Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Ukraine Paid Cohen for Access to Trump
The BBC is reporting that the Ukrainian government of President Petro Poroshenko paid Michael Cohen, one of the president's lawyers, at least $400,000 to arrange talks with Mr. Trump in the White House. The US media are ignoring the story. Mr. Cohen is not a registered lobbyist, and so, if there were a payment made for such a purpose, it would be a criminal act to accept the funds. Mr. Cohen denies the allegations. Mr. Trump may not have known about the payments. However, this is just another example of how low the Trump administration's hangers-on will stoop. And it might explain why Ukraine has stopped cooperating in the investigation into Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
The basic details are that the Ukrainian president was going to be in Washington, and he wanted a meeting with Mr. Trump that could be described as serious talks rather than a meet-and-greet courtesy call for domestic political reasons. The registered lobbyists and the embassy couldn't get that for him.
This was almost certainly political payback for the Poroshenko government releasing proof in August 2016 that campaign manager Paul Manafort had taken millions in fees from its pro-Russian predecessor.
Enter Mr. Cohen, and a back channel of communications, and a fee of $400,000 according to one source or $600,000 as another has it. The BBC says, "Mr Cohen's fee was for getting Mr Poroshenko more than just an embarrassingly brief few minutes of small talk and a handshake, the senior official said. But negotiations continued until the early hours of the day of the visit.
"The Ukrainian side were angry, the official went on, because Mr Cohen had taken 'hundreds of thousands' of dollars from them for something it seemed he could not deliver.
"Right up until the last moment, the Ukrainian leader was uncertain if he would avoid humiliation.
"'Poroshenko's inner circle were shocked by how dirty this whole arrangement [with Cohen] was'."
However, he did get a meeting in the Oval Office, and he held a press conference afterwards in front of the north portico of the White House. A week later, his government subtly dropped the investigation into Mr. Manafort.
The prosecutor in charge of the case, Serhiy Horbatyuk, told the Beeb's Paul Wood, "There was never a direct order to stop the Manafort inquiry but from the way our investigation has progressed, it's clear that our superiors are trying to create obstacles."
As Malcolm Nance, the counter-intelligence expert says, coincidence takes a lot of planning. While there is no smoking gun that links the payment to the dropped charges via Mr. Trump, the circumstantial evidence in that direction is compelling.
What the BBC has conclusively proved is that Mr. Cohen is trading on his ties to Mr. Trump without being a registered lobbyist. The Foreign Agent Registration Act [FARA] of 1938 is pretty clear on this, and the penalty is a fine up to $10,000 and possibly 5 years in federal prison. Add that to his troubles stemming from the Mueller investigation, and this journal believes he will turn state's evidence before much more time passes.
© Copyright 2018 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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