Demagogue con man Donald "Rump" Trump's fixer / bag man and consigliere Michael "Clown Roy Cohn" Cohen is finding himself in deeper legal kimchi today, as the Justice Department acknowledged in Federal Court that he's been the subject of a criminal investigation for months. Lawyers for both Cohen and Rump went to court to try to suppress the materials collected by the FBI under a search warrant last week executed on Cohen's office, home and hotel room. The materials seized likely contain evidence of a range of illegal activities, potentially wire and bank fraud, money laundering and violations of Federal election laws.
In another development, McClatchy News reports that the Mueller team has evidence that Cohen traveled to Prague before the 2016 election, perhaps to meet with Russian operative and Putin ally Konstantin Kosachev. The allegation that Cohen went there to meet with a Russian operative surfaced in the Christopher Steele dossier. Cohen denied that he was in Prague, even going so far as to showing reporters his passport:
"Kosachev, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee of a body of the Russian legislature, the Federation Council, also has denied visiting Prague during 2016. Earlier this month, Kosachev was among 24 high-profile Russians hit with stiff U.S. sanctions in retaliation for Russia’s meddling.The significance of the Prague meeting can't be overstated. Rump uses Cohen as his right hand for sensitive (read shady) negotiations and activities (beyond paying mistresses for their silence). If there's evidence in Cohen's papers or records of that meeting and what the discussion involved, that would make the charge of collusion/conspiracy with the Russian government clearer than ever.
But investigators have traced evidence that Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany, apparently during August or early September of 2016 as the ex-spy reported, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is confidential. He wouldn’t have needed a passport for such a trip, because both countries are in the so-called Schengen Area in which 26 nations operate with open borders." (emphasis added)
UPDATE: Did notorious Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin meet with Cohen in Prague, too? Laurence Lewis at DailyKos has the story. (Nikulin is now in U.S. custody, after having been extradited from the Czech Republic).
UPDATE II: Thanks to some investigative work by TPM/Josh Marshall, the man in the photo above sitting to Cohen's left in the all-blue outfit wearing glasses is a character named Rotem Rosen, the CEO of a holding company owned by a Putin oligarch Lev Leviev.
(photo: Cohen, background center, chatting with his crew. Do they speak Italian or Russian?)
