My Conspiracy Theory About the Prague-Meeting Hoax -- Part 8

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

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Christopher Steele's first publicly known Dossier report mentioning Michael Cohen is Report 2016/134, dated October 18, 2016.

A month before that -- in September 2016 -- Fusion GPS's interest in Cohen "changed". Fusion GPS itself began investigating Cohen and -- according to the company's owners Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, in their book Crime in Progress -- soon learned the following suspicious facts about Cohen (pages 234, 237):

* Cohen had been involved in an unsuccessful project to develop a Trump Hotel in the Republic of Georgia.

* Cohen had "sponsored mixed martial arts [MMA] events with Russian fighters under a Trump MMA brand".

* Cohen's father-in-law owned some taxi medallions in New York.

* Cohen himself "had built up significant taxi medallion holdings in New York City and Chicago".

* "The FBI believed that Soviet emigre taxi operators based in Brighton Beach and Chicago belonged to a loosely knit organized criminal community".

* Cohen had partnered ... with two ex-Soviet taxicab magnates ... one of whom had faced convictions assault, burglary and criminal possession of a weapon".

* Cohen had built up his taxi ventures while working as a personal-injury lawyer. ... His first boss in the business was arrested for bribery".

* "The taxi office Cohen worked in was run by a man named Simon Garber, a Ukrainian-American known as the Taxi King of New York. Several of Cohen's legal partners in Garber's company were disbarred foe filing false personal-injury cases against rival cab companies".

* "Cohen had registered medical companies for several Brighton Beach doctors who had then collectivley bilked Medicare for questionable medical claims".

* "Cohen was even on the paperwork for a taxi company in Russia".

*Cohen's father-in-law "had once admitted to a felony money-laundering charge".

*Cohen's "uncle Morton Levine owned a Brooklyn club and catering hall called El Caribe, notorious throughout the city as a mob hangout".

Based on these suspicious facts, Simpson and Fritsch asked Christopher Steele himself to investigate Cohen. The book says (emphasis added):

Fascinated by these strands, Fusion [i.e. Simpson and Fritsch] asked Steel in the fall of 2016 to see whether Cohen rang any bells among his sources in Russia [e.g. "Kremlin insider" Olga Galkina]. On October 18, Steele filed a memo [Dossier Report 206/134] with the first mention of Cohen. .... Cohen was playing "a key role in the secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship." Steele didn't know much more than that.

Simpson's and Steele's theory was that when [Paul] Manfort resigned from the [Trump] campaign in August, Cohen likely became an important liaison for contacts with Russia. ...

At Fusion's urging, Steele kept pushing his sources [e.g. "Kremlin insider" Galkina] for more information on Cohen. Two days after the first memo [Dossier report] mentioning Cohen, he came back with more: In August, Cohen had held a secret meeting with "Kremlin officials" in Prague, Steele's source ["Kremlin insider" Galkina] said.

It was a stunning report. While there was no way to immediately verify Cohen's whereabouts, other aspects of the Prague reporting fit with [imaginary] information coming in at the time from [imaginary] independent sources. One of the Russians who Steele was at the meeting ran the Prague office of a Russian government cultural organization that the U.S. authorities believed was a front for Russian intelligence.

Of course, "Kremlin insider" Galkina, living in Cyprus, did not know anything at all about Cohen or about the Russian who ran the Prague office that US Intelligence "believed was a front for Russian intelligence". 

Of course, Galkina was told and paid by someone to tell Steele's "primary sub-source" that Cohen had met with that Russian in Prague. That "someone" knew that that particular Russian in Prague ran an office that was "a front for Russian intelligence".

I think that someone -- who put Galkina up to telling those lies -- was a member of a cabal of former and current US Intelligence officials who were helping Hillary Clinton to prepare an October Surprise that might be launched to help her defeat Trump in the 2016 election.

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Galkina denies that she told those lies to Danchenko. She says Danchenko himself concocted the lies and then attributed them falsely to her.

However, John Durham indicted for telling various lies to the FBI, but he did not indict Danchenko for telling lies to the FBI about Galkina's role in the Prague-meeting hoax.  

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Continued in Part 9

My Conspiracy Theory About the Prague-Meeting Hoax -- Part 7

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

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Christopher Steele's first publicly known Dossier report mentioning Michael Cohen is Report 2016/134, dated October 18, 2016.

However, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch -- the two owners of the company Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to investigate Donald Trump's imaginary collusion with Russia -- write in their book Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump, that Fusion GPS had begun to focus its attention on Cohen already in September 2016.

Specifically, Simpson and Fritsch write (page 234; emphasis added):

Fusion's own interest in Cohen changed in September 2016, when the firm [Fusion GPS] came across evidence suggesting that he [Cohen] had been a key link between Trump and various Russians of interest. Fusion noticed that Cohen had apparently served as the Trump Organization contact with the Belarussian émigré and suspicious Trump hanger-on Sergei Millian, who claimed to have partnered with the Trump Organization in making tens of millions of dollars in condo sales to Russians. [Fusion GPS employee Jacob] Berkowitz found a message on Twitter from Cohen to Millian in August 2016 asking him if he's seen Trump's standing in the polls. ....

A review of open-source records showed Cohen's father-in-law was a Ukrainian émigré who owned New York taxi medallions and had once admitted to a felony money-laundering charge. Cohen's brother had also married into a Ukrainian family shortly before he [Michael Cohen] joined the Trump Organization.

After Fusion GPS began discovering such incriminating information about Cohen in September 2016, it was no wonder that Steele began reporting in his Dossier Report # 134 on October 18, 2016, that Michael Cohen was playing a "key role" in the imaginary Trump-Kremlin collusion. Specifically, Steele wrote there (emphasis added):

* Kremlin insider highlights importance of TRUMP's lawyer, Michael COHEN in covert relationship with Russia. COHEN's wife is of Russian descent and her father a leading property developer in Moscow.

[....]

4. Speaking separately to the same compatriot in mid-October 2016, a Kremlin insider with direct access to the leadership confirmed that a key role in the secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship was being played by the Republican candidate's personal lawyer Michael COHEN. [Redacted]

Michael Cohen's wife (née Laura Shusterman) had immigrated to the USA from Ukraine in 1973. The Shusterman family was Jewish and so had been allowed to emigrate. In 1991-- 21 years after she had immigrated -- she married Cohen (born in 1966), when he was about 25 years old. Cohen's father-in-law Shusterman never has been "a leading property developer in Moscow" and has not even set foot in Moscow ever in his life (16:30).

The "Kremlin insider with direct access to the leadership" was Olga Galkina, who was living in Cyprus.

Olga Galkina, "a Kremlin insider with direct access to 
the leadership" who was living in Cyprus

Galkina was living in Cyprus, because she was working there for Aleksey Gubarev. The parts of the Dossier that mention Gubarev are redacted now because Gubarev sued Steele for defamation. In particular, Steele insinuated in his Dossier that Gubarev was involved in the hacking of the Democrat Party's computers.

The Mueller Report does not explain these lies about Cohen and the Shusterman family. In particular, who told and paid Galkina to tell her lies? After all, somebody must have told and paid her to do so! How could she have known anything at all about Michael Cohen?

(Galkina denies that she ever said anything to anybody about Cohen. She thinks that Igor Danchenko himself concocted the lies about Cohen and attributed them to Galkina.)

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Above, I quoted Simpson and Fritsch writing this:

[Cohen] had been a key link between Trump and various Russians of interest. Fusion [GPS] noticed that Cohen had apparently served as the Trump Organization contact with the Belarussian émigré and suspicious Trump hanger-on Sergei Millian, who claimed to have partnered with the Trump Organization in making tens of millions of dollars in condo sales to Russians.

At that time, Cohen was the Vice President of The Trump Organization, which managed several Trump Hotels -- including one in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. This facility included not only a hotel, but also a large number of condominiums. 

The condominium building at the
Trump Hotel in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida 

Millian sold some such condominiums, especially to Russians who had immigrated to the USA or who still lived in Russia. These condo sales made Millian "suspicious" in the eyes of Simpson and Fritsch. After all, maybe these condo sales were a method of laundering millions of dollars into Donald Trump's bank accounts. And the condos were sold by Millian! And Cohen was the Vice President of The Trump Organization, which managed all the Trump Hotels !! These were pieces of the puzzle incriminating Cohen in the imaginary Trump-Kremlin collusion!!! 

In February 2019, The Washington Post summarized Millian's role in this situation as follows (emphasis added):

Born in Belarus [in 1978] and given the name Siarhei Kukuts, Millian went to college in Minsk, where a Russian-language version of his biography that he posted online said he trained to be a military translator [when he was about 20 years old, in about 1998].

He moved to Atlanta in the early 2000s, changed his name to Sergei Millian, and began working in real estate and professional translating ... There, he founded a trade group called the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the USA, which gave him a platform to interact with business and government leaders in the United States and Russia.

It also boosted Millian’s profile. In 2011, he was invited to take part in a Russian government-backed effort to bring American entrepreneurs on visits to Moscow. ...

In his organization’s literature and elsewhere, Millian boasted of a relationship with Trump, saying that he had been engaged [in 2007-2008] to sell apartments to rich Russians in the Trump Hollywood condo building in Florida.

... [I]n April 2016, Millian gave the Russian state-operated news organization RIA Novosti an eyebrow-raising interview. He claimed that after meeting Trump in Miami he went to New York and met Trump’s “right-hand man” — his personal lawyer Michael Cohen — and then signed a contract to sell Trump units in Florida.

“You can say that I was their exclusive broker,” he said, speaking in Russian. “Back then, in 2007-2008, Russians by the dozens were buying apartments in Trump’s buildings in the USA.”

(...)

Cohen has denied meeting Millian and extending him a contract to sell Trump-branded condos.

Millian also has been identified as a source for information contained in the Steele dossier. The Post has previously reported that in his research reports, Steele described Millian — who was identified in one report as “Source D” and in another as “Source E” — as a “close associate of Trump” who had given a “compatriot” information in confidence in late July 2016.

The information attributed to Millian included the dossier’s most prurient claim: that Trump cavorted with prostitutes in Moscow. The document also cited Millian as a source for the assertion that a “well developed conspiracy of cooperation” existed between the Trump campaign and Russian leaders.

He attended several black-tie events at Trump's inauguration, and told the Russian news agency RIA that he had been in touch with the Trump Organization as late as April 2016. He was also photographed [!!!!] at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2016 with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a longtime business associate of Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort. ...

The Mueller Report discusses Millian (Volume 1, pages 94-95) only in relation to some communications between him and George Papadopoulos during July-November 2016.

* In July 2016, Millian informally invited Papadopoulos to speak about energy policy -- Papadopoulos was an expert about such policy -- at a conference scheduled for September 2016 in Moscow. Papadopoulos did not attend the conference, although the Mueller Report does not explain why.

* In August 2016, Millian sent Papadopoulos a Facebook message offering to "share with you a disruptive technology that might be instrumental in your political work for the campaign ". When asked by the Mueller staff about that Facebook message, Papadopolous responded that he did not remember seeing it.

* On November 9, 2016, the day after Election Day, Millian arranged to meet with Papadopoulos in Chicago on November 14. Millian hoped that Papadopoulos would get a position in Trump's administration, but Papadopoulos said he did not want to work for the US Government. Millian and Papadopoulos met again in Washington DC on about January 20, 2017, the date of Trump's inauguration.

The Mueller Report does not describe any further communication between Millian and Papadopoulos. Of course, all these communications between these two businessmen were just ordinary networking.

The Mueller Report does not discuss Millian selling condos to rich Russians or Millian allegedly being Sources D and E for Steele's Dossier or anything else about Millian.

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Continued in Part 8

My Conspiracy Theory About the Prague-Meeting Hoax -- Part 6

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

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Special Counsel Robert Mueller published his final report on April 18, 2019. On that same date, investigative journalists Peter Stone and Greg Gordon -- who apparently received the report before that date -- published an article titled Mueller report states Cohen was not in Prague. It is silent on whether a Cohen device pinged there. The 280-page Mueller report said essentially nothing about the imaginary meeting in Prague, except to assert that Michael Cohen never has visited Prague.

Instead, the bulk of the Report's text about Cohen was that he had been involved in a project to develop a Trump Hotel in Moscow. In the course of that effort, Cohen  had communicated with some Russians, but the project was abandoned during the first half of 2016. It did not even happen that a location for the hotel was found.

Furthermore, the Mueller Report said almost nothing about Christopher Steele's Dossier.

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Stone's and Gordon's April 18, 2019, article included the following passages (emphasis added):

The newly released report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller says Donald Trump’s fixer and personal lawyer was not in the Czech Republic months before the 2016 election.

The redacted report is silent on whether investigators received information placing one of Cohen’s devices in or near Prague, as McClatchy [Stone and Gordon] reported.

The so-called Steele Dossier, a collection of private memos from a former British spy [Christopher Steele] that became one of the triggers for Mueller’s two-year probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections, alleged that Michael Cohen was in Prague to meet with Kremlin officials and computer hackers.

McClatchy reported in April 2018 that Mueller’s office had been presented with evidence of Cohen entering the Czech Republic via Germany in late August or early September 2016. Cohen denied the allegation.

In a subsequent story in December 2018, McClatchy [Stone and Gordon] reported that it was a pinging cell signal, picked up by a foreign intelligence agency, that geo-located Cohen’s phone to the Prague area. While a contradiction to the assertions in the dossier, compiled by Christopher Steele, this scenario raised the possibility that Cohen was not there but one of the many phones he used was.

The Mueller report states Cohen was not in Prague: “Cohen had never traveled to Prague and was not concerned about those allegations, which he believed were provably false,” the report says on page 139. ...

The report was silent on the issue of a device linked to Cohen pinging from the Czech Republic, and whether the investigation was ever presented with such evidence. The report confirms the investigation used this type of evidence, noting cell-tower records geo-located another person relevant to the investigation. (The investigation geo-located Erik Prince, former head of security firm Blackwater, at Trump Tower, for example.)

The attorney general’s office and the Mueller team declined to comment following release of the report. Cohen and his representative did not respond to requests for comment.

McClatchy’s December 2018 report about the cell-phone ping came after Cohen’s testimony cited in the Mueller report, which was given on November 20, 2018. It is unclear whether Mueller subsequently pursued this line of investigation, or whether it fell under sensitive intelligence gathering. ....

McClatchy’s [Stone's and Gordon's] December 2018 reporting was based on information from five individuals with foreign intelligence connections, who all requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information shared and concerns about sources and methods. Each obtained their information independently from each other. McClatchy stands by the reporting.

Because parts of the Mueller report were redacted to protect secret grand jury testimony and information coming from intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence operations, it is difficult to independently gauge what Mueller knew about the Prague allegations or how he reached his conclusions.

Congress is expected to call Mueller to testify, and this could shed more light on the investigation.

Mueller did testify to Congress, but there he did not shed any light on the imaginary Prague meeting. Mueller even seemed to be ignorant of the Dossier's very existence.

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Stone's and Gordon's April 18, 2019, article added the detail that the Special Counsel's questioning began on November 20, 2018. Until then, Cohen had been questioned only by the FBI's Southern District of New York. At the time when the Special Counsel began its own questioning, Cohen's sentencing was scheduled for December 12, 2018.

The November 20 interview was Cohen's opportunity to reduce his own sentence by providing to the Special Counsel his secret knowledge of the imaginary Prague meeting and of the imaginary Trump-Putin collusion. However, Cohen did not know any such information to provide, and so his sentence was not reduced on December 12. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison and a $50,000 fine and was ordered to pay $1.4 million in restitution and to forfeit $500,000.

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Stone's and Gordon's December 2018 article said that it was based on information from four sources. Now this April 2019 article specifies five sources. I speculate that Stone and Gordon read Mueller's final report, were disappointed that the Prague meeting was not elaborated, and so asked a fifth intelligence official whether an East European intelligence agency indeed had detected the cell-tower pings and the Russian-language conversation. In response, that fifth official did confirm what I call "the Double Detection".

Therefore, I believe that the Double Deception indeed did happen. In other words, an East European intelligence agency indeed did detect the cell-tower pings and the Russian-language communication.

These two events -- the pings and the conversation -- were staged by the cabal of Trump-hating Intelligence officials -- current and former officials -- who used their expert knowledge to prepare an October Surprise to help Hillary Clinton to defeat Donald Trump.

This October Surprise -- the false accusation that Michael Cohen had met secretly with Kremlin officials in Prague -- would be revealed to the public in late October and would have to withstand scrutiny only until Election Day, November 8, 2016.

A major problem with this October Surprise was that the cell-tower pings and the Russian-language conversation had been detected on specific days. As it turned out, for those specific days Cohen had a rock-sold alibi that he was in California. This contradiction continued to frustrate Mueller's Special Counsel staff until the final report inevitably had to be published in April 2019. The staff's solution was to ignore the Prague-story hoax except for a two-sentence passage admitting that Cohen never has visited Prague, but explaining absolutely nothing more about that hoax.

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The cabal's -- and therefore Steele's -- initial plan was to portray Carter Page as the key intermediary in the imaginary Trump-Putin collusion. Then the plan was adjusted to portraying the much more important Paul Manafort as the key intermediary.

When, however, Manafort was compelled to resign his position as Trump's campaign manager in mid-August 2016, the cabal -- and Steele -- had to develop false evidence against a new key intermediary. The patsy chosen for this role was Michael Cohen. Soon, in the last week of August, the Double Detection was staged for the East European intelligence agency.

On October 18, about three weeks before Election Day, Steele began to publish Dossier reports about Cohen. A cabal member had arranged for "Kremlin insider" Olga Galkina (living in Cyprus) to begin telling false stories about Cohen to "primary sub-source" Igor Danchenko, who forwarded her false stories to Steele, who began summarizing them in his Dossier. The four Dossier reports about Cohen are dated October 18, 19 and 20 and December 13, 2016.

The three October Dossier reports were not revealed to the public before Election Day, because the cabal felt certain that Clinton would win the election. The Dossier reports were not revealed to the public until early January 2019, during the period between Election Day and Inauguration Day.

Instead of the October Surpise -- including the Prague-meeting hoax -- defeating Trump, the Trump-hating Democrats organized Mueller's Special Counsel investigation. It real purpose was not to explain the imaginary collusion to the public. Rather, its purpose was to lure President Trump into an obstruction-of-justice situation that would enable the Trump-hating memebers of Congress to impeach and remove him from his elected office.

Of course, Mueller's Special Counsel staff figured out that the Double Deception had been staged by a cabal of US Intelligence officials. Of course, that finding could not be told in a report to the public. Therefore, the final report was published without describing and explaining the Prague-meeting hoax -- without saying anything significant about Steele's Dossier.

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Continued in Part 7

My Conspiracy Theory About the Prague-Meeting Hoax -- Part 5

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

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On April 9, 2018, the FBI searched the apartment, law office and hotel room of Michael Cohen, who was the Vice President of The Trump Organization and was also Trump's personal lawyer. Four days later, on April 13, investigative journalists Peter Stone and Greg Gordon reported that "The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that ... Cohen secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign". However, their April 13 article did not describe the evidence.

Although Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation had been established in May 2017, Mueller had been leary about sexual aspects of Cohen's case, and so he passed the FBI's initial investigation and prosecution of Cohen to the FBI's Southern District of New York (SDNY).

That SDNY prosecution ended on December 12, 2018, when Cohen was sentenced. In the following days (I assume) the Special Counsel staff took over the Cohen case and began to pressure Cohen to reveal his secret knowledge of the imaginary Trump-Putin collusion. In particular, that staff promised Cohen leniency if he would tell about his imaginary meeting with Russian officials in Prague. Of course, Cohen insisted to that staff that he ever had been in Prague at any time in his entire life.

I speculate that Then (I speculate), that the Special Counsel staff increased its pressure on Cohen by leaking to investigative journalists Stone and Gordon some details of the "evidence" that Cohen indeed had visited Prague in August or September 2016. In other words, that staff did not reveal the "evidence" directly to Cohen and his lawyer, but rather arranged for the evidence to be summarized in the mass media.

Stone and Gordon had written in their April 13 article that they had two sources and hinted that both sources worked for Congressional intelligence committee. That article had not detailed the "evidence" that Cohen had visited Prague.

Now, on December 27, 2018 -- a couple weeks after Cohen had been sentenced and the Special Counsel staff had taken over the Cohen case, -- Stone and Gordon published a second article about the imaginary Prague visit -- titled Cell signal puts Cohen outside Prague around time of purported Russian meeting. Although the April 13 article had been based on two sources (hinted to be staff members of Congressional intelligence committees), this new December 27 article was based on four sources. For sure, the two new sources were members of Mueller's Special Counsel staff. This December 27 article provided to the public the first details of the Special Counsel's "evidence" that Cohen indeed had visited Prague. The December 27 article included the following passages (emphasis added):

A mobile phone traced to President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.

During the same period of late August or early September [2016], electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague, two people familiar with the incident said.

The phone and surveillance data, which have not previously been disclosed, lend new credence to a key part of a former British spy’s [Christopher Steele's] dossier of Kremlin intelligence describing purported coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russia’s election meddling operation. ....

The new information regarding the recovery of Cohen’s cell phone location doesn’t explain why he was apparently there or who he was meeting with, if anyone. But it adds to evidence that Cohen was in or near Prague around the time of the supposed meeting.

Both of the newly surfaced foreign electronic intelligence intercepts were shared with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, people familiar with the matter said. ...

Four people [two Congressional staff members in April and then two Special Counsel staff members in December 2018] spoke with McClatchy [i.e. with Stone and Gordon] on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of information shared by their foreign intelligence connections. Each obtained their information independently from foreign intelligence connections. ...

While the foreign intelligence about Cohen does not confirm a meeting even occurred, it provides evidence that he traveled to the Czech Republic, where the sources said his phone was momentarily activated to download emails or other data. ...

The cell phone evidence, the sources said, was discovered sometime after Cohen apparently made his way to the Czech Republic.

The records show that the brief activation from Cohen’s phone near Prague sent beacons that left a traceable electronic signature, said the four sources.

Mueller’s investigators, some of whom have met with Steele, likely also pursued Cohen’s cell phone records. It would be a common early step in such an investigation for a prosecutor to obtain a court warrant for all U.S. and foreign phone company records of key subjects, even those dating back more than 18 months.

Such data might enable investigators to track Cohen’s whereabouts whenever the phone was in his possession, even if it was turned off, said several experts, including a former senior Justice Department official who declined to be identified.

These officials said intelligence agencies and federal investigators often can examine electronic records to trace the location of a cell phone or any other device sending signals over phone lines or the Internet, so long as the data was still stored by phone carriers or cell phone manufacturers that offer location-tracking services, such as Apple and Google.

Jan Neumann, the assumed name of a former Russian intelligence officer [Yuri Shvets] who defected to the United States years ago, said that Cohen’s electronic cell tower trail appears to reflect sloppy “tradecraft.”

“You can monitor and control cell phones in Europe same as you do it here in US,” Neumann [Shvets] told McClatchy. “As long as the battery is physically located in the phone, even when it’s turned off, the mobile phone’s approximate location can be detected and tracked. Any attempt to use an app, to get mail, send texts, connect to a Wifi network, your phone and your location will be detected.”

“It would not be very professional to take your phone to a secret meeting,” said Neumann [Shvets], who has consulted for the U.S. intelligence community. In this case, he said, “it would be more logical to leave it turned on and connected to a WIFI network in a hotel in Germany.”

It was during the same late August-early September time span in 2016 that an Eastern European intelligence agency eavesdropped on a conversation in which a Russian official advised another that Cohen was in Prague, two of the sources said.

The sources could not definitively pin down the date or dates that the intelligence indicated Cohen was in the vicinity of Prague. Cohen has insisted that he was in Southern California with his son from Aug. 23-29, 2016, but his public alibis have not been so airtight as to preclude flights to and from Europe during the relevant period. ...

If Cohen indeed made the journey to the Czech Republic, one lingering mystery is how he entered Europe’s visa-free, 29-nation Schengen area without detection. While those countries’ open-border arrangements would have spared Cohen from having to produce a visa to travel between Germany and Prague, U.S. and European authorities should have a record if he took a trip to Europe. Those records are not public. ...

Of course, the statement that "the sources could not definitely pin down the dates" is absurd. The dates when the cell-tower pings occurred were specific. The date when the Russian-language communication occurred was specific. The Special Counsel's leakers did not want to admit to Stone and Gordon that those specific dates were contradicted by Cohen's solid alibi that he was in California. 

No matter that the Special Counsel staff now had managed to summarize the "evidence" against him in the mass media, Cohen continued to insist through the following weeks, months and years that he never had visited Prague and that he did not know anything about the imaginary collusion between Trump and Russian Intelligence. No matter what legal leniency the Special Counsel promised, Cohen simply did not know anything at all.

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The December 27 is published by McClatchy, which has a paywall. I could not find the article on some other website that lacks a paywall.

I paid for a McClatchy subscription that enabled me to read and quote from the entire December 27, 2018, article. In this situation, though, I refrained from quoting the entire article here.

However, I will assert here that several passages, which I did not quote here, indicated the Special Counsel staff's frustration that Cohen insisted -- despite the "evidence" -- that he never has been in Prague.

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Continued in Part 6

My Conspiracy Theory About the Prague-Meeting Hoax -- Part 4

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

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On April 9, 2018, the FBI searched the apartment, law office and hotel room of Michael Cohen, who was the Vice President of The Trump Organization and was also Trump's personal lawyer.

Four days later, on April 13, the Greeley Tribune published an article titled Mueller has evidence Trump lawyer met in Prague with Russians during campaign, sources say, written by investigative journalists Peter Stone and Greg Gordon. Both journalists were accomplished and respected.

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Stone's journalist career has been summarized as follows:

Peter Stone is a Washington-based investigative journalist who has covered a wide array of lobbying, legal, and campaign finance issues, working for National Journal, McClatchy newspapers, and Legal Times, among other publications. As a freelancer, his work has also appeared in The Guardian, the New York Review of Books Daily, Mother Jones, and many other news outlets. He is the author of Heist: Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies and the Buying of Washington.

For example, Stone's articles published by The Guardian are listed here.

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Gordon's journalist career has been summarized as follows:

Since joining McClatchy’s national staff in 2006, he has helped expose Wall Street’s role in the 2008 financial crisis, partisanship in the Justice Department and gaps in U.S. homeland security. In 2010, he ... was honored as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for their financial reporting ... In 2008, he ... won a McClatchy ``President’s Award’’ and Scripps Howard’s Raymond Clapper Memorial Award for Washington reporting ...

Earlier, Gordon spent 13 years with the Minneapolis Star Tribune and McClatchy, covering the prosecution of al-Qaida terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui and writing about asbestos in the workplace, money and politics, aviation, law enforcement and the environment. He also worked for The Detroit News’ Washington bureau and spent 18 years with United Press International, where he headed its Washington investigative team and won the 1983 Raymond Clapper award for coverage of an EPA scandal.

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Stone and Gordon wrote in their April 13 article that their information came from two sources. The article indicated that the two sources were staff members of two Congressional committees -- one intelligence committee in the House and one intelligence committee in the Senate.

I speculate that one source leaked to Stone, and the other source leaked to Gordon. I speculate further that Stone's source advised him to consult with Gordon and that Gordon's source advised him to consult with Stone. In other words, the two leakers coordinated with each other in order to cause their leaks to be reported cooperatively by two respected investigative journalists. The leakers intended that this information would receive much intention among the well-informed public.

That public was supposed to understand that the FBI raids on Cohen were not justified just by Steele's Dossier. Rather, the FBI had obtained some additional proof, which Stone and Gordon did not describe yet in this April 13 article. 

Stone's and Gordon's April 13, 2018, article included the following passages (emphasis added):

The Justice Department special counsel has evidence Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter. ...

It would also be one of the most significant developments thus far in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of whether the Trump campaign and the Kremlin worked together to help Trump win the presidency. ...

Cohen has denied for months that he ever has been in Prague or colluded with Russia during the campaign. Neither he nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment. ...

But investigators have traced evidence that Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany, apparently in August or early September 2016 as the former spy [Christopher Steele] reported, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Cohen wouldn’t have needed a passport for such a trip, because both countries are in the Schengen Area, in which 26 nations have open borders. The disclosure still left a puzzle: The sources did not say whether Cohen took a commercial flight or private jet to Europe, and gave no explanation of why no record of such a trip has surfaced. ...

Last August [2017] an attorney for Cohen, Stephen Ryan, delivered to Congress a point-by-point rebuttal of the dossier’s allegations. “Mr. Cohen is not aware of any ‘secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship,’ ” Ryan said.

Democratic investigators for the House and Senate intelligence committees, which are conducting parallel inquiries into Russia’s election interference, also are skeptical about whether Cohen was truthful about his 2016 travels to Europe when the interviewed him last October, two people familiar with those investigations said this week. Cohen has publicly acknowledged making three trips to Europe that year – to Italy in July, England in early October and a third after Trump’s November election. The investigators intend to press Cohen for more information, the sources said.

One of the sources said congressional investigators have “a high level of interest” in Cohen’s European travel, with their doubts fueled by what they deem to be weak documentation Cohen provided about his whereabouts around the time the Prague meeting supposedly occurred.

Cohen has said he was only in New York and briefly in Los Angeles in August [2016], when the meeting may have occurred, though the sources said it also could have been held in early September [2016]. ...

If Cohen met with Russians and hackers in Prague as described in the dossier, it could be the most compelling evidence so far that the Russians and Trump campaign aides collaborated. ...

Cohen is in the spotlight because of the FBI raids on his offices and home in New York. Various news organizations have reported that investigators principally sought evidence on non-Russia matters, including a covert $130,000 payment Cohen made days before the 2016 election to porn star Stormy Daniels to silence her about an alleged affair with Trump. The FBI raids also seized some of Cohen’s computers and cellphones, among other evidence, according to these reports. ...

Soon after Trump took office, The New York Times reported that Cohen was involved in promoting a secret “peace plan” for Ukraine and Russia that was the brainchild of a little-known Ukrainian legislator, Andrii Artemenko. The plan would have ended U.S. sanctions against Moscow and allowed Russia, if it pulled back militants invading Ukraine, to keep control of Crimea under a 50- to 100-year lease, if voters approved.

In February 2017, he [Cohen] told the Times, he left the plan on the desk of Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who resigned days later and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with the Russian ambassador. But in subsequent interviews, Cohen denied delivering the plan to the White House.

Knowledge that Cohen may have traveled to Prague during the campaign could heighten Trump’s risk of being prosecuted for obstruction of justice if news reports are accurate that he is considering firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the Mueller investigation ....

Although the two leakers apparently were Congressional staff members, they must have obtained their information from the the Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff. (See the April 13 article's first sentence, above). 

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Continued in Part 5.

My Conspiracy Theory About the Prague-Meeting Hoax -- Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

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Four of Christopher Steele's Dossier reports mentioned Michael Cohen.

1) Report 2016/134, dated October 18, 2016

2) Report 2016/135, dated October 19, 2016

3) Report 2016/136, dated October 20, 2016

4) Report 2016/166, dated December 13, 2016

The first three reports were dated about three weeks before Election Day, November 8, 2016. If Hillary Clinton would come to the opinion that she might be defeated by Donald Trump, then the Dossier might be released to the public. The Dossier's allegations about Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen meeting secretly with Kremlin officials would be reinforced by further revelations about an Eastern European intelligence agency detecting Cohen's phone pinging cell-phone towers and detecting Russian-language communications that discussed Cohen's presence.

However, Clinton remained certain that she would defeat Trump, and so her October Surprise was not launched before Election Day.

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I summarize the four Dossier reports as follows:

After Paul Manafort was removed from his position as Donald Trump's campaign manager in mid-August 2016, Michael Cohen took over a secret operation to prevent the exposure of Trump's relationship with Russia. By the end of that August, Cohen met secretly with several officials of Russia's Presidential Administration.

After August, however, the Presidential Administration delegated such meetings to non-government employees of Russian policy institutes and of the organization Rossotrudnichestvo. The latter organization's participant in the meetings was a Russian Intelligence official named Oleg Solodukhin.

On Trump's side, Cohen himself continued to participate in the secret meetings.

In the last week of August or the first week of September, Cohen, accompanied by three colleagues, traveled to Prague to meet with Kremlin representatives and with computer hackers, who included Romanians. There, Cohen discussed methods of accomplishing secret, deniable payments to the hackers. Such payments were to be made by both the Trump and Russian sides.

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After Trump's surprising election and before his inauguration, the Dossier was revealed belatedly to the public on January 10, 2017. In particular, Steele's revelations about Cohen's secret meetings with Russian officials were revealed.

Based largely on these allegations, a Special Counsel -- former FBI Director Robert Mueller -- was appointed on May 16, 2017, to investigate the imaginary collusion between Trump's campaign staff and the Russian Government. By that time, the FBI had interviewed Steele's "primary sub-source", Igor Danchenko, who told the FBI that the "Kremlin insider" who provided the information about Cohen was a former classmate, Olga Galkina, who was living in Cyprus during 2016.

Mueller published his report on April 18, 2019. The report said essentially nothing about Steele's Dossier -- in particular about the Dossier's allegations against Cohen. The Report comprised two volumes -- Volume I was 198 pages long, and Volume II was 182 pages long. The only mention of Cohen's imaginary Prague meetings was a three-sentence passage on Volume II, page 139:

In early May 2017, Cohen received requests from Congress to provide testimony and documents in connection with congressional investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 eleciton. At that time, Cohen understood Congress's interest in him to be focused on the allegations in the Steele reporting concerning a meeting Cohen allegedly had with Russian officials in Prague during the campaign. Cohen had never traveled to Prague and was not concerned about those allegations, which he believed were false.

The Mueller Report did not tell the public anything more about the Dossier's allegations that Cohen met with Russian officials in Prague to discuss the imaginary collusion. Also, the Report did not tell anything about the Double Detection -- about the cell-tower pinging and the Russian-language communication.

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Instead of providing any explanation of the imaginary Prague meeting, the Mueller Report discussed Cohen's communications and actions to develop a Trump hotel in Moscow during the years 2013-2016. Cohen did so in his position as Vice President of the Trump Organization, which already had developed several other Trump Hotels.

There was nothing remarkable about these development efforts of Cohen. Since he could not get a location for the hotel in Moscow, he abandoned his efforts in 2016. He did not acquire financing or Russian partners. He did not go on any business trips. He did not sign any contracts. All that ever happened was that such a development was discussed for several years.

The Mueller Report does not explain to its readers any relationship between Cohen's hotel project and the idea that Trump was colluding with the Russian Government to defeat Clinton in the 2016 election. Cohen did not occupy a position on Trump's campaign staff. Rather, Cohen was the Vice President of The Trump Organization, which already had developed several Trump Hotels.

The Mueller Report did not document that this Trump Hotel project received any special advantages from Putin or the Kremlin. Basically, no Moscow location was obtained, and so the project was abandoned.

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On November 29, 2018, the Special Counsel charged Cohen for making three "false statements" about the Trump Hotel project.

1) Cohen said that he abandoned the project in January 2016, whereas he continued to discuss it three more times into June 2016.

2) Cohen said that he never took any steps to arrange for himself or Trump to travel to Moscow to discuss the project there, whereas he had provided his own and Trump's passports for visa applications.

3) Cohen said he never communicated with the Russian Government about the project, whereas he had sent one e-mail to the office of Putin's press secretary.

Cohen pleaded guilty to these three trivial, non-material "false statements" in order to prevent the US Government from charging his wife for tax evasion. Cohen's guilty plea enabled the Special Counsel to promise leniency in sentencing for revealing his knowledge of the imaginary Trump-Putin collusion in the 2016 election. However, Cohen knew nothing at all about the imaginary collusion.

Cohen explained further that Trump-haters already in early 2016 were concocting a phony scandal about Trump's attitude toward the Russian Government, and for that reason Cohen minimized his own statements about the Trump Hotel project.

The Mueller Report does not tell its readers that Cohen could not tell the Special Counsel anything at all about the imaginary collusion, even though he was promised leniency in exchange for revealing anything significant about it.

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There never was any rational basis for the Special Counsel's investigation of the Trump Hotel project in relation to allegations about the 2016 Presidential election. The only reason for the investigation of Cohen was catch him in some process crimes so that he might be compel him to reveal secret knowledge about the election in exchange for legal leniency. 

In general, the real purpose of the Special Counsel investigation was not to explain various suspicions that Trump had colluded with the Russian Government to win the 2016 election. That's why the Mueller Report did not explain the Dossier itself, the Dossier's particular allegations about the Prague meeting, or the Double Detection.

Rather, the Special Counsel's real purpose was to lure President Trump into an obstruction-of-justice situation that would enable the Trump-haters in Congress to impeach and remove him from his elected position.

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Continued in Part 4

My Conspiracy Theory About the Prague-Meeting Hoax -- Part 2

Part 1

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According to The Wall Street Journal, Christopher Steele's "primary sub-source" Igor Danchenko told the FBI in January 2017 that his source for the Prague-meeting story was Olga Galkina. He and she had attended the same school in Perm, Russia, so it's likely they were about the same age -- about 38 years old in 2016. In early 2016, she had been hired to work as a press secretary by an Internet entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev, and they both were living in Cyprus. Although Steele's Dossier says that the Prague-meeting story was told by a "Kremlin insider", Galkina herself was not a "Kremlin insider".

However, it's possible that Galkina learned the Prague-meeting story from Gubarev, who learned it from an actual "Kremlin insider". Such a possibility might have been Danchenko's rationalization for his own reporting to Steele that the source of the Prague-meeting story was a "Kremlin insider". In other words, Danchenko had a good reason for thinking the story actually a "Kremlin insider", even though he learned the story from Galkina, who herself obvious was not a "Kremlin insider". Furthermore, Steele had a good reason to believe Danchenko's report to him that the source was a "Kremlin insider".

A big problem with this chain of rationalizations is that Michael Cohen never has visited Prague. At some point, somebody concocted and forwarded the false story.

* A real "Kremlin insider" concocted the story and told it to Gubarev.

* Or else, Gubarev concocted the story and told it to Galkina.

* Or else, Galkina concocted the story and told it to Danchenko.

* Or else, Danchenko concocted the story and told it to Steele.

As far as I know, the FBI never has interviewed Galkina and therefore has not been able to confirm Danchenko's statement that he really learned the story from Galkina. Therefore, it's possible that Danchenko himself concocted the story and later lied to the FBI that he learned the story from Galkina.

Another possibility is that Danchenko himself did not concoct the story, but rather learned it from someone other than Galkina. For example, Danchenko learned the story from a colleague at the Brookings Institution, where he worked in the USA. If so, then Danchenko lied to the FBI about Danchenko in order to protect his real source, his colleague.

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It's possible that Galkina or Gubarev was working secretly for an Intelligence agency --- either a US Intelligence agency or a Russian Intelligence agency -- which told her or him to tell the concocted story.

It's further possible that this was a false-flag situation. For example, Galkina thought mistakenly that she was working for a Russian Intelligence agency, but she actually had been recruited by a US Intelligence ageny or by a non-govenment cabal.

There are many possibilities, but the least likely possibility is that Galkina herself concocted the story that Cohen met with some Kremlin officials in Prague. It's very unlikely that Galkina was even aware of Cohen's existence.

Another unlikely possibility is that Russian Intelligence concocted the story and told it to a "Kremlin insider", to Gubarev, to Galkina or to Danchenko. Some Russian officials were aware of Cohen's existence, since he had been involved in some talks about developing a Trump Hotel in Moscow, but I cannot imagine a reason for Russian Intelligence to incriminate Cohen in an imaginary collusion between Trump and Putin.

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I speculate that the Prague-meeting story was concocted by a cabal comprising some former US Intelligence officials who were helping Hillary Clinton to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election. This cabal had arranged for the company Fusion GPS to collect and report information that associated Trump with Russian Intelligence and/or Russian mafias. This cabal was well informed about Steele's efforts and progress. Eventually this cabal concocted the Prague-meeting story and inserted the story into the Dossier. The cabal told the Prague-meeting story to Gubarev or to Galkina or to Danchenko. Eventually the Prague story was included in the Dossier, even though the story had not originated actually from a "Kremlin insider".

In this situation, the cabal also arranged the Double Detection. A cell-phone ping and a Russian-language conversation -- incriminating Cohen -- were staged in the Prague area with the expectation that both events eventually be detected by a East European intelligence agency. Of course, such an agency would not have appreciated either event immediately. Rather, much later, a US Intelligence would ask the East European agency to search its intelligence collections for any indication that Cohen had visited the Prague area.

The cabal implicated Cohen as the intermediary in the imaginary Trump-Putin collusion because the initial two intermediaries -- Carter Page and Paul Manafort -- turned out to be inadequate. Page was a low-ranking person who had only a very tenuous, indirect association with Trump. And Manafort had been fired from his campaign-manager position by Trump on about August 19, 2016.

In contrast, Cohen had been associated with Trump closely and for a long time. Furthermore, Cohen had been involved in talks about developing a Trump Hotel in Moscow, and so he had had -- and still might have -- some contacts with some Russian-Government officials.

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The cabal was preparing an October Surprise that Clinton might launch shortly before Election Day, November 8, if it seemed she might lose to Trump. Steele's Dossier would be revealed to the public. Then a top-ranking official would leak to influential journalists that US Intelligence had confirmed that Cohen indeed had visited Prague -- just as the Dossier had reported.

By the time Cohen might convince the public that he never had visited Prague, Election Day already would have happened and Clinton already would have been elected.

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Continued in Part 3