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The ghost of mistresses stars past might continue to haunt President Trump for a quite a while.
On Tuesday, a federal court unsealed hundreds of pages of search warrant applications for Michael Cohen submitted by federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office. The court filings have some eyebrow raising nuggets in them but what’s missing from them is even more interesting. Prosecutors sprawled gray ink over any section that touched on Cohen’s hush money payments to Trump’s alleged ex-lovers in a hint that they may not quite be done with the case of mistress hush money.
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Redaction riddle: Flip through the hundreds of pages of search warrant applications for Michael Cohen and you’ll notice that prosecutors have treated the crimes they describe in very different ways. The sections describing Cohen’s tax and bank fraud crimes are practically naked but for the occasional demure redaction of a word here or there. By contrast, the sections that deal with his hush money payouts are practically invisible behind page after page of bulk redactions.
The most logical explanation for why those sections are redacted is that there’s something about the illicit campaign finance scheme that prosecutors aren’t quite done with yet. What that something is, we don’t quite know. But we do know that it jibes with some of the other hints that there may be more shoes to drop in the story of Cohen’s hush money payment to Stormy Daniels and his involvement in American Media Inc’s “catch and kill” of Playboy model Karen McDougal. We know that prosecutors in New York are still interested in learning more about Trump Organization executives who may have known about or been involved in the hush money payment. And there’s the tantalizing but still highly speculative theory that prosecutors could charge Trump once he leaves office for his role in the payment scheme.
Be aggressive: The special counsel’s office warrant for Cohen’s Gmail account is more interesting when you put it in context. Mueller was appointed special counsel on May 17, 2017. Just two months later, on July 18, 2017, he already had a warrant on Cohen’s Gmail account up and running with a filter team ready to sift out any potentially material covered by attorney-client privilege. That’s pretty fast and it suggests that something made prosecutors key in on Cohen very early on.
Origin story: If you want a warrant, you need to cite the crimes you think were broken in order to justify your search. In Cohen’s case, the crimes Mueller first suspected Cohen of committing were false statements to a financial institution, money laundering, and acting as an unregistered foreign agent. But where did the special counsel’s office first get the idea that Cohen may have committed those crimes? It’s hard to say for certain, but it’s possible that various banks’ suspicious activity reports filed on Cohen’s accounts may have played a role.
Flash back to May 2018 when the New Yorker revealed that First Republic bank filed at least three suspicious activity reports on Essential Consultants LLC, the sham company set up to pay off Stormy Daniels and store money from Cohen’s “consulting” work on behalf of a handful of big corporations. The New Yorker’s source described those reports as covering three time spans: from September 2017 to January 2018, from June 2017 through September 2017, and a third suspicious activity report that covered a seven month period, likely sometime prior to the other reports. That means there’s a good chance one of those suspicious activity reports from First Republic was likely around early enough to spark the special counsel’s interest in Cohen.
Lies: The similarity between the offenses listed in Mueller’s initial warrant for Cohen and the kinds of things that would trigger a suspicious activity report also suggest that the reports may have piqued Mueller’s interest in Cohen. The New Yorker piece shows that one of the red flags that prompted First Republic’s reporting was that Cohen told bank officials the company and its account were for something completely different than what they saw it being used for. He claimed it was "a real estate consulting company to collect fees for investment consulting work, and all of his consulting clients would be domestic individuals based in the United States,” according to court papers.
Of course, that has nothing to do with paying hush money to alleged mistresses and depositing abnormally large checks from companies seeking access to and advice about Trumpworld. As we now know, Cohen lied about his clients being American, too. Companies like Korea Aerospace Industries, a bank in Kazakhstan, Swiss drugmaker Novartis, and a company affiliated with Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg all gave money to Essential Consultants.
All of that is hinted at in the special counsel’s warrant application. Among other things, prosecutors said they expected to find evidence that Cohen had lied about “intended the purpose [sic] of an account or loan" and "the nature of any business or entity associated" with Essential Consultants accounts.
FARA: One of the revelations in the search warrants is that Mueller’s office at least considered the possibility of charging Cohen with failure to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). We don’t know which country or transaction triggered the special counsel’s FARA suspicions but we do know that prosecutors have thought Vekselberg was important enough to their investigation to stop him at a U.S. airport in early 2018, search his electronic devices, and question him.
Prosecutors didn’t charge Vekselberg with anything and Cohen was never charged with FARA violations. But as the New Yorker noted, the bank officials were alarmed by the fact that Vekselberg’s American cousin, Andrew Intrater, the CEO of a company affiliated with Vekselberg, was donating money to Trump inaugural committee at the same time his company was paying Trump’s lawyer. And as we know from The Daily Beast’s reporting on a Trump inaugural breakfast, the special counsel’s office has been investigating possible links between Cohen, foreign nationals, and the Trump inaugural committee well past 2017.
