Michael Cohen paid out $130,000 to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to buy her silence concerning her affair with Donald Trump. But the money that Trump Organization provided to Michael Cohen actually totaled $420,000. Even for a professional “fixer” that seems like a pretty high fee.
But not all of it was Cohen’s short term loan vigorish. Because the documents filed in federal court along with Cohen’s guilty plea on Tuesday provide more details about the transaction. And it shows that included in Cohen’s bill was a mysterious $50,000 that, according to the federal prosecutors, covered work that Cohen "solicited from a technology company during and in connection with the campaign."
As MSNBC reports, the documents don’t name the tech firm. They also don’t give any indication what this firm did for the campaign, or why Michael Cohen would be out purchasing tech services for Trump’s campaign independent of the effort managed by Brad Parscale, who was digital media director for the Trump campaign. Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon had connections with Cambridge Analytica, but not Cohen. Cohen had no official role in the campaign’s technical staff.
But Cohen did have one official role for Trump: Fixer. As the payment to Daniels and model Karen McDougal vividly illustrate, Michael Cohen was the man Trump went to when he wanted something buried. Which makes it seem extremely likely that, if Cohen was actually buying tech services for the Trump campaign, they were services that Donald Trump didn’t exactly want to show to the public.
That has certainly led to speculation that these unknown services are connected to statements from Cohen attorney Lanny Davis that Cohen would be “happy” to share with Special Counsel Robert Mueller his “knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on.”
The payment seems rather small for most things that a tech company might be contracted to do—short of supplying the campaign with a regular supply of burner phones and helping them set up the “encrypted communications applications” also mentioned in Cohen’s court filings. But there is another connection that has drawn attention from several quarters.
In the memos put together by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, widely known as the Steele Dossier, there is discussion of a trip to Prague made by Cohen in which some technical planning, and discrete payments, came up.
In Prague, COHEN agreed contingency plans for various scenarios to protect the operation, but in particular what was to be done in the event that Hillary CLINTON won the presidency. It was important in this event that all cash payments owed were made quickly and discreetly and that cyber and other operators were stood down / able to go effectively to ground to cover their traces.
The idea that Cohen was directly paying Russian hackers seems unlikely—though not that much more unlikely than other events since 2016. But the clear read of Cohen’s role in this scenario doesn’t appear to be paying Russian operatives to dig up dirt. Instead, Cohen seems to have been working with them to practice his expertise: burying things.
According to Steele, Cohen was in Prague in August 2016, specifically talking to Russian operatives about how to protect Russian technical assets if everything fell apart. Part of that conversation directly states that they want to make “cash payments … quickly and discreetly” to help them “cover their traces.”
According to the court documents, Cohen approached the campaign in January 2017 seeking $50,000 in compensation for “work Cohen had solicited from a technology
company during and in connection with the campaign.”
If the Prague trip and the related meeting actually occurred, then Michael Cohen doesn’t just have awareness of the hacking, he was part of a Trump campaign effort to provide cover and protection for Russian operatives working to disrupt the United States election. And the insistence on making “cash payments” in advance suggests that Cohen might easily have made such a payment before the results of the election were clear.
It’s possible, likely even, that Cohen’s “tech” firm was not Russian hackers. But the fact that it was Michael Cohen, and the fact that the money was tossed into a bundle with other things that Trump wanted kept out of sight, certainly suggests that wherever that $50,000 went … it wasn’t buying printer ink.