Michael Cohen’s attorneys have produced a court filing in which they attempt to counter the set of astounding documents released by Stormy Daniels’s attorney on Tuesday. Those documents demonstrated that the shell company formed by Donald Trump’s attorney Cohen had been used not just to produce the money paid to Daniels to buy her silence, but had also received over $4 million in payments from both US and foreign companies eager to influence Trump.
The court filing from Cohen’s attorneys addressed some specific items in the the earlier document, calling the list of payments produced by Daniels’s attorney Michael Avenatti “concerning for a number of reasons,” and stating that it contained “blatantly incorrect statements.” The court filing then goes on to refute four items from the Avenatti list. This includes a payment that apparently went to a different Michael Cohen, this one in Toronto.
However, the items on the court filing from Cohen’s attorneys total less than $5,000 out of the greater than $4 million that has so far been reported as flowing into Cohen’s “Essential Consulting.” The court filing doesn’t dispute the major payments listed by the Avenatti document, including large payments from a company associated with Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, payments from AT&T, or payments from pharmaceutical giant Novartis.
Instead, the document from Cohen’s team ends with a rather limp statement …
We are not going to list every incorrect statement contained in Mr. Avenatti’s “Preliminary Report.”
Which would seem to be a way of saying that the few items they did list, were the worst of what they found.
Meanwhile, several of the companies involved have confirmed that they made these payments to Cohen on a promise of “access” to the Trump White House. Among them, Novartis told Reuters that paying Cohen was “a mistake.” However, they continued making that mistake for a year, sending $1.2 million to Essential Consulting—which had no office or employees. Despite the claims of mistake, the Swiss company’s CEO met at least once with Trump when he was among a group of business leaders who dined at the White House.
Columbus Nova, which spent much of the week trying to distance itself from Putin-associate Vekselberg, also confirmed that it had hired Cohen. Though they stated that Vekselberg was not involved in that decision. Columbus Nova has also been struggling to explain how its company name appeared on the registration of a number of alt-right sites.
AT&T has not only confirmed that they made the payments, but told the New York Times that they had been interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller concerning Essential Consulting. The special counsel has clearly been aware of Essential Consulting for several months.
What remains unknown is whether all the money that was paid into Essential Consulting remained with Cohen, or whether it was paid out to others. The way in which Essential was used to pay for the money that was owed to Stormy Daniels is reminiscent of the way Donald Trump used his now-defunct foundation to pay his own bills, including legal expenses and even a bet concerning a golf shot.
In the case of Daniels, at the very least, money paid into Essential was used to enact business for Donald Trump. If that pattern continued, then Essential Consulting would be clearly a means of providing bribes to Trump, even if those bribes never legally came into one of Trump’s own accounts.