Michael Cohen, the man once best known to the world as President Donald Trump's lawyer but now widely regarded as a potential liability for the president, has been revealed to have had possible financial connections of his own with a Russian oligarch.
Essential Consultants LLC, a shell company created by Cohen that funneled hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels for her alleged affair with Trump, received payments amounting to roughly $500,000 from a New York investment firm, Columbus Nova, whose main client is a company controlled by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, according to The New York Times. It was also determined that Essential Consultants LLC had received payments from various Fortune 500 companies that had business before the Trump administration, including AT&T, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in total. Overall, financial records that the Times was able to review revealed that at least $4.4 million has gone through Essential Consultants LLC for a number of business transactions.
On Wednesday morning, Cohen briefly told NBC cameras that the documents — which had been shared by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stephanie "Stormy Daniels" Clifford — are not accurate.
Cohen's attack on Avenatti is perhaps unsurprising, considering that the story came to light as a result of his efforts.
References to the transactions first appeared in a document posted to Twitter on Tuesday by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, the adult film star who was paid $130,000 by Essential Consultants to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Mr. Trump. The lawyer’s seven-page document, titled “Preliminary Report of Findings,” does not explain the source of his information but describes in detail dates, dollar amounts and parties involved in various dealings by Mr. Cohen and his company. Most of the transactions involved two banks: First Republic Bank and City National Bank.
The Times’s review of financial records confirmed much of what was in Mr. Avenatti’s report. In addition, a review of documents and interviews shed additional light on Mr. Cohen’s dealings with the company connected to Mr. Vekselberg, who was stopped and questioned at an airport earlier this year by investigators for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The chief executive of Columbus Nova, Andrew Intrater, is not only Vekselberg's cousin, but a Trump supporter who donated $250,000 to the then-incoming president's inauguration. Columbus Nova is pushing back against the reports that their involvement with Essential Consultants LLC somehow entangled them in the ongoing controversy surrounding Trump and Russia.
"Columbus Nova is an investment management company solely owned and controlled by Americans. After the inauguration, the firm hired Michael Cohen as a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures," Richard Owens, a lawyer for Intrater and Columbus Nova, told the Times, while adding that Vekselberg had never actually owned the firm in question.
Owens added, "Reports today that Viktor Vekselberg used Columbus Nova as a conduit for payments to Michael Cohen are false. The claim that Viktor Vekselberg was involved in or provided any funding for Columbus Nova’s engagement of Michael Cohen is patently untrue. Neither Viktor Vekselberg nor anyone else outside of Columbus Nova was involved in the decision to hire Cohen or provided funding for his engagement."
Columbus Nova isn't the only company being caught up in the controversy involving Essential Consultants LLC. AT&T gave $200,000 in payouts to Essential on the grounds that they were "one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration," according to The New York Times. Considering that the company already has an $85.4 billion bid for Time Warner in front of the administration, AT&T's payment has raised questions about whether there was any connection between the funds being given to the shell company and AT&T's larger corporate goals.
The main question confronting Cohen at this point is whether he will turn against the president in order to protect himself legally. Although Trump and Cohen have so far seemed supportive of and sympathetic to each other, that doesn't change the fact that Trump is well known to look out for himself in the end. Cohen may view the Trumps as family, and vice versa, but Cohen's ongoing legal troubles have taken a considerable personal toll on him, according to Vanity Fair:
Cohen, for his part, is mostly distraught over the impact on his family, according to the people familiar with his thinking. "I live for my wife and my kids," he tells friends. "I’d die for my wife and my kids. And this is all ruining their lives." An inaccurate NBC News report on Thursday saying that the government had wiretapped his phone, which was corrected by the network the same day, was particularly difficult on his children, according to one person. Once they read it, it doesn’t matter if it’s corrected, he has told people. The damage, he has said, is already done. (Though he has said he’s glad they did ultimately correct it.)
Cohen himself is grappling with the fact that, in his early fifties, his life and his business will never be the same, and that he is isolated from the people in Washington around Trump, who, he has said, have been treating him as though he is "disposable."
"I am sitting here in this nightmare," he has told people. He has said he has had no peace since January 2017, when BuzzFeed published the so-called "dossier" that made several claims about Cohen’s interactions with Russians throughout the presidential campaign (claims he has repeatedly denied). Since the raids, however, and following Giuliani’s media blitz, two people said that Cohen feels even more alone. Friends have said that “Washington has made a huge mistake” in hanging him out to dry. "That," one person said, "is a dangerous place for him to be."
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