“The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign,” McClatchyreports. “Confirmation of the trip would lend credence to a retired British spy’s report that Cohen strategized there with a powerful Kremlin figure about Russian meddling in the U.S. election.” “It would also be one of the most significant developments thus far in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of whether the Trump campaign and the Kremlin worked together to help Trump win the White House. Undercutting Trump’s repeated pronouncements that “there is no evidence of collusion,” it also could ratchet up the stakes if the president tries, as he has intimated he might for months, to order Mueller’s firing.”
The red herring just jumped into the boat. This was the clarion call of the fucktards on the right for months—that Cohen didn’t pass Customs. He shows the top cover of his passport. The POS drove through the open border with Germany. I hope the guy gets thirty years with Trump. They can do BroSquats in Leavenworth. Trumpism is a disease.
When the dossier was first published by BuzzFeed, Cohen replied to this allegation specifically in a somewhat odd tweet. Since countries don’t stamp the front of your passport when you visit, it is not clear what this was meant to show. Nor would showing his passport have been exculpatory if he’d shown, say, a stamp from having entered France or Spain, since travel within most of the European Union doesn’t require additional checks at individual borders. That, in fact, is what McClatchy alleges: That its sources say Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany. A Czech publication reported shortly after the allegation was made that government intelligence officials in that country had no record of Cohen’s visiting. One source said that “if there was such a meeting, he didn’t arrive in the Czech Republic by plane.” McClatchy’s report doesn’t contradict that. The day after Cohen’s tweet, Trump held a news conference. “He brings his passport to my office,” the then president-elect said in response to a question. “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. It’s a disgrace what took place. It’s a disgrace and I think they ought to apologize to start with Michael Cohen.” That part about the “different Michael Cohen” doesn’t seem to be true. Nor does the part about Cohen not having left the country. Cohen showed his passport to BuzzFeed. The only travel into the proper area indicated by passport stamps was a trip to and from Italy from July 9 to 17. But note that this is too early for Steele’s time frame — and for the assertion that it was a response to the firing of Manafort. How Cohen would have gotten to Prague is still unclear. But this contradiction between a clear allegation from the Steele dossier and the assertion that it wasn’t true by Cohen and Trump helped drive the idea that the dossier was broadly discredited shortly after its release. Pick out the Prague trip and nothing that follows could have happened. Put the Prague trip back into the mix? A lot of the other parts of that allegation now become possible.* What’s more, it undermines the credibility of those who insisted that the claim was completely without merit. Look at it another way: If the central conceit of the Steele’s claim were accurate — that Cohen was working with agents of the Russian government directly to aid Trump’s candidacy — it would be very hard to argue that no collusion took place. That likely requires Cohen’s having been in Prague. This is our first significant indication that he might have been. * It’s easy to cherry-pick some aspects which ring true. For example: A source of leaked information from the Democratic National Committee who claimed to be Romanian was actually a Russian intelligence official. Carter Page denied having met with Russian officials during his trip in July, until the House Intelligence Committee got him to admit that he had, however briefly. But much more of the dossier’s allegations lacks any resemblance to what is known. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-russia-investigation/?utm_term=.eb1b640965b5
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-dossier-puts-longtime-trump-fixer-in-spotlight-1484178320 Mr. Cohen told The Wall Street Journal he hadn’t been to Prague since 2001, but on Twitter Tuesday night he said he had never been there.