Last month, authorities raided the home, office, and hotel room of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, on the hunt for an array of information and unsurprisingly provoking the wrath of the president in the process. In the aftermath of those raids, authorities revealed that Cohen was the subject of a months-long criminal investigation, and in the time since, the web that Cohen has found himself in after years of association with the president has become clearer.
This week, it’s now come out that among the other ties ensnaring him, AT&T paid Cohen $200,000 for “insights” on the Trump administration. That money went to “Essential Consultants,” the front company that Cohen used in late 2016 to funnel $130,000 in hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels covering an alleged affair with the president.
The money from AT&T was first revealed by lawyer Michael Avenatti, who is working for Daniels herself in her ongoing legal battle with the Trump team. The company itself did confirm the payments on Tuesday, offering a statement calling Cohen’s company “one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration.”
According to the company, Cohen did no “legal or lobbying work” for the telecommunications giant, and their contract with him ended in December of last year. Avenatti reported that the $200,000 paid by AT&T to Cohen’s company came in four separate payments in late 2017 and early 2018.
He had other condemning revelations about the activities of the front company Cohen used to pay off his client, too. He revealed, for instance, that an American company associated with sanctioned Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg paid half a million dollars to Cohen’s “Essential Consultants” company, and according to CNN, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has questioned Vekselberg about those payments.
Besides that, Avenatti also revealed that big pharma company Novartis paid Essential Consultants four separate installments that totaled nearly $400,000 during the same time period that AT&T was paying him. President Trump himself in January of this year met with the then-incoming Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan in a move poised to prompt the question of whether or not the company’s patronage of Michael Cohen allowed them access to the president. The meeting was not one-on-one, but with the amount of lies enveloping this administration, chalking it up to just coincidence could prove short-sighted.
Novartis responded to those claims by saying that “any agreements with Essential Consultants were entered before our current CEO taking office in February of this year and have expired.”
Through all of these new revelations, Cohen is continuing to face a criminal investigation that has attracted the president’s ire. Part of the focus of that investigation is the aforementioned hush money that Cohen dished out to Stormy Daniels, and based on the recent mess of statements from the Trump team concerning where the money came from, they’re not at all prepared to deal with that investigation.
The question of whether or not Cohen will flip and testify against the president is one of many that have been raised.
Featured Image via Spencer Platt/Getty Images
