Investigative Group

Lanny Davis: Michael Cohen Never Went To Prague As Steele Dossier Claims

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

• Michael Cohen’s lawyer dropped a bombshell on Wednesday, saying that Cohen has not been to Prague
• The Steele dossier alleges that Cohen traveled to Prague during the campaign to collude with Russians
• But Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis says that the dossier allegations are “false”

Lanny Davis, the Clinton-connected attorney for Michael Cohen, said Wednesday that the former Trump lawyer had never been to Prague, as the infamous Steele dossier alleges.

“Thirteen references to Mr. Cohen are false in the dossier, but he has never been to Prague in his life,” Davis said Wednesday in an interview on Bloomberg.

The statement is a significant denial given that, according to Davis, Cohen has turned over a new leaf by deciding to discuss his work on behalf of President Donald Trump.

Cohen pleaded guilty on Tuesday to tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations. He claimed that he acted at the direction of Trump by paying off two women who claimed they had affairs with the former real estate mogul in 2006.

But Cohen did not address a larger question of whether he was involved in a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian government, as former British spy Christopher Steele claimed in the Democrat-funded dossier.

In the 35-page document, Steele claimed that Cohen was a central figure in a “clandestine” conspiracy of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. According to Steele, Cohen and three associates visited Prague in order to meet with Kremlin officials as part of a conspiracy to pay hackers to obtain dirt on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“The agenda comprised questions on how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the CLINTON campaign and various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the TRUMP team more generally,” claimed Steele, who was paid by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to investigate Trump.

Cohen, 52, has vehemently denied the dossier’s allegations ever since BuzzFeed published the salacious document on Jan. 10, 2017. He has denied ever visiting Prague. In an attempt to prove that, he provided BuzzFeed with his passport, which did not show any stamps from the Czech Republic.

Cohen offered his most recent rebuttal to the dossier on June 28, tweeting: “Dossier misreports 15 allegations about me.”

“I had nothing to do with Russian collusion or meddling!” he added.

He also disputed the dossier during an interview that is now seen as his first public break with Trump. In an interview that aired on July 2, Cohen told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that he had never been to Prague and that he did not collude with Russians.

“By the way, the number of time that falsehood has been repeated — I’m not accusing you — is the classic example that if you mention something a million times, and you get Google hits and they’re all false, it’s zero-zero,” Davis said on Bloomberg Wednesday.

Though Davis helped settled a looming question about the dossier, he dropped a bombshell in interviews on Tuesday and Wednesday in which he suggested that Cohen has information about election-related hacks.

“Michael Cohen has information that would be of interest to Mr. Mueller in his probe of a conspiracy to corrupt American democracy, very similar to the indictment of the 12 Russians,” Davis said, referring to the Russian intelligence officers indicted on July 13 for hacking into the DNC’s computer systems.

“I believe that Mr. Cohen would be able to provide information useful to the special counsel,” he said. “I won’t call it a smoking gun information, someone else will have to judge that. I believe that he does relevant information.”

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