The McClatchy news organization is standing by its reporting that President Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague in 2016 — a key claim from an ex-British spy’s dossier detailing interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian elements.
“We stand behind our reporting,” spokeswoman Jeanne Segal told the Daily Caller Tuesday, less than a week after Cohen said during testimony before the House Oversight Committee that he had never visited Prague or the Czech Republic.
[Opinion: Improbable, but not impossible, that Michael Cohen went to Prague]
McClatchy was the only mainstream news outlet to publish the claim about Cohen, leaving the outlet increasingly out on a limb as months passed.
That contradicts the the dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, published in early 2017 and which provided an early road map to areas of inquiry about Trump’s relations with Russian officials.
McClatchy reported on April 13, according to two anonymous sources, that special counsel Robert Mueller received evidence that Cohen traveled to the Czech Republic through way of Germany. Steele alleges that Cohen visited Prague in August 2016 to meet with Russian government officials to discuss setting up secret payments to Russian hackers aimed harming the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Last week was the first time Cohen publicly — and under oath — disputed the claims made by the Steele dossier. Earlier Cohen had sued Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired Steele.
