The pharmaceutical giant Novartis is madly conducting damage control after admitting early Wednesday to paying $1.2 million to Donald Trump's longtime fixer Michael Cohen beginning in the early months of the Trump administration.
Anonymous sources at the Swiss company have now told multiple outlets that Cohen reached out to them to pitch his services and not the other way around. NBC writes:
President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, contacted the drug giant Novartis after the 2016 election "promising access" to the new administration, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller later requested information from the company about the offer, a senior official inside Novartis told NBC News on Wednesday.
"He [Cohen] contacted us after the new administration was in place," the official said. "He was promising access to the new administration."
And here's what an unnamed Novartis employee told STAT:
“He reached out to us. [...] With a new administration coming in, basically, all the traditional contacts disappeared and they were all new players. We were trying to find an inroad into the administration. Cohen promised access to not just Trump, but also the circle around him. It was almost as if we were hiring him as a lobbyist.”
As if, except that technically Cohen doesn’t work as a lobbyist and isn't registered as one.
The employee could not explain why Novartis would have agreed to a deal with a lawyer with no background in health care and without deep Washington ties.
Access, is seemingly the answer to that question, but company executives not only entered into a contract with Cohen, it did so before even meeting him according to the statement the company issued earlier on Wednesday.
In February 2017, shortly after the election of President Trump, Novartis entered into a one year agreement with Essential Consultants. [...] In March 2017, Novartis had its first meeting with Michael Cohen under this agreement. Following this initial meeting, Novartis determined that Michael Cohen and Essential Consultants would be unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated related to US healthcare policy matters and the decision was taken not to engage further.
So they entered into a contract one month, then after meeting Cohen decided he would actually be useless so they stopped communicating altogether? And yet they finished making the payments anyway until the contract expired in February 2018.
“At first, it all sounded impressive, but toward the end of the meeting, everyone realized this was a probably a slippery slope to engage him. So they decided not to really engage Cohen for any activities after that,” the employee continued.
One meeting was all it took to unravel how “impressive” Cohen was. To review:
Fascinating business practices.