Michael Cohen, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, denies a new report that says it has evidence that supports an alleged meeting between Cohen and Russians in the summer of 2016.
News website McClatchy reported Thursday that cellphone signals show that Cohen was in the Prague area in late summer 2016, according to four anonymous sources.
Cohen denied on Twitter that he has ever been to Prague.
“I hear #Prague #CzechRepublic is beautiful in the summertime,” Cohen wrote on Twitter. “I wouldn’t know as I have never been. #Mueller knows everything!”
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The significance of whether Cohen has ever been to Prague or not is that the Steele Dossier, the intelligence report by former British spy Christopher Steele, said that Cohen had gone to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Russian officials to discuss how to make payments to Kremlin-hired hackers working against Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Both Trump and Cohen have denied the contents of the dossier, and Cohen sued Buzzfeed for first publishing the dossier, alleging defamation, but later dropped the case due to limited resources to pursue it.
Steele has said that he believes 70 to 90 per cent of the dossier is true.
McClatchy also reported Thursday that electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation between Russians in which one mentioned that Cohen was in Prague, according to two people “familiar with the incident.”
McClatchy had reported in April that the Justice Department has evidence that Cohen made a late-summer trip to Prague, according, again, to two anonymous sources.
No other news outlets have been able to confirm McClatchy’s reports.
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Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison earlier in December for lying to Congress and making hush money payments to two women during Trump’s campaign, which violated campaign finance law.
Cohen has been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller extensively, and Mueller has written in court filings that he believes Cohen has told the truth.
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