Newly unsealed documents offer an in-depth look at how Special Counsel Robert Mueller found himself investigating Michael Cohen’s role in the Stormy Daniels hush money scheme within weeks of being appointed.
A July 2017 search warrant application shows what Mueller’s then-recently assembled team of federal investigators and prosecutors knew about Cohen in the investigation’s earliest stages.
The warrant application targeted a Gmail account belonging to Cohen, with federal investigators telling D.C. chief judge Beryl Howell that they were probing allegations of money laundering, foreign lobbying violations, and false statements to a financial institution. The two campaign finance counts to which Cohen eventually pleaded guilty were not included in the warrant application.
The documents reveal that the government immediately began working with TD Bank, where the bank account for Cohen’s Delaware registered firm Essential Consultants was located. Cohen used the company to funnel hush money to Daniels through her attorney, Keith Davidson.
Mueller referred to Daniels as “person 1” in the warrant application.
The document suggests that the special counsel team knew the general contours of the Daniels payoff scheme, in what Cohen later pleaded guilty to as a campaign finance violation, by July 2017. Specifically, Mueller appeared to be investigating where money that Cohen held was going, and why.
Thanks to the bank reports that federal prosecutors received, it appears Mueller’s team has already traced the path of the $130,000 that Cohen wired to Daniels via her attorney. The details, including that Cohen drew down a home equity line of credit to make the payment, were also in the special counsel’s possession at the time that it requested its first warrant in the case.
The warrant application also shows that the hush money scheme raised flags within the bank that made the transfer, in part because Cohen gave a false reason for opening the bank account he used to send the money.
Other elements of the warrant application reflect the special counsel’s approach at the time, in the early days of the probe.
Essential Consultants, the firm Cohen set up, had other clients, including a firm connected to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.
For the special counsel, the payments from Vekselberg’s company was an example of “foreign transactions” that had “a Russian nexus.”
David Pecker and Alan Weisselberg entered into cooperating witness/non-prosecution agreements with the DOJ specifically to both enable Mueller to get to the bottom of this hush money crime, and accruing the benefit of skating punishment for their involvement. Yet Cohen is the lone perp in the scheme to suffer, and apparently everyone else walks, investigation shut down and terminated, nothing further to see here, move along.
WTF?
I’d like to see the House dig into this. But we all know what effing good that would do.
So Cohen cut a deal, and prosecutors got his cooperation.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but what exactly did that gain?
There’s only one bigger fish Cohen could give up…
And Pizza The Hutt shields that big, fat fish with absolute immunity using a 1973 OLC memo.
Barr
And the OLC memos were written by Justice Departments when the party’s president was under impeachment investigation. Does anyone see a hook here?
Let’s get through Mr. Mueller’s appearance, and then regroup to start the impeachment inquiry right after the House gets back from its August recess…