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Michael Cohen Disputes Report Claiming Prague Visit

Michael Cohen Disputes Report Claiming Prague Visit

Michael_Cohen | Circa March 2011 | By IowaPolitics.com [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen on Thursday disputed a would-be bombshell report claiming that he visited Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“I hear #Prague #CzechRepublic is beautiful in the summertime. I wouldn’t know as I have never been. #Mueller knows everything!” Cohen wrote on Twitter.

Cohen was responding to a Thursday report from McClatchy claiming that special counsel Robert Mueller has been provided with electronic evidence showing that Cohen’s cellphone communicated with a tower in Prague during in late summer 2016.

The report, if accurate, would seem to corroborate a major allegation made in the Steele dossier, which was funded by former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

The dossier, which was authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, alleged that Cohen visited Prague in late August or early September 2016 to meet with Kremlin insiders to pay off Russian hackers.

Cohen vehemently denied the dossier’s allegations up until he began cooperating over the summer with federal prosecutors in New York and with the special counsel’s office. He also disputed an April 13 report from the same McClatchy reporters who claimed that Mueller had been provided evidence that Cohen visited Prague.

Cohen, who entered plea deals with prosecutors from both offices, was sentenced to three years in prison on Dec. 12.

Lanny Davis, an adviser to Cohen, has claimed in recent months that Cohen has information implicating President Donald Trump in illegal activity. As part of a plea deal struck with prosecutors in New York, Cohen said that Trump instructed him to make a hush payment in October 2016 to Stormy Daniels, the porn star who claims she had an affair with Trump in 2006. Cohen pleaded guilty to making an illegal campaign contribution.

Cohen also pleaded guilty in the Mueller probe on Nov. 29 to lying to Congress in 2017 about his efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Notably, Cohen did not admit to lying to Congress when he denied claims made in the dossier. That has been widely interpreted as circumstantial evidence that Mueller does not have evidence placing Cohen in Prague.

Cohen’s tweet is the first time since June 28 that he has weighed in publicly on the dossier’s allegations against him. Davis has instead been the public face of those denials.

Davis, a longtime associate of the Clintons who was also Cohen’s lawyer during his legal battles, insisted on Dec. 16, as well as to McClatchy this week, that Cohen did not visit Prague. Those denials have been taken seriously given that Cohen seemingly has no incentive to lie about any contacts with Russians now that he is cooperating with prosecutors.

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