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Back when Michael Cohen was still loyal to da-Boss, he said this:
and then there was this pile-on denial too:
[Click the link above, Cohen’s LA alibi did not cover both Aug and Sept of 2016.]
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Cohen at the time indignantly dared investigators to ‘Check my Passport’ — because it would prove he couldn’t have been there, because there was NO Czech ‘stamp’ there.
What Cohen knows, and no doubt so do the Trump investigators, there are some locations in that part of the world, where Passports are not even required.
Special counsel has evidence Michael Cohen traveled to Prague: McClatchy
Reuters Staff — April 13, 2018
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Investigators for Special Counsel Robert Mueller have evidence Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany in late summer 2016, McClatchy reported, citing two unnamed sources. The news agency said it was unclear whether Mueller’s investigators have evidence that Cohen met with a prominent Russian as the dossier claimed.
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But investigators have traced evidence that Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany, apparently during August or early September of 2016 as the ex-spy reported, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is confidential. He wouldn’t have needed a passport for such a trip, because both countries are in the so-called Schengen Area in which 26 nations operate with open borders.
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The dossier alleges that Cohen, two Russians and several Eastern European hackers met at the Prague office of a Russian government-backed social and cultural organization, Rossotrudnichestvo. The location was selected to provide an alternative explanation in case the rendezvous was exposed, according to Steele’s Kremlin sources, cultivated during 20 years of spying on Russia. It said that Oleg Solodukhin, the deputy chief of Rossotrudnichestvo’s operation in the Czech Republic, attended the meeting, too.
Further, it alleges that Cohen, Kosachev and other attendees discussed “how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers in Europe who had worked under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign.”
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Why the question of whether Michael Cohen visited Prague is massively important for Donald Trump
The Steele dossier claimed Cohen went to Prague to meet Russians. He’s said for more than a year that he didn’t.
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If the McClatchy report was accurate, it would utterly devastate one of the Trump team’s leading arguments that there was no Trump-Russia collusion. That’s because, to be blunt, there is no reason for Cohen to try to debunk the Steele dossier by lying and saying that he didn’t visit Prague at all if he actually did, unless he was trying to cover up extremely serious wrongdoing that happened during that visit.
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According to the Kremlin insider, COHEN now was heavily engaged in a cover up and damage limitation operation in the attempt to prevent the full details of TRUMP’s relationship with Russia being exposed. In pursuit of this aim, COHEN had met secretly with several Russian Presidential Administration (PA) Legal Department officials in an EU country in August 2016. The immediate issues had been to contain further scandals involving MANNAFORT’s commercial and political role in Russia/Ukraine and to limit the damage arising from exposure of former TRUMP foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE’s secret meetings with Russian leadership figures in Moscow the previous month. The overall objective had been “to sweep it all under the carpet and make sure no connections could be fully established or proven.”
Then in a report dated the next day, October 20, Steele gave more specifics. He said Cohen’s “clandestine meeting” with Russian officials was in Prague, and mentioned a Russian NGO, Rossotrudnichestvo, as a potential host for the meeting.
The final report in the published Steele dossier, dated December 13 (after Trump was elected president), reiterated the claim of a Cohen/Prague meeting — now saying it happened in August or September 2016 — and gave many more supposed specifics (emphasis added):
COHEN had been accompanied to Prague by 3 colleagues and the timing of the visit was either in the last week of August or the first week of September. One of their main Russian interlocutors was Oleg SOLODUKHIN operating under Rossotrudnichestvo cover. According to [redacted], the agenda comprised questions on how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the CLINTON campaign and various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the TRUMP team more generally.
The report claims that Cohen discussed how to destroy evidence of this purported hacking operation in the event of a Clinton victory. [...]
Do you think Cohen fessed up about all these Trump directed-travels in his Mueller tell-all sessions? Now that he is no longer the Fixer for the Fool … Well if this is any indicator:
[ Michael Cohen at his sentencing hearing: ]
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Recently, the President Tweeted a statement calling me weak, and he was correct, but for a much different reason than he was implying. It was because time and time again I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds rather than to listen to my own inner voice and my moral compass. My weakness can be characterized as a blind loyalty to Donald Trump, and I was weak for not having the strength to question and to refuse his demands. I have already spent years living a personal and mental incarceration, which no matter what is decided today, owning this mistake will free me to be once more the person I really am.
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For months now the President of the United States, one of the most powerful men in the world, publicly mocks me, calling me a rat and a liar, and insists that the Court sentence me to the absolute maximum time in prison. Not only is this improper; it creates a false sense that the President can weigh in on the outcome of judicial proceedings that implicate him. Despite being vilified by the press and inundated with character assassinations over the past almost two years, I still stand today, and I am committed to proving my integrity and ensuring that history will not remember me as the villain of his story.
www.nbcnews.com — Dec 12, 2018 … (seems like weeks ago).
Well this is what I think:
If the Prague Meeting happened as Steele’s local sources claimed, then Cohen told Mueller all the details, including any “credible” and “reliable” evidence, he was able to produce.
All we have to do now, is to wait for the inevitable Fireworks.
When the Trump-Russia conspiracy is revealed for the insidious, plotted Treason it really was, and still is.
We still live in perilous times, even though the recent Election, have made it somewhat less so.
RESIST as long as the corrupt liars remain, desperately clinging to Trump’s ill-gotten power, and their Putin-assisted win.
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