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I think we know now why Cohen happily paid Daniels $130,000 on the behalf of Trump. It was a drop in the bucket compared with the cash rolling in from selling access to Trump without a lobbying permit.
The question is was Cohen a lobbyist, sure sounds like he is an unregistered lobbyist working right inside the administration.
"President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, contacted the drug giant Novartis after the 2016 election "promising access" to the new administration, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller later requested information from the company about the offer, a senior official inside Novartis told NBC News on Wednesday.
"He [Cohen] contacted us after the new administration was in place," the official said. "He was promising access to the new administration."
The disclosure came after an attorney representing the adult-film actress who says she had an affair with Trump released a summary of bank transactions that he says shows payments from various companies to a company controlled by Cohen.
That lawyer, Michael Avenatti, said the transactions suggest that Cohen was "selling access to the President of the United States." Cohen, his attorney and the White House did not respond to a request for comment."
In other words, like every other politician on the planet.
Nothing to do with Trump. Nothing came of it. Don't you think this happens in every industry? Not illegal.
Everything to do with Trump. What was Novartis was paying for?
May not be illegal, but hardly above board for the administration that is supposed to be draining the swamp.
Don’t those optics matter?
“The curious relationship between one of the world’s biggest drug makers and President Trump’s personal lawyer began early last year when Michael Cohen, a longtime fixer for the president, reached out to Novartis’s then-chief executive officer Joe Jimenez, promising help gaining access to Trump and influential officials in the new administration, according to an employee inside Novartis familiar with the matter.
...
“He reached out to us,” the Novartis employee said, providing STAT with the company’s version of events as it scrambles to contain the fallout from being entangled in the investigations surrounding Trump and his inner circle, including Cohen. “With a new administration coming in, basically, all the traditional contacts disappeared and they were all new players. We were trying to find an inroad into the administration. Cohen promised access to not just Trump, but also the circle around him. It was almost as if we were hiring him as a lobbyist.”“
Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd., which is seeking to sell its planes in the U.S., hired Cohen’s entity for advice on local accounting standards, a spokesman for the South Korean company said Wednesday.
AT&T has been mentioned as well.
“AT&T has confirmed that it paid Cohen for "insights into understanding the new administration." However, the company said the contract ended in December 2017. That would be just weeks after the Justice Department in November 2017 sued to block the merger, which AT&T had announced in October 2016.”
Gah - all this talk of "draining the swamp" and Clinton's "Pay to Play" - and then people act surprised when it happens during Trump's administration?
Listen "Drain the Swamp" was simply a very clever campaign motto that Trump added in the last month of the campaign. He played us like a fiddle and still is. Drain the Swamp means different things to different people and that is part of why it was so effective.
Republicans could simply see the swamp as getting rid of democrats.
Democrats, Independents as well as Republicans could also read it as "getting rid of corruption in Washington."
It definitely isn't the latter, but if he is asked to defend that statement during the 2020 campaign, he'll say it was meant to be the former.
How is it that Cohen couldn't rustle up $130K without getting a loan on his home.
So far, we've been told he received $500,000 from a Russian oligarch, $600,000 from AT&T, and $1.2 million from Novartis.
These are just the payoffs we know of so far.
How can he rake in over $2 million in such a short time and still be broke?
My theory is that Cohen figured out that if he had paid Stormy with $$ directly from his LLC that had, at the time, only taken money from the outside sources, that would be a direct tie from the Foreign or corporate slush payments to Trump.
So he orchestrated the HELOC in order to claim the Stormy payoff was from his contribution, therefore distancing the account from Trump.
At least with regards to Stormy.
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