Mueller’s Early Scrutiny of Michael Cohen Rooted in Foreign Ties
Suspicions that Cohen violated law known as ‘espionage lite’.
(Bloomberg) -- Well before President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to tax fraud and campaign-finance violations, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was building a different sort of case against him -- pursuing evidence he’d acted as an unregistered foreign agent.
Prosecutors haven’t brought such charges against Cohen. But documents made public on Tuesday show that the early stages of Mueller’s probe of Trump’s longtime fixer were driven by concerns about his possible foreign ties, including suspicious payments from a company tied to a Russian oligarch.
Those insights emerge in hundreds of pages of partially blacked-out affidavits that were filed to justify searches of Cohen’s email accounts and phones by federal authorities in New York. But the filings also make reference to searches done earlier at Mueller’s request, before his office handed over some or all of the matter to law enforcement in Manhattan.
It’s unclear whether investigators stopped looking at Cohen’s foreign dealings or whether the inquiry continued as part of Mueller’s investigation, with which Cohen has cooperated.
The special counsel’s office focused on Cohen early on, the affidavits show. In July 2017, two months after Mueller’s appointment, the FBI asked the chief U.S. district judge in Washington to authorize a covert search of Cohen’s emails back to 2016.
They were looking for evidence of possible crimes including money laundering and making false statements to banks, as well as two possible violations related to work for foreigners -- failing to register as a foreign lobbyist and acting as an unregistered foreign agent. The latter has been used against suspected Russian spies.
The two laws related to foreign activities showed up later in Mueller’s prosecutions and other Russia-related actions. Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was convicted of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, among other offenses. In Washington, Russia’s Maria Butina pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Russia, running afoul of a law the Justice Department’s national security division has described as “espionage lite.”
The unsealed Cohen filings don’t explain what tipped off Mueller’s team or what initial evidence they showed the judge to justify that first round of warrants. But the documents detail payments received by one of Cohen’s companies from foreign entities after Trump’s inauguration. Those entities included a Kazakh bank embroiled in a money-laundering fight and a South Korean aerospace firm that does business with the U.S. military.
Cohen’s company, Essential Consultants LLC, also received payments for consulting work from Columbus Nova LLC, a company led by Andrew Intrater, a cousin of Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg. Columbus Nova has said it’s owned and controlled by Americans. But the FBI, citing public sources, considered Columbus Nova “controlled” by Vekselberg’s holding company, Renova Group, according to the unsealed documents.
The suspicious payments were made to an Essential Consultants bank account at First Republic, which Cohen opened in October 2016, according to the filing. He falsely told the bank’s employees that the account was for “a real estate consulting company to collect fees for investment consulting work” and that “all of his consulting clients would be domestic individuals based in the United States,” the filing says.
The documents revealed for the first time that foreign payments and suspicious activity reports -- which banks file regularly with the federal government to comply with anti-money-laundering laws -- may have formed a basis for Mueller’s search of Cohen’s emails.
Among those payments:
- Jan. 31, 2017: Less than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Cohen began receiving monthly payments of $83,333 from Columbus Nova, an investment management firm that authorities said is controlled by Renova, a Swiss holding company. Renova is controlled Vekselberg, prosecutors said in the filing. The payments totaled nearly $600,000, the U.S. said.
- April 2017: Cohen began accepting payments from Novartis International AG totaling $1.1 million through February 2018, according to the filing.
- April 2017: Cohen began accepting payments from AT&T Inc. totaling $600,000, with the last installment in January 2018, according to the filing.
- May 2017: BTA Bank JSC, based in Kazakhstan, paid Essential Consultants $150,000 for a “monthly consulting fee.” The BTA payment was revealed for the first time during Cohen’s congressional testimony.
- May 2017: Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd., a South Korea-based maker of fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters and satellites for customers including the U.S. Defense Department, made four payments totaling $600,000 in May, June, July and November 2017.
Most of the payments were revealed last year after being leaked to Michael Avenatti, the California lawyer who represented the actress Stormy Daniels. The payment from BTA was revealed later by Cohen during his explosive congressional testimony last month.
To contact the reporters on this story: Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net;Shahien Nasiripour in New York at snasiripour1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeffrey D Grocott at jgrocott2@bloomberg.net, David S. Joachim, Peter Jeffrey
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