=======
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.)
=======
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.
=======
Continued in Part 8
No comments:
Post a Comment