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On April 13, 2018 -- four days after the FBI's raid on Michael Cohen's home, law office and safes -- investigative journalists Greg Gordon and Peter Stone wrote an article titled Mueller has evidence Trump lawyer met in Prague with Russians during campaign, sources say. They article's key paragraph:
.... 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 leaked to Gordon and Stone], who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Cohen wouldn’t have needed a passport for such a trip, because both countries [Germany and Czechia] 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.
Later, in the last days of December 2018, Gordon and Stone added some new details:
... cell phone tower records obtained by foreign intelligence sources place Michael Cohen (or at least his phone) in Prague in the late summer of 2016. The [Gordon and Stone] story says this information, as well as the fruits of electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency that picked up discussion among Russians of Cohen’s presence in Prague, are now in the possession of the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
It's obvious to me that this information was leaked to Gordon and Stone by an FBI official assigned to Robert Mueller's Special Counsel staff. The leak's purpose was to justify to the public the FBI's raid on President Donald Trump's personal lawyer.
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I think that several elements of this story are true. In fact, an Eastern European intelligence agency did detect Cohen's phone number in Prague and did intercept a discussion of some Russians about Cohen's presence in Prague.
However, I think further that this information was planted by Russian Intelligence in order to boost the credibility of Olga Galkina, who was one of Steele's sub-sources. Galkina -- a secret agent of Russian Intelligence -- told Steele's primary sub-source, Igor Danchenko, that Cohen had visited Prague in order to meet with several officials of Russia's Presidential Administration. The planted information was supposed to prove that Galkina was correct about Cohen's visit -- even though he had not actually visited Prague..
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According to The Wall Street Journal, Galkina had been hired in early 2016 to work as a press secretary for Aleksej Gubarev, an Internet entrepreneur from Russia. In that position, Galkina had asked for some help from Danchenko, a former school-mate from Perm, Russia. More specifically, Galkina had asked Danchenko (now living in the USA) to recommend a US-based publicist to work for Gubarev. Danchenko (on the advice of Fiona Hill at the Brookings Institute) recommended Charles Dolan, who subsequently was hired by Gubarev in July 2016.
Through Galkina, Dolan met Danchenko (Steele's "primary sub-source") and soon began to provide gossip that was included in Steele's Dossier. For example, Dolan was the "Source D" who told the story about Trump watching prostitutes urinating on a bed in a Moscow hotel room. (In FBI reports released to the public, the FBI calls Dolan "PR Executive-1".)
According to Danchenko (when interviewed by the FBI), Galkina herself was the source of the Dossier's first reports about Carter Page meeting secretly with Kremlin officials.
Also according to Danchenko (when interviewed by the FBI), Galkina herself was the source of the Dossier's reports about Cohen. For example, the Dossier's Cohen report dated October 20, 2016, said:
Speaking to a compatriot and friend on 19 October 2016, a Kremlin insider provided further details of reported clandestine meeting/s between Republican presidential candidate Donald TRUMP's lawyer Michael COHEN and Kremlin representatives in August 2016.
I understand that sentence to mean that Danchenko is the "compatriot and friend" and Galkina is the "Kremlin insider".
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Before Galkina told Danchenko her Cohen stories, she had quit working for Gubarev. The Wall Street Journal writes:
By this time [i.e. before the Dossier report dated October 20, 2016] Ms Galkina's relationship with her employer in Cyprus, Mr. Gubarev, had soured and she had resigned. Her former supervisor filed a report with police, seen by the Journal, saying she chronically appeared at work late, sometimes drunk, and alleging that a friend [Danchenko] of Ms. Galkina's tried to extort him [Galina's supervisor in Cyprus] for money.
I speculate that around the time (perhaps much earlier) when Galkina lost her job working for Gubarev, she began working as a secret agent for Russian Intelligence.
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If Galkina did indeed work as such an agent, then Russian Intelligence would have been motivated to boost her credibility. In particular, it might have planted evidence that Cohen indeed had -- as Galkina had told Danchenko -- visited Prague. Galkina's original story was that Cohen had visited Prague in the last week of August. Russian Intelligence was not able, however, to plant information about that particular week. Rather, information was planted only that Cohen had visited Prague during the first two weeks of September 2016.
In that regard, the articles that Gordon and Stone wrote in April and December 2018 were true. Indeed, a East European intelligence agency had detected Cohen's telephone number and intercepted a Russian discussion about Cohen visiting Prague. A discrepancy with the Dossier was that the detection and interception had happened in the first half of September, not in the last week of August 2016.
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My speculation has a chronology problem. Russian Intelligence had done the spoofs -- the phone-number pings and the discussion about Cohen -- in the first half of September, but Galkina did not begin telling Danchenko about Cohen until the last half of October 2016.
I offer two different speculations:
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My first speculation is that Russian Intelligence's planting of evidence in September had nothing to do with Galkina. Rather, Russian Intelligence was preparing to cause trouble for Cohen, who was denying publicly that he had been involved, after January 2016, in any negotiations with Russia about the development of a Trump hotel in Moscow. (Trump said such negotiations had ceased in that January because of his election campaign.)
In that situation, Russian Intelligence planted false evidence in the first half of September 2016 that Cohen was meeting with Russian officials in Prague despite Cohen's public denials of any hotel negotiations. A month later, in the second half of October, this planting of evidence turned out to be potentially useful when Russian Intelligence tasked Galkina to tell Danchenko about Cohen visiting Prague.
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My second speculation is that Galkina had begun to work as a secret agent of Russian Intelligence before the beginning of September 2016 -- while she still was working for Gubarev. Then in the first half of September, Russian Intelligence planted the false evidence about Cohen visiting Prague. The evidence was planted with the foresight that it eventually would boost Galkina's credibility.
Then Galkina did tell Danchenko in October 2016 that Cohen had visited Prague in September. Later, in 2017 or 2018, that information was collected by a Eastern European intelligence agency, which forwarded it to the US Government. This spoof thus would "prove" eventually that Galkina indeed was a credible "Kremlin insider", as Steele had described her in his Dossier.
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In either of my two speculations, the confused information about a Mike Cohen (not Trump's lawyer) visiting Prague in late August caused the Prague visit of Michael Cohen (Trump's lawyerf) to be shifted from September to August in the Dossier reports.
I assume that the FBI resolved the Mike Cohen confusion rather quickly, but nevertheless the planted evidence about Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen visiting Prague caused the FBI to persist in its false belief until the end of 2018, when a second FBI leak to Gordon and Stone attempted to reinforce their April 2018 article about the "proof" of the Prague visit.
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On December 13, 2019, Gordon and Stone issued a statement that includes the following passages (emphasis added):
We quoted a total of five sources. Our sources cited information that signals from a cell phone owned by Cohen were detected in the vicinity of Prague and that, during that time frame, electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a Russian remarking that Cohen was in the Czech capital. ...
There’s been no indication that Czech intelligence monitored or was aware of such a meeting, so it’s difficult to see how Special Counsel Robert Mueller could have proved this allegation even with an admission by Mr. Cohen. ....
We are aware that other journalists have obtained unpublished information that tends to support our stories, but the fact is that this issue may remain a mystery.
It is always possible that the information we gathered was part of a Russian disinformation campaign, and that the phone intercept was a spoof by Moscow intelligence agencies, but given what we know, that seems unlikely.
When Mr. Mueller testified about his report to Congress last July [2019], a Republican congressman specifically asked him to state whether our initial story was false. Mr. Mueller replied: “I can’t get into it.” In response to the next question, he stated [in contrast to his answer to the previous question] that a story by another news outlet was inaccurate.
From the above statement, I presume that the East European intelligence agency was not the Czech agency, but rather the German agency. (The leaked story was that the phone pings indicated that Cohen had traveled from Germany into Czechia.)
I presume also that Gordon and Stone confirmed with their FBI leaker that the FBI thought now, in December 2019, that the Prague story had been based on "a spoof by Moscow intelligence agencies".
(For more details about phone pings, etc., see also an informative Daily Beast article and an informative Observer article published in December 2018.)
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In April 2020, Chuck Ross wrote an article, titled FISA Bombshell: Russian Intelligence Knew Christopher Steele Was Investigating Trump During 2016 Campaign, which summarized the FBI's ultimate understanding then, in April 2020. The article's key passages (emphasis added):
Two Russian intelligence operatives were aware as early as July 2016 that former British spy Christopher Steele was investigating Donald Trump, according to newly declassified information in footnotes from a Justice Department report on FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign. Footnotes from that report also said a member of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team investigating the Trump campaign received evidence in January 2017 that Russian intelligence might have targeted and collected information on Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. ...
The footnotes ... say that in late January 2017, an investigator on the Crossfire Hurricane team received information that Russian intelligence “may have targeted Orbis” and researched the company. ...
The FBI obtained information on Jan. 12, 2017, ... [that the Dossier' claim] that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague in August 2016 was likely the product of Russian disinformation. ....
The January 12, 2017, information was the FBI's interview of Danchenko, who revewaled that the Prague-visit information had come from Galkina, who was a dubious character.
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By the time the FBI figured out that it had been spoofed, however, Cohen already had been raided, persecuted, and sentenced to prison. That series of abuses of Cohen had begun because the FBI had tried futiely to find proof that he had visited Prague in order to meet with Russian officials in a plot to steal the USA's Presidential election from Hillary Clinton.
We can hope that John Durham's future report about this history will explain the false story about Cohen visiting Prague.
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Continued in Part 5
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