Corporate and Russian Oligarch ‘Pay to Play’ Funds Flow to Trump’s Lawyer

Interview with James S. Henry, a senior fellow at Columbia University's Center for Sustainable International Investment and senior editor at D.C. Report for investigative economics, conducted by Scott Harris

As the Trump-Russia investigation rolls on, much of it behind closed doors, new revelations made headlines when Michael Avenatti, adult film star Stormy Daniel’s attorney, disclosed that several major U.S.-based and international corporations had made large payments to Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
Avenatti is challenging the validity of the nondisclosure agreement that Daniels signed just before the 2016 presidential election requiring her not to discuss an alleged affair she had with Donald Trump in 2011.  Avenatti released a report, much of it now verified, which stated that Michael Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, received $600,000 from AT&T, $1.2 million from pharmaceutical giant Novartis, $150,000 from Korea Aerospace, and $500 million from Columbus Nova, an investment firm linked with Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. These funds were deposited in the same LLC account from which Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in hush money in October 2016. It’s notable that all these companies that gave Cohen money had important business issues awaiting decisions from the U.S. federal government.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with James S. Henry, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable International Investment, a Global Justice Fellow at Yale University and senior editor at D.C. Report for investigative economics. Here, he examines the purpose and use of the multi-million dollar slush fund that Michael Cohen controlled, and the legality of corporate money flowing directly or indirectly to a president through a third party in order to gain influence.

JAMES S. HENRY: I suspect that in this case, this may well be something that Trump had no knowledge of, that Cohen was looking for kind of a freelancing opportunity to sell access to the president. And he talked these companies into this proposition on the basis of, you know, every one of them that was involved here we know certainly AT&T with its Time Warner deal; Novartis with drug regulations. You know, they were firms that really needed to have an inside track on government regulation. You know, this wasn’t a whole lot of money for them in the aggregate, compared to the potential value of having access to the president. But you know, the Times had a detailed profile of Cohen in which they went into many of his other dodgy connections going back in time and his uncle involved with the Lucchese mob and operating El Caribe, you know, a place in kind of a watering hole for a mafioso and Michael maintained an investment in that club until 2016 after the election.

The more interesting and I think important relationship here was the Vekselberg relationship. Viktor Vekselberg is one of the richest people in Russia. He has intimate relationships with many of the other oligarchs that have come up in this kind of last two years in the story in the investigation. People like Deripaska; Leo Blavatnik is a Russian American who made a lot of donations to $6.3 million of political contributions to U.S. politicians in the 2016 election cycle. He’s Vekselberg’s partner and has been an investor with (Oleg) Deripaska, who’s implicated in the Michael Flynn matter and the (Paul) Manafort investigation. So this is a kind of a tiny, very influential crowd that, you know, some say have been basically deployed to gain influence over the Trump administration. And so this is kind of consistent with my favorite theory about what’s been going on, which is not so much the Trump as a kind of a mole on the part of Putin. There is a whole investigation of collusion that Mueller is doing, but I’m just more struck by this kind of long history of kind of mobster activity. I mean it’s, it’s kind of organized crime has had a long-term relationship with Trump and with some of the people around him.

BETWEEN THE LINES: For myself and our audience, I’d like you to discuss a bit about the money that was coming into Michael Cohen’s LLC from large corporations, like AT&T and Novartis. Michael Cohen, as I understand it, was not a registered lobbyist. So what’s the legality of hundreds of thousands of dollars and even over a million dollars that was pumped into that account by some of these corporations? Is this illegal transaction to buy access to the president or at least what they thought was buying access?

JAMES S. HENRY: Clearly, if Trump had known about Michael Cohen’s fundraising activities here – and it sent him out to shake down these companies in exchange for access, that would have been, I think, over the line. But where you have a case here that the companies are kind of responding to Michael’s invitations that are hiring him for alleged consulting services. You know, I think the argument that the president didn’t even know about it, I mean we don’t know that for sure, but we have to give the benefit of the doubt. So, I think in this case what we have is foolhardy behavior. It certainly has impropriety written all over it. It’s the avoiding – in terms of avoiding the appearance of impropriety. Uh, but it may be a case of where it’s hard to prove that there was any kind of real exchange for services. In fact, just the opposite. These companies have come away with their kind of black eyes as a result of this.

And it’s not clear that he ever delivered anything. We may be on the verge of learning much more about a whole web of relationships that Michael Cohen was involved with. There was this strange meeting at the Trump Tower in December of 2016 in which one of the senior investors from Qatar met with Michael Flynn and with Trump and also with Rick Perry, the Department of Energy Cabinet executive in the U.S. and who knows what they were discussing. But the meeting happened just a couple of days after this deal in which Qatar invested in the big Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft and basically helped to buy a transaction that involved about 20 percent of Rosneft.

There are all kinds of allegations in the Steele memorandum. For those of you who are really down in the weeds here on the Trump investigation, that transaction with Qatar is featured prominently in there. We have basically Cohen, you know, holding hands with all these people during this kind of very dubious meeting that day. So I suspect that we’re going to find out much more about people that he maybe recruited, that he tried to recruit. But, you know, this is a fellow who’s been deeply involved in the Trump administration for at least a decade and probably longer. And, you know, there’s probably more to come out about him.

For more information, visit James S. Henry’s websites, including The Global Haven Industry at globalhavenindustry.com and The American Interest at the-american-interest.com/v/james-s-henry.

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