Longtime Clinton crony Lanny Davis, now Michael Cohen’s lawyer, last week walked back a tantalizing story he had been whispering to reporters. Davis admitted he was an anonymous source for reports claiming that Cohen, Donald Trump’s disgraced personal lawyer, was prepared to say candidate Trump knew in advance of the infamous Trump Tower meeting (the one in which his son and other top campaign advisers hoped to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from a Russian source).
If the story were true, it would have done untold damage to President Trump while also creating further legal jeopardy for Cohen, who has already pleaded guilty to eight felonies. As Axios pointed out, “Cohen told lawmakers last year, in sworn testimony, that he didn’t know whether then-candidate Donald Trump had foreknowledge of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians.”
It isn’t as if Cohen’s old testimony was sitting forgotten in a file. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, well aware that Cohen had denied to them any knowledge that Trump knew about the meeting, asked Cohen’s lawyers “whether Mr. Cohen stood by his testimony.” Chairman Richard Burr and vice chairman Mark Warner, in a joint August 21 statement, said that Cohen’s legal team “responded that he did stand by his testimony.”
Pressed by the New York Post—for which he had been an anonymous source—Lanny Davis apologized for spreading the Trump Tower story.
Cohen’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee—the truthfulness of which his lawyers have now reaffirmed—was not primarily about the Trump Tower meeting. It dealt largely with denying one of the most explosive charges of Christopher Steele’s dossier, the accusation that a few months before the 2016 election, Cohen traveled to Prague on Trump’s orders to pay off “Romanian hackers” who had been bedeviling Democrats. Cohen has done damage to Trump by implicating him in hush-money payoffs that violated campaign-finance laws. But this pales in comparison to the damage he might do if he were to suggest Trump used him to pay hackers. This would buttress the accusations of Trump campaign “collusion” and be ruinous for the president.
There was rampant speculation after Cohen’s guilty plea in the hush-money matter that he might seek a deal with special counsel Robert Mueller to revisit his testimony on Prague and related matters. The day after Cohen pleaded guilty, the Washington Post surmised that the Prague shoe was about to drop: A trip to the Czech Republic by the Trump lawyer has been alleged but “hasn’t been otherwise confirmed,” wrote the Post. “Obviously, Cohen might be able to do so.”
If Cohen were going to change his testimony, his plea deal would have been an optimal time to do so. Prosecutors in New York were able to discover, in the mountain of materials they seized from his office, home, and hotel room, that Cohen had failed to pay taxes on money he earned from the sale of a pricey French handbag. It would surely not have been beyond their forensic abilities to prove Cohen had traveled to Europe in the late summer of 2016. And yet Cohen and his legal team have stated to the Senate intel committee that Cohen was telling the truth in his testimony, which included such unambiguous statements as “I have never in my life been to Prague or to anywhere in the Czech Republic.” And “I never saw anything—not a hint of anything—that demonstrated [Trump’s] involvement in Russian interference in our election or any form of Russian collusion.”
The Steele dossier’s allegations about Cohen going to Prague are elaborate. Where did its baroque tales of illicit meetings to pay Romanian hackers come from? Special counsel Robert Mueller’s case against Russian military intelligence (GRU) hackers may provide the answer. If the information he conveyed in this July’s grand jury indictment of GRU hackers holds up, the special counsel will have shown definitively that the Kremlin was behind the theft and release of Democratic party communications. Mueller will also have shown that, in falling for the idea of some involvement by Romanian hackers, the authors of the dossier were duped.
The July 13 indictment cuts to the heart of Russia’s bad actions: GRU units, says the indictment, “conducted large-scale cyber operations to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The indictment includes extensive explanations of how the Russian hacks were executed—with spoofed email addresses, falsely condensed URLs, and malicious links. More to the point: The hackers invented a fictitious Romanian hacker to try to cover their tracks.
Which brings us to the dossier, a work of opposition research written by former British spy Christopher Steele. He was hired by the oppo firm Fusion GPS, which had been paid by a law firm representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The dossier was delivered in installments, the last of which, in December 2016, claimed that Cohen and “Kremlin representatives” agreed during an August/September 2016 meeting “in Prague to stand down various ‘Romanian hackers’ (presumably based in their homeland or neighbouring eastern Europe) and that other operatives should head for a bolt-hole in Plovdiv, Bulgaria where they should ‘lay low.’ ”
But we know now from the exhaustive investigative work done for the Mueller team that the putative Romanian hackers were a fiction invented by Russian military intelligence to hide their tracks. Steele seems to have fallen for it.
“On or about June 14, 2016,” according to this summer’s indictment, the DNC “publicly announced that it had been hacked by Russian government actors.” In response to the DNC announcement, the Russian “Conspirators created the online persona Guccifer 2.0 and falsely claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker to undermine the allegations of Russian responsibility for the intrusion.”
It was in the middle of June 2016 that Guccifer 2.0 made his first appearance on a newly created WordPress blog. The title of the post was “DNC’s servers hacked by a lone hacker.” The blogger taunted a “Worldwide known cyber security company” that had done computer forensics for the DNC.
Just in case there remains any doubt that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian concoction, Mueller offers extensive details that demonstrate just how thoroughly Russian computer systems have been penetrated by the investigation. Earlier on the day of the first Guccifer 2.0 post, the Russian military intelligence cyber team at Unit 74455 had “searched for certain words and phrases.” These included terms that turned up in the Guccifer 2.0 post, such as “worldwide known.”
The indictment states, “Between in or around June 2016 and October 2016, the Conspirators used Guccifer 2.0 to release documents through WordPress that they had stolen from the DCCC and DNC.” Russian military intelligence devoted time and effort to maintaining the deception that Democratic documents were hacked and distributed by a Romanian: In January 2017—a month after Steele wrote his Prague tale—they were still putting out statements on the Guccifer 2.0 blog that the fictitious Romanian did all the hacking and had “totally no relation to the Russian government.”
When newspapers in 2016 originally reported the hacks as coming from Russia, the early installments of the dossier show Steele relaying that story. But after months of Russian efforts to prop up an imaginary Romanian hacker, the dossier trafficked in the conceit that “Romanian hackers” were involved in the theft and leaking of Democratic emails and documents. It spun an intrigue-filled tale that a representative of Trump was dispatched to see that the hackers received “deniable cash payments” and help arrange “bolt-holes” where they could hide out.
Mueller’s indictment from this July shows conclusively that the Romanian hacker was invented by Russian military intelligence to fool the West. Perhaps no one was taken in quite so fully as Christopher Steele. However Steele’s story was obtained, the special counsel has provided compelling evidence that his informants either manipulated Steele or didn’t know what they were talking about.
Michael Cohen has maintained and even now maintains—after having pleaded guilty to a grab-bag of criminal offenses—that he has never been in Prague. As risky as it may be to credit anything Cohen says, he has held to the claim through changing fortunes and changing legal teams. And the evidence mounts that he’s right in declaring the dossier allegations about him to be false.
