sentencing leniency,” said Andrew McCarthy, former federal prosecutor. “I think Cohen’s rolling over on the campaign-finance allegations made the SDNY more amenable to leniency.”99
That proved to be the case. The sentencing took place on December 12, 2018, in a lower Manhattan courtroom mobbed with reporters and spectators, including the odious Avenatti. Three members of Mueller’s team sat with the SDNY prosecutors. Backed by a large group of family members, Cohen expressed his remorse and declared war on Trump.
“Today is the day that I am getting my freedom back,” he read in a prepared statement. “I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real estate mogul whose business acumen that I deeply admired.” Exactly how Trump had compelled Cohen to commit tax evasion and bank fraud was not explained. The judge sentenced Cohen to three years in prison, forfeiture of $500,000 in assets, and payment of $1.393 million to the IRS, plus an extra $50,000 fine for lying to Congress.100
One of Cohen’s lawyers told the judge that Cohen and his family had been receiving “threats” because of his decision to “come forward to offer evidence against the most powerful person in our country.”101 Davis promised that his client planned to reveal “all he knows about Mr. Trump” after the Mueller investigation was complete, with testimony to congressional committees “interested in the search for truth and the difference between facts and lies.” Clearly revenge was on the agenda.102
One clue was his deferred prison sentence; Cohen was told he didn’t have to report to prison until March 6, 2019. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, appeared on CNN and said he wanted Cohen to testify. “This is a watershed moment,” he averred, comparing Cohen to John Dean, who had testified about Watergate and “changed the course of America.” Of course, Dean’s testimony had led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.103
McClatchy added to the melodrama, reporting in December 2018 that, according to unnamed sources, a mobile phone traced to Cohen had “sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area” in late summer 2016, and “electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague.”104
That story, based on triple hearsay, proved to be false as well. Cohen and Davis again denied it. As the Mueller Report would subsequently put it, “Cohen had never traveled to Prague and was not concerned about those allegations, which he believed were provably false.”105
However, as far as the media were concerned, Cohen’s upcoming appearances before Congress put collusion, with the added dollop of campaign finance violations, on the table. And Davis was there to assist, shaking up Cohen’s legal team for the second time, bringing in attorneys to focus on “Washington and Congress.”106 If “collusion” had collapsed, impeachment over some tortured allegation of obstruction of justice would do just fine.
The Capitol Circus
When Cohen agreed to testify before three different congressional committees before reporting to the penitentiary, Trump foes rejoiced. But Cohen and Davis couldn’t play it straight; his testimony needed building up. All eyes must be focu
sed on Cohen’s epic takedown of Trump.
So someone leaked to BuzzFeed, which had gotten the ball rolling by publishing the phony Steele “dossier” two years earlier. On January 27, 2019, BuzzFeed reported that Trump had instructed Cohen to lie to Congress in his statements about the “Moscow Project,” directly accusing Trump of committing a felony. “The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents,” wrote BuzzFeed reporters Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier. “Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.”107
Cohen and Davis made no official comment. The poorly sourced story, citing “two law enforcement officers involved in an investigation of the matter,” made little sense. But for twenty-four hours, rabid media piranhas and feverish Democrats speculated that the president would resign. Many predicted Trump’s imminent impeachment for suborning perjury and obstruction of justice.
Then the special counsel’s office issued a rare public statement. “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” said Mueller’s spokesman Peter Carr.108 The frenzy fizzled out.
On February 5, 2019, BuzzFeed tried again. The same reporters released a trove of internal Trump Organization documents about efforts by Cohen and Sater to advance the Moscow project. But the bottom line remained the same: no tower had been built. The deal hadn’t made financial sense and—spoiler alert—Trump had been elected president.109
Cohen announced that he would not appear to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 7, 2019, as planned. Perhaps with the flood of new documents, he needed to get his story (or lies) straight. Davis announced that he was postponing his testimony for several reasons, including his continued cooperation with the special counsel regarding ongoing investigations and “threats against his family from President Trump and Mr. Giuliani.”110
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