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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
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