President Donald Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen told the House intelligence committee investigating ties between Trump associates and the Kremlin that it should “discern and publicly disclose” the financing and motivations of the salacious dossier claiming, among other things, that Russian sex workers performed a golden shower for the pleasure of the future president.
In an Aug. 14 letter first reported by The New York Times and acquired by The Daily Beast, Cohen seeks to rebut the unproven claims in the dossier alleging his own role in a Trump-Kremlin relationship during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Cohen’s letter is concerned entirely with refuting the dossier’s claims about himself, not its broader allegations about Trump. Despite calling the document “libelous” and saying “any repetition of its allegations by the Committee should be rejected,” Cohen’s letter repeats several of its claims.
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Though Cohen holds out the possibility of additional document presentations to the committee—in addition to two that the letter says Cohen already gave House investigators—Cohen says “we do not believe that an interview or testimony concerning these allegations is warranted.”
The letter produced by Cohen attorney Stephen Ryan comes days after the same committee obtained November 2015 emails between Cohen and Trump Organization business associate Felix Sater discussing an ultimately scotched real-estate deal in Moscow that Sater mysteriously believed could “get Donald elected,” with Sater pledging to “get all of Putin[’]s team to buy in on this.”
In addition to Cohen’s longstanding denials that he has never visited Prague, in contradiction of a dossier claim that he traveled there for meetings “with Kremlin officials in August 2016,” Cohen denies as “entirely false” a claim that he played a role in an “ongoing secret liaison relationship” between Trump and the Russian leadership.” The dossier cited an unnamed “Kremlin insider” highlighting the “importance of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen” in that alleged relationship.
This week, however, Cohen confirmed that he emailed Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in January 2016 seeking “assistance” in pushing the proposed Trump Tower Moscow deal along. “As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance,” Cohen emailed a generic Kremlin press email. Peskov said that he didn’t reply to Cohen’s email.
Much of Cohen’s point-by-point response to the dossier involves saying he was “not aware” of “Mr. Trump having any improper political relationship with officials of the Russian federation” and therefore acting accordingly. His responses, delivered by his attorney, are narrowly tailored to the allegations against him, saying, for instance, that he never traveled to Prague or having conversations with the specific people the dossier alleges (“Oleg Solodukhim,” “Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers”) at the specifically alleged times (“in August or September 2016.”)
One of the points in the dossier, for instance, alleges that Cohen “met officials from the PA [Russian presidential administration] Legal Department in an EU country in August 2016” for a damage-control discussion, after a meetup “originally scheduled for cohen in Moscow... was shifted to what was considered an operationally ‘soft’ EU country when it was judged too compromising for him to travel to the Russian capital.” Cohen says the allegation is “entirely false” and did not “meet ‘officials from the PA Legal Department clandestinely in an EU country in August 2016.’” Cohen claims it is entirely false, but does not issue a denial of visiting EU countries in 2016, though elsewhere in his letter, he cites his passport to knock down the claim of visiting Prague at any point in time.
“We do not believe that the Committee should give credence to or perpetuate any of the Dossier’s allegations relating to Mr. Cohen unless the Committee can obtain independent and reliable corroboration of those allegations, which we do not believe exists,” the letter states.
