It's a little like Pretty Woman meets The Frog Prince: a low-level lawyer who previously specialized in seedy hush-money deals on sexual trysts magically transformed into an international business tycoon the moment Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Suddenly, corporate telecomms, pharmaceutical and aerospace behemoths lined up to kiss the ring of Trump’s longtime fixer Michael Cohen and tap the expertise of his shell company, Essential Consultants LLC.
"Novartis believed that Michael Cohen could advise the company as to how the Trump administration might approach certain US healthcare policy matters,” the Swiss Pharma giant explained in a statement on Wednesday. Yet even after Novartis officials determined that Cohen “would be unable to provide the services” they had anticipated on health care, the company still paid Cohen $1.2 million in three $400,000 increments over the course of a year. Of course, as USA Today noted ...
Lobbying and financial reports filed by Novartis show that, like other drug companies, it had significant business before the government. Novartis' contract with Cohen came at a time when Trump appeared open to allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. That idea was strongly opposed by drug firms, and Trump ultimately abandoned it.
Also, just after the company’s final payment to Cohen, there was that summit earlier this year in Davos, Switzerland, where Trump met with European business leaders including the Novartis CEO, who told Trump they were “very pleased with the great progress being made at FDA.”
Similar to Novartis, the international telecommunications company AT&T sought out Cohen to "provide insights" into the Trump administration. AT&T paid Cohen at least $200,000 (and maybe as much as $600,000) in payments ending in January 2018, and the company sugarcoated nothing in a statement acknowledging the arrangement.
"Essential Consulting was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration," AT&T said in a statement Tuesday evening. "They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017."
In essence, Cohen did zero work. But AT&T had a keen interest in convincing the Trump administration to kill net neutrality and its payments to Cohen stopped shortly after Trump's appointee at the Federal Communications Commission pushed through a repeal of the Obama-era policy.
Another apparent point of expertise for Cohen: accounting standards. Really, the hands-down best explanation of Cohen’s sudden allure came from South Korea’s Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd (KAI).
A KAI spokesman said it signed a contract with Essential last year for “legal consulting concerning accounting standards on production costs,” and upon the expiration of the contract it made the payment in November.
As much of a stretch as that might be, Cohen may have indeed worked some miracles with KAI’s books since the company is now poised to get a multibillion-dollar contract with the Pentagon.
That's quite a return on its $150,000 investment. Perhaps Cohen is more magical than we knew.