Welcome to Rabbit Hole, a breaking-news analysis that helps you get smart on the one story everyone’s obsessing over—for Beast Inside members only.
Michael Cohen has a head full of Trump secrets. So what should Congress ask him first? It’s hard to know where to begin since the president’s former fixer claims he knows about everything from Donald Trump’s mistresses to the shady Russians who claimed they could play matchmaker for a Putin meetup. One place to start would be the checks that Cohen now says Trump signed to keep his affairs quiet.
Who okayed the mistress money? On Tuesday, sources told The Daily Beast that Cohen is going to talk about who signed those reimbursement checks for Trump’s (alleged) mistress hush-money payouts. So who signed them? The money for the payoffs wasn’t his. The Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen, threw in a $60,000 bonus, and had him parcel out the money into $35,000 invoices paid out monthly as part of what prosecutors said was a phoney retainer agreement. The expenses were handled by “Executive-1,” identified as Trump Organization chief financial officer turned cooperating witness Allen Weisselberg—who then asked an anonymous Trump Organization official, dubbed “Executive-2,” to sign off on the payments.
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The Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday that Trump signed at least some of Cohen’s reimbursement checks, meaning he could be the anonymous Executive-2 in Cohen’s plea documents.
Dangerous autographs: The check-signing habits of Donald Trump sounds like an impossibly obscure topic that only Trump Organization insiders would know about. Fortunately for the rest of us, Trump went on at length about his check-signing habits as part of a 2011 lawsuit after he stuffed the company that had been making his line of licensed dress shirts. In a deposition, he cast himself as deeply involved in signing off on invoices and said “In some cases I'll sign a thousand checks in a week.” Trump said he was so involved, in fact, that he caught himself signing checks he shouldn’t have and then stopping payments. So by his account, he’s a hands-on manager who likes to see his money before it goes out the door—if it goes out the door at all.
Timeline: That allegation lines up with another claim from Cohen—that the president committed unspecified crimes while he was president. Cohen’s guilty plea shows he submitted his mistress payout invoices on a monthly basis starting in January 2017, when Trump would’ve been sworn in as president as of the 20th of that month. Assuming Cohen’s allegation is that Trump himself has criminal liability from reimbursing the illegal campaign contribution, the timeline at least lines up. It also begs the question of what Trump would’ve been doing signing checks for his company when he’s supposed to be at an arm’s length from his business through a revocable trust.
How far did the Putin UN meeting plans go? One of the less discussed aspects of Cohen’s cooperation with the special counsel’s office was his admission of a failed attempt to organize a Trump-Putin meeting during the UN General Assembly meeting in 2015. Mueller’s sentencing memo for Cohen points out that Cohen said he spoke with Trump about feeling out the Kremlin about a meeting. Who did Cohen talk to or try and get a hold of in the Russian government and how did he get in touch with them?
Who offered “political synergy”? The failed outreach efforts to Russia are interesting because just two months later a Russian national reached out to him trying to set up another Trump-Putin meeting. That Russian said making nice with Russia could get Trump world “political synergy” from the Russian government and hinted at a financial payout by referencing the Trump Tower Moscow project. Cohen told the special counsel that he didn’t follow up with the mysterious meeting midwife because he had his own connections to the Kremlin he was working through the Moscow Trump Tower project, but that doesn’t necessarily downplay the significance of the outreach, particular if the matchmaker tried the same pitch with other Trump associates.
Did Trump do anything to try and grease the Moscow Trump Tower project? Cohen lied to Congress about the extent of planning for a Trump Tower Moscow project in order to hide that he and Trump were still dependent on Moscow’s favor to greenlight it while Trump was running for president. We know that Cohen reached out to Russian officials about it and suggested Trump did, as well. What we don’t know is what, if anything, Trump did on his own to try and push the project forward.
Who gave the Trump inaugural money and for what? Federal prosecutors in New York and the Special Counsel’s Office are reportedly investigating a 2016 Trump inaugural breakfast event attended by foreign dignitaries to see if any foreign nationals improperly gave money to the Trump inaugural. It’s unclear who allegedly gave what on behalf of which country. Equally unclear is why the feds are interested in an inaugural donor on the breakfast guest list, Imaad Zuberi. A federal subpoena for the Trump inaugural committee asked for information on Zuberi, whose firm donated nearly a million dollars to the inaugural and who spoke with Cohen about attending the inauguration itself. So why do the feds want documents on Zuberi and what might that have to do with inaugural fundraising?
Trust but verify: As Republicans like Ohio’s Rep. Jim Jordan point out, Cohen has already admitted to lying to Congress. He’s also admitted to double-crossing close friends and associates, cheating banks, and the IRS, and engaging in an illegal scheme to cover up his boss’s affair. He also has every reason to dislike Trump given that the president has made a habit of trashing him on Twitter and urging every law enforcement official within earsight to try and make a criminal case against Cohen’s father-in-law.
But despite those credibility issues, two separate teams of prosecutors have publicly vouched for Cohen’s version of events in the crimes he copped to. Why? Because he had corroborating evidence like recordings, text messages, and documents to back up his story. Given his history of lying, you’d do right to be skeptical unless he can back up any of his claims with similar evidence.
