Michael Cohen has been associated with Mr. Trump for some years. He became the president’s personal attorney when Mr. Trump became president. Not surprisingly, he has become the target of investigations into the alleged intervention of Russia in our recent election.
One of President Donald Trump’s closest confidants, his personal lawyer Michael Cohen, has now become a focus of the expanding congressional investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 campaign.
Cohen confirmed to ABC News that House and Senate investigators have asked him “to provide information and testimony” about any contacts he had with people connected to the Russian government, but he said he has turned down the invitation.
“I declined the invitation to participate, as the request was poorly phrased, overly broad and not capable of being answered,” Cohen told ABC News in an email Tuesday.
Having declined to appear before congressional committees, it is likely that he will be subpoenaed. He has emphatically stated that there is no connection between him and the “fake Russian conspiracy.”
After Cohen rejected the congressional requests for cooperation, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to grant its chairman, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, and ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, blanket authority to issue subpoenas as they deem necessary.
“To date, there has not been a single witness, document or piece of evidence linking me to this fake Russian conspiracy,” Cohen added. “This is not surprising to me because there is none.”
Given his close connection to President Trump it’s not surprising that Cohen has been the subject of an investigation as elements of Congress continue their efforts to find some connection between Russian interests and the Trump campaign. His aggressive defense of himself and the president have drawn media attention to him as well. Not surprisingly, ABC refers to this as “browbeating.”
While much of the media focus in recent days has fallen on Russian contacts made by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, there are few people closer to the president than his longtime lawyer. Insiders consider Cohen to be Trump’s pit bull or consigliere for his role in threatening legal action against Trump critics, gaining notoriety for threatening and browbeating reporters investigating Trump’s background.
Claims of impropriety against Cohen have gone nowhere with having been debunked by ABC News itself.
The emergence of Cohen as a subject of the Senate probe brings renewed attention to a strident Trump advocate who was named in the unverified dossier prepared by a former British intelligence agent during the 2016 campaign and provided by the FBI to Sen. John McCain, which contains a number of unconfirmed allegations that Cohen played a role in working with the Russians on the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers during the campaign.
In January, Cohen told ABC News the allegations in the dossier were “laughably false.” His wife is Ukrainian, and he once worked with her family in Ukraine to establish an ethanol business. ABC News was able to debunk some references to him in the unverified document, such as the assertion in the that his Ukrainian-born father-in-law had a vacation home, or dacha, near Russian President Vladimir Putin’s.
“I don’t even think my father-in-law has ever been to Moscow,” Cohen told ABC News earlier this year. “I wonder who’s living in the dacha.”
Another suggestion in those documents — that Cohen supposedly met with the Russians in Prague last August — is also false, he said. Then-President-elect Trump pushed back against the claim in a wide-ranging news conference held in January, saying that he saw Cohen’s passport.
“I said, ‘I want to see your passport.’ He brings his passport to my office. I say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. He didn’t leave the country. He wasn’t out of the country.’ They had Michael Cohen of the Trump Organization was in Prague. It turned out to be a different Michael Cohen,” Trump said. “It’s a disgrace what took place. It’s a disgrace, and I think they ought to apologize to start with Michael Cohen.”
The Russia investigation continues to produce nothing to implicate the president or his team members in any inappropriate contacts with Russian representatives of interests. The reason for this failure may just be because there were none.
Source: ABC News
Attorney Client privilege!
Okay great let him do it what’s the big deal nothing abnormal here