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Four Dossier reports made statements about 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
These are the last four known Dossier reports. The gap between 2016/136 and 2016/166 has not been explained to the public.
The first known Dossier report was 2016/80, dated June 20, 2016. That report was the first in a series of 12 reports that extended through 2016/113, dated September 14, 2016. There are several gaps -- all unexplained -- in that series.
That series of 12 reports was delivered by Christopher Steele to FBI official Michael Gaeta, who was stationed in London. According to the FBI's official story, Gaeta did not send any of those 12 reports to FBI Headquarters in Washington DC. Rather, beginning in early July, Gaeta sent them, as he received them, to the FBI New York Field Office, where the Chief Division Counsel stored them and did not take any known actions on them.
The FBI Headquarters had established the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016. According to the official FBI story, the New York Field Office's Chief Division Counsel did not send any of the Dossier reports to the Crossfire Hurricane staff until September 19, 2016. On that occasion, only six of the 12 reports were sent to the Crossfire Hurricane staff.
(I speculate that, in fact, Gaeta had sent copies all 12 reports immediately to the FBI Counterintelligence Chief. In that regard, the official FBI story is misleading.)
In any case, the Crossfire Hurricane staff had received six Dossier reports by September 19. I presume it had received the other six shortly afterwards. I presume also that the staff received the four Cohen reports shortly after their publication dates in October and December.
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Before the Crossfire Hurricane staff received the Dossier reports, the staff based its investigation entirely on other information. The staff began with its belief that Russian Intelligence had hacked the Democratic National Committee's computers in April 2016. The staff then proceeded with another belief that Trump campaign-staff advisor George Papadopoulos had told Australian diplomat on May 10 that Russian Intelligence was collaborating with a campaign-staff member to use those hacked documents for an "October Surprise". More specifically, Russian Intelligence intended to release some of those hacked documents (some of which might be falsely altered) to discredit Hillary Clinton shortly before the election, which was scheduled for November 8, 2016.
On September 19, the Steele Dossier was added as new information to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Before then, the Crossfire Hurricane staff already had figured that the collaborator probably was one or more of the following four members of the Trump campaign staff:
1) George Papadopoulos
2) Carter Page
3) Paul Manafort
4) Michael Flynn
When the first Dossier reports were arrived in mid-September, the Crossfire Hurricane staff saw that those reports incriminated mostly Page and (to a lesser degree) Manafort.
Accordingly, the Crossfire Hurricane staff began at the end of September to prepare an application for a FISA warrant against Page. That preparation took about three weeks. The so-called Woods Procedures verification began on October 19 (page 151), and then the warrant was completed, submitted and approved on October 21.
That was the secret situation within FBI Headquarters when Steele wrote his first three Cohen reports on October 18, 19 and 20, 2016. The Crossfire Hurricane staff was finishing its first FISA warrant -- against Page -- and so now would be ready to begin preparing a second FISA warrant -- against Cohen.
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The four Dossier reports about Cohen can be separated into two groups. The last three reports -- dated October 19 and 20 and December 13 -- are mainly about Cohen visiting Prague in late August or early September 2016 to meet with three Russian Intelligence officials. In contrast, the first report -- dated October 18 -- does not indicate any knowledge of that trip.
After Steele wrote that first report, someone found in an NSA database that a Michael Cohen had visited Prague during that period. Based on that found information, Steele wrote a Prague trip into his following three reports. However, it turned out that the Michael Cohen who visited Prague was not the Michael Cohen who worked as Trump's lawyer. This confusion reveals that there was some secret collaboration between Steele and someone in the US Intelligence Community who was able to search for information about people in that NSA database.
In this blog article here, I will discuss only the first Cohen report, which is ignorant about a Prague trip. I will discuss the other three Cohen reports in my following blog articles.
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The text of the October 18 Dossier report follows. I myself have emphasized the passages (like this) that are relevant to Cohen. (You can skip through the other passages.)
COMPANY INTELLIGENCE REPORT 2016/134
DETAILS OF KREMLIN LIAISON WITH TRUMP CAMPAIGN
Summary
- Close associate of SECHIN confirms his secret meeting in Moscow with Carter PAGE in July
- Substance included offer of large stake in Rosneft in return for lifting sanctions on Russia. PAGE confirms this is TRUMP’s intention
– SECHIN continued to think TRUMP would win presidency up to l7 October. Now looking to reorient his engagement with the US
- 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.
Detail
Speaking to a trusted compatriot in mid October 2016, a close associate of Rosneft President and PUTIN ally Igor SECHIN elaborated on the reported secret meeting between the latter and Carter PAGE, of US Republican presidential candidate’s foreign policy team, in Moscow in July 2016. The secret had been confirmed to him/her by a senior member of staff, in addition to by the Rosneft President himself. It took place on either 7 or 8 July, the same day or the one after Carter PAGE made a public speech to the Higher Economic School in Moscow. In terms of the substance of their discussion, SECHIN’s associate said that the Rosneft President was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered PAGE/TRUMP’s associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return. PAGE had expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.
According to SECHIN’s close associate, the Rosneft President had continued to believe that TRUMP could win the US presidency right up to 17 October, when he assessed this was no longer possible, SECHIN was keen to readapt accordingly and put feelers out to other business and political contacts in the US instead.
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. [REDACTION]
Source Comment
5. SECHIN’s associate opined that although PAGE had not stated it explicitly to SECHIN, he had clearly implied that in terms of his comment on TRUMP’s intention to lift Russian sanctions if elected president, he was speaking with the Republican candidate’s full authority.
Company Comment 6.
6. [REDACTION]
18 October 2016
Below is an image showing the two redactions at the end of the report.
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According to this Dossier report, Steele became aware of Cohen's importance because of some information that Steele received from "a Kremlin insider with direct access to the leadership". However, now in late 2022, the public knows that there was no such "Kremlin insider". Instead, Steele got all his information from Igor Danchenko and his fellow ignorant gossipers. Furthermore, the confused information about a Michael Cohen visiting Prague would not have come from a real "Kremlin insider" who really knew something about the Michael Cohen who worked as Trump's lawyer.
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Since Steele's idea about Cohen collaborating with Russian Intelligence did not come from a "Kremlin insider", where did the idea come from?
This Dossier report indicates that Steele's idea came from some information about Cohen's father-in-law -- supposedly a Russian who was "a leading property developer in Moscow".
The maiden name of Cohen's wife is Laura Shusterman. Her father was a Ukrainian Jew who had emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1973 -- almost two decades before the collapse of the Soviet Union. He never set foot in Moscow. Why did Steele imagine that this Mr. Shusterman had something significant to do with Moscow real estate?
On August 24, 2020, I published a blog article titled Michael Gaeta and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 5. (See also Part 6.) There, I wrote about how Steele had come across information that former Ukrainian President Yulia Tymoshenko had provided to a New York court about the alleged laundering of Ukrainian money in New York real estate. That blog article included the following passage:
In 2011, Yulia Tymoshenko -- the Ukrainian politician whom [Ukrainian politician Viktor] Yanukovych had defeated in the 2010 election -- had filed a civil lawsuit in the federal court in New York that accused her political opponents of having operated in a U.S.-based racketeering enterprise. The suit alleged that Manafort had colluded with Dmytro Firtash, a Putin-connected Ukrainian natural gas magnate and a Yanukovych ally, to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains from Ukrainian gas interests through a "labyrinth" of companies in Panama, Cyprus, and Europe -- and into real estate ventures in New York City. ....Suffice it to say here that Tymoshenko's court documents provided to Steele a wealth of details about how Ukrainian money was laundered in New York real estate. I speculate that, in those documents, Steele came across the Mr. Shusterman who is Cohen's father-in-law. I speculate that in October 2016, Steele used that information about Shusterman to concoct an insinuation about Cohen. In that process, Steele also turned Shusterman into "a leading property developer in Moscow".
[In 2008], according to documents filed in the lawsuit by Tymoshenko's lawyers, Manafort had met with Firtash in Kiev to discuss a proposal for the oligarch to invest $100 million in a global real estate fund. As part of the arrangement, Firtash would pay $1.5 million in management fees to a firm owned by Manafort and a real estate executive named Brad Zackson, who had once been a manager for the Trump Organization under Fred Trump, Donald's father.
When Steele wrote his first Cohen report, Steele still did not know how he would develop this concoction. One day later, however, Steele was informed -- by someone who had read his first Cohen report -- that Cohen had visited Prague in August-September 2016. This new information caused Steele to abandon completely his real-estate story and to switch completely to the Prague-visit story. That switch turned out to be disastrous for Steele after it turned out that another Michael Cohen had visited Prague.
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The two passages that were redacted at the Dossier reports end involved a Russian businessman named Aleksey Gubarev. He sued Buzzfeed, claiming that he had been libeled by Buzzfeed, which had published the Dossier for public consumption. Buzzfeed prevailed in the lawsuit, but agreed to redact all the passages about Gubarev from its Internet versions of the Dossier.
As a consequence, I have not been able to find the entire original text of the Dossier's October 18 report. Perhaps something that Gubarev allegedly said or did caused Steele to bring Cohen into Steele's insinuations that Russian Intelligence had colluded with some Trump associates.
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In his book, Cohen does not address the Dossier in a detailed manner. In particular, Cohen does not address the Dossier's remarks about Cohen's father-in-law. (Cohen's book is a meandering rant that lacks in index, so it's difficult to verify what his book does or does not say about any particular person.)
However, BookTV has broadcast a lecture that Cohen gave in a bookstore about his book, and in that lecture Cohen mentioned that his father-in-law had immigrated from Ukraine in 1973, had never set foot in Moscow and had not invested in Moscow real estate. (Generally, Cohen says persuasively that every statement in the Dossier about Cohen is false.)
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It's possible that Steele brought Cohen into the collusion story by something that Steele learned about Cohen's friend Felix Sater. Here are three articles about the Cohen-Sater relationship:
Felix Sater and Michael Cohen: Childhood Friends
A Former Russian Spy Worked On A Trump Moscow Deal During The Presidential Campaign
Who is Felix Sater and what's his role in Michael Cohen's plea deal?
However, neither Cohen's book nor Steele's Dossier indicate obviously that Sater was a consideration -- especially in late 2016 when Steele wrote his Cohen reports.
After Steele's first Cohen report -- the report dated October 18, 2016, which mentioned falsely that Cohen's father-in-law was "a leading property developer in Moscow" -- Steele never wrote anything more (as far as the public knows) about Cohen's direct or indirect involvement in real-estate deals. Steele wrote only about Cohen's supposed visit to Prague.
In other words, Steele seems to be ignorant in late 2016 about any Cohen involvement with Sater in any real-estate deals or in any other activities. For that reason, I think that Steele's interest in Cohen was prompted by something he read about a Mr. Shusterman in the documents that Tymoshenko had provided to a New York court in 2011.
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Continued in Part 3
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