Section: TPM (USA)
More on the Michael Cohen Money Trail
Yesterday we noted that Michael Cohen grew up around the Brooklyn social club which served as the headquarters of the bosses of the Russian mob in the from the 1970s to the 1990s. Today we discussed the role of Cohen’s father-in-law Fima Shusterman, an immigrant from Ukraine. Shusterman had been in the taxi business for decades before Cohen...
Cohen-ology Pays Off After All
Yesterday afternoon I had one of those epiphanies about a story I usually have no more than once every few years. It was partly triggered by details I put in this post about Michael Cohen. But it wasn’t about that alone. It was the sum of a dozen developments since the raid on Cohen’s homes and office last Monday. Starting over a year...
Good Grief. Cohen’s World Gets Mobbier The Closer I Look
In today’s podcast we look into the background of Michael Cohen. TPM first reported last year that Cohen was actually a childhood friend of Felix Sater, whose father was himself a reputed capo in the Mogilevich organized crime syndicate, said to be Russia’s largest and most dangerous. Filling out this picture of how Cohen fell into...
More Cohen Businesses Coming to Light
Though most information remains tied up with prosecutors in New York and outside of public view, we are beginning to get some hints about which of Michael Cohen’s businesses are under federal scrutiny. We’ve discussed Cohen’s involvement in the taxi business at great length. This new thread of that story turns on the taxi...
Summa Co(he)neyettica
Today’s Episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is a bit different. Want to know how Donald Trump got this deep in with Michael Cohen? Where Cohen came from? We pack the whole story into a single episode from the early days at the mob social club with Felix and the crew (a la Spider and Henry Hill) to the Ukraine-money-backed taxi and casino...
WaPo: Trump Battles With Top Aides Over Stances Seen As Too Anti-Russian
Despite President Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive positioning on Russia in recent months, he has been reluctant or even angry about confronting that country, the Washington Post reported Sunday night. The Post painted a picture of Trump in a stand-off with top foreign policy advisers on moves seen to be anti-Russian: expelling a...
The Big Picture on the Expanding Michael Cohen Investigation
We have just come off of one of those assaultive news weeks in which each day brought a greater rush of news than seemed conceivable the day before. It’s hard to keep up. More particularly, as Michael Cohen has moved from comic side show figure in the Trump saga to something much closer to the center, it’s been hard to figure out just...
This Week: Michael Cohen Is In The Feds’ Crosshairs; Rosenstein Forecasts That He Will Be Fired
President Trump’s righthand man, Michael Cohen, has been under grand jury investigation for months for alleged “criminal conduct” related to his business dealings, court filings unsealed Friday revealed. Federal agents have obtained cover search warrants for multiple email accounts used by Cohen, and their probe burst into public view...
Taxis!
We’ve been telling you for years that Michael Cohen’s business history couldn’t survive first contact with serious investigative scrutiny. He’s been tied his entire life to emigres from Russia and Ukraine; he’s been their business partners, and they’ve been the source of rivers of money from that part of the...
NYT: Mueller Probing $150,000 Payment From Ukrainian To Trump Charity In 2015
Special counsel Robert Mueller is looking into a $150,000 payment from a Ukrainian steel mogul to President Donald Trump’s foundation in September 2015 in exchange for a talk Trump gave, the New York Times reported Monday, citing three people briefed on the matter.After the special counsel’s office subpoenaed the Trump Organization...
