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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
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