Michael Cohen, the longtime personal lawyer to President Trump, appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday and will tell senators there was never a “hint” of the Trump campaign possibly colluding on any level with Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections.
“Let me be totally clear that I am innocent of the allegations raised against me in the public square, which are based upon misinformation and unnamed or unverifiable sources,” Cohen plans to say, according to his opening remarks.
He went on to say he had “never engaged with, been paid by, paid for, or conversed with any member of the Russian Federation,” to hack anyone, to interfere with any election, to hack the Democratic Party computers, or to make fake news stories “to damage the [Hillary] Clinton campaign.”
Cohen became the focus of the Russian investigation when emails were exposed showing that he had discussed the possibility of a Trump Tower-style building in Moscow, a proposal that went far enough that it culminated in Trump signing a letter of intent to pursue the project.
“This was solely a real estate deal and nothing more,” Cohen wrote. “I was doing my job.”
Cohen then went on to blast the “Russian Dossier,” which has played a central role in numerous developments in the entire Russian saga.
“My name is mentioned more than a dozen times in the lie-filled-dossier and so within moments of Buzzfeed’s publication, false allegations about me were plastered all over the national and international press,” Cohen wrote. “The accusations are entirely false.”
The dossier is sometimes called the “Steele Dossier,” because it refers to the author, Michael Steele, a former British spy who was paid to assemble the sources and allegations that comprised the document, although most of it has been debunked or is unverifiable.
