Analysis - What Happens After Fed Raid Trump Lawyer's Offices? [Archive]

enhanced_deficit

05-10-2018, 06:13 PM

Looks like this info was found and leaked to public:

According to Avenatti's memo, pharmaceutical company Novartis made four separate payments of $99,980 to the Essential Consultants bank account in late 2017 to early 2018;

"Following these payments, reports surfaced that Mr. Trump took a dinner with the incoming CEO of Novartis before Mr. Trump's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in late January 2018," Avenatti's report said.

Cohen established the firm Essential Consultants in the weeks leading up to Election Day to make a $130,000 payment to Daniels, as a part of an agreement to prevent the porn star from discussing her alleged affair with Trump.

Stormy Daniels' lawyer: US company linked to Russian oligarch paid $500,000 to Cohen

By MJ Lee, Kara Scannell and Marshall Cohen, CNN
Tue May 8, 2018

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180416105724-02-michael-cohen-04-13-2018-medium-plus-169.jpg (https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/08/politics/robert-mueller-russian-oligarch-payments-michael-cohen/index.html)
Exclusive: Mueller's team questions Russian oligarch about payments to Cohen

We’re Supposed to Believe Michael Cohen’s One-Person Shell Company Provided “Consulting” Services Worth Millions of Dollars

By Ben Mathis-Lilley
May 09, 2018

• Korean Aerospace Industries, a defense contractor, said it paid $150,000 to Essential Consultants for “legal consulting concerning accounting standards on production costs” and told the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mueller-questioned-payment-to-trump-lawyer-michael-cohen/2018/05/09/6ad3a7d6-538d-11e8-a551-5b648abe29ef_story.html?utm_term=.f5aa50126144) that it was not aware that Cohen had a connection to Donald Trump. (Cohen has represented the Trump Organization and Trump personally for more than a decade, in which time he has also acted as a Trump spokesman and campaign surrogate.)

• AT&T said in a statement (https://www.dallasnews.com/business/att/2018/05/09/want-know-facts-att-emails-employees-wake-trump-lawyer-payment-controversy) that it paid Cohen “to help us understand how the President and his administration might approach a wide range of policy issues important to the company, including regulatory reform at the FCC, corporate tax reform and antitrust enforcement.” Cohen reportedly received $600,000 (https://twitter.com/ceciliakang/status/994300689475145730) from the company.

• The Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis says it hired Cohen to “advise the company as to how the Trump administration might approach certain U.S. healthcare policy matters, including the Affordable Care Act.” Amazingly, Novartis says, it agreed to a $1.2 million contract with Cohen in February 2017 but didn’t even meet with him until a month later, at which point it “determined that [he] would be unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated related to U.S. healthcare policy matters” and made the decision not to “engage further” with him. (A Novartis employee told the health care publication Stat (https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2018/05/09/trumps-lawyer-cohen-fixer-novartis/) that Cohen contacted the company’s former CEO around the time of Trump’s inauguration and offered his services helping obtain “access” to Trump and his advisers. Stat notes dryly that “the employee could not explain why Novartis would have agreed to a deal with a lawyer with no background in health care and without deep Washington ties.” A spokesman for the company called its involvement with Cohen “a mistake.”)

• Columbus Nova, a New York investment firm, paid Cohen $500,000 to work as “a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures.” Columbus Nova’s CEO is the cousin of a Russian billionaire named Viktor Vekselberg who controls a holding company called the Renova Group.

So, these four entities paid a former personal-injury lawyer’s zero-employee paper company millions of dollars for advice about accounting standards, telecom reform, tax policy, antitrust law, the Affordable Care Act, and high-end investment opportunities in the same period that said company was also involved in nondisclosure payments to a pornographic actress and a Playboy playmate (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/08/how-money-flowed-through-michael-cohens-multi-purpose-shell-company/?utm_term=.ccc74fe003bd).

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/michael-cohen-essential-consultants-corporate-explanations-fail-laugh-test.html