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Andrew Weissman's book Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, published in 2020, provides some limited information about the FBI's investigation of Michael Cohen.
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| Cover of Andrew Weissman's book, Where Law Ends |
In Mueller's Special Counsel staff, Weissman headed one of three "principle teams" -- the team that investigated Paul Manafort. The other two teams investigated "Russian interference in the 2016 election" and "obstructions of justice". (The overwhelming majority of the staff members were current or past FBI officials.)
Weissmann tells at length how he intended to "flip" Manafort by prosecuting him for tax evasions, for failure to comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), for lying to the FBI and for any other process crimes. Once Manafort's guilt for such crimes was proved, then Weissmann intended to promise leniency in the punishments if Manafort would provide evidence that Donald Trump or his associates had colluded with Russia to affect the election.
In that regard, Weissmann's book is a shaggy-dog story. Eventually, Weissmann did confess to some crimes and agree to cooperate with Weissmann. However, the book does not reveal what Manafort was asked about the suspected collusion -- or what relevant information Manafort provided. It should be obvious to any intelligent reader that Manafort could not provide any information about such collusion -- because no such collusion ever happened.
Likewise, the book's telling about the principle team investigation of "Russian interference in the 2016 election" is another shaggy-dog story. That team indicted several Russians for such interference. One such Russian, Yevgeny Prigozhin, hired an American law firm, which agreed to stand trial. When the trial was about to begin in March 2020, the prosecutors dropped all the charges, and so the trial never took place. Weissmann's book tells about the indictments, but says nothing at all about the dropping of all charges right before the trial.
(The intelligent reader should surmise that the Special Counsel's indictment of Prigozhin was just a publicity stunt that was not based on compelling evidence. The Special Counsel had not foreseen that any of the indicted Russians ever might appear to stand trial.)
Weissmann's book does not significantly discuss the fact that Mueller's final report said that no evidence was found incriminating any Americans in the suspected collusion with Russia. Rather than discuss that finding, Weiussman's book complains at length that the Special Counsel staff was not able to compel President Trump to answer all the arrogant, obnoxious questions that Weissmann thinks should have been asked.
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Weissman's discussion of Michael Cohen is limited, because the investigation of Cohen was removed from the Special Counsel's jurisdiction -- in particular, from Weissmann's supervision.
Of course, Cohen had nothing at all to do with any Russian collusion to affect the election -- because there never was any such collusion.
During the Special Counsel investigation, Cohen came to Weissmann's attention because an outside attorney (not named in the book) -- who had become acquainted with Weissman during a previous FBI investigation of the Enron company -- sent Weissmann a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) that a foreign bank (represented by that attorney) intended to submit to the US Treasury Department about Cohen.
That SAR indicated that, "soon after the 2016 election", some payments had been deposited into "a Cohen business account ... from a source linked to a Russian oligarch". After those words, on page 143 of his book, Weissman never writes another word in the following 200 pages about those payments or that unnamed "oligarch".
The SAR mentioned also that the same "Cohen business account" had, before the election, deposited $130,000 into the account of adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. Mueller worried that this sexual aspect might turn his own Special Counsel investigation into something like the Monica Lewinsky circus, and so he decided to transfer the entire Cohen investigation to the FBI's Southern District of New York (SDNY). Therefore, Weissmann's book does not provide any further inside information about the investigation and prosecution of Cohen.
Eventually, Cohen pleaded guilty to several charges (e.g. tax evasion, campaign-finance violations) that had nothing at all to do with any suspected Russian collusion to affect the 2016 election. In the course of his ordeal, Cohen turned against Trump and so was eager to provide any information incriminating Trump that he knew.
After Cohen was convicted, he agreed to answer the questions of the Special Counsel staff. Of course, that staff asked Cohen about the suspected election collusion, but Weissmann's book does not specify any such questions -- or Cohen's answers. So Weissmann's narrative about Cohen is yet another shaggy-dog story. The intelligent reader should surmise that Cohen could not provide Weissmann any information about election collusion -- because no such collusion happened.
Cohen did tell the Special Counsel staff that he had made some misleading statements about a project to develop a Trump-branded hotel in Moscow. Cohen had said publicly that the project had ended by January 2016, although some discussions had occurred intermittently until June 2016. In the post-January discussions, however, their essence was that no significant progress was being accomplished.
Obviously, Weissmann and some of his fellow staff members were obsessed by their suspicion that Russian President Vladimir Putin was secretly helping Trump to establish the Moscow hotel as a reward for Trump's collusion.
Cohen, in his own book, writes (pages 10-11) that in January 2016, his associate Felix Sater had tried to arrange for him, Cohen, to travel to Russia make some progress on the hotel project. (Cohen was not only Trump's lawyer; he was acting also as an executive in Trump's organization.) However, Cohen decided not to do the trip, because he lacked any reliable information that any relevant person in Moscow had the necessary licenses, permits and funding to develop such a hotel project. In Cohen's mind, his decision in January 2016 to not travel to Moscow was the actual end of the project, although there were a few more discussions in the following months, into June 2016.
Nevertheless, the FBI compelled Cohen to plead guilty to lying when he had said that nothing happened in the hotel project after January 2016. In general, Cohen says he was innocent of all the charges, but he was compelled to plead guilty because he feared his wife might be prosecuted likewise for the tax-evasion charges.
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When Weissmann wrote in his book that "soon after the 2016 election", some payments had been deposited into "a Cohen business account ... from a source linked to a Russian oligarch", Weissmann intended that his book's readers would assume that these deposits incriminated Cohen somehow.
Since, however, Weissmann never writes another word about those deposits or that "oligarch", the intelligent reader should surmise that those deposits had nothing at all to do with any Russian collusion in the USA's 2016 election." That passage in Weissmann's book is just a gratuitous and malicious smear of Cohen.
Exactly what was this "source linked to a Russian oligarch"? It was not even the "oligarch" himself! Rather, it was merely a "source linked to a Russian oligarch".
According to another book, Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump (page 241), which I will discuss in my next blog article, the "oligarch" was Viktor Vekselberg, who paid Cohen's company Essential Consultants for "investment consulting".
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The Special Counsel's published report stated that Cohen did not travel to Prague, despite the many Dossier statements that he had done so. Weissmann does not write anything about the Special Counsel's investigation of this trip or about its firm conclusion that the Prague trip had not happened.
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Continued in Part 6
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