Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is under criminal investigation

The Justice Department released several search warrants related to their investigation of Michael Cohen Tuesday — and the documents made clear special counsel Robert Mueller had his sights trained on Cohen far earlier than previously known.

Indeed, it was all the way back on July 18, 2017 — just two months after Mueller was appointed special counsel — that his team obtained a warrant for the content of Michael Cohen’s Gmail account. That was nearly nine months before the dramatic FBI raids on Cohen’s residence and office made clear Trump’s then-attorney was in deep legal jeopardy.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former attorney, tried to rig online polls in favor of Trump by paying a man to code an algorithm that would vote for Trump in two public surveys, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Rothfeld, Rob Barry, and Joe Palazzolo.

Cohen hired the same man — John Gauger, owner of RedFinch Solutions LLC — to create a Twitter account called @WomenForCohen that attempted to establish the lawyer as a sex symbol.

Senate Republicans will tell you that the news this week implicating President Donald Trump in a campaign finance felony is serious — and it looks like they intend to do absolutely nothing about it.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations related to hush money payments he made to porn actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election cycle — and said Trump directed him to do it.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, pleaded guilty to eight counts of campaign finance violations and tax and bank fraud, admitting he broke the law at the direction of Trump himself.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, was found guilty of tax and bank fraud.

We might be closer to the end of the Michael Cohen story than we are the beginning, according to a new report.

William Rashbaum, Ben Protess, and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times reported late Sunday that federal investigators looking into Cohen’s business activities are focused on more than $20 million in loans to taxi businesses that Cohen and his family own. The value of the loans, from two New York financial institutions that cater to the taxi industry, has not been previously reported. Investigators are also probing payouts made by Cohen to women who alleged they had affairs with Donald Trump in exchange for their silence, which could have run afoul of campaign finance laws.

Michael Cohen certainly seems like a guy who’s ready to turn on his old boss.

Last week, Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, gave CNN a tape of Donald Trump and Cohen discussing a payment to former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal in September 2016. The recording confirmed Trump was aware of the payoff at the time.

In a series of television appearances on Monday morning, Rudy Giuliani tried to rebut Michael Cohen’s reported claims that team Trump isn’t telling the whole story about the infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian delegation in 2016.

But in doing so, Giuliani seemed to reveal new information about just what Cohen, Donald Trump’s former attorney, has been saying — information that had not yet become public.

Michael Cohen is willing to tell special counsel Robert Mueller that Donald Trump had advance knowledge of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which Russians offered campaign aides dirt on Hillary Clinton, sources told CNN.

However, the president has previously denied knowing about the meeting in advance, and reiterated that denial in a Friday morning tweet:

Federal investigators are getting closer to the heart of the Trump Organization: The chief financial officer has been subpoenaed to testify, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization finance chief, was name-dropped on the September 2016 secretly recorded tape in which Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, discusses a payoff to former Playboy model Karen McDougal. At one hard-to-decipher point in the tape, Cohen can be heard telling Trump that he’s “spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with …”

Lordy, there are tapes in the government’s investigation of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen — more than 100 of them. But they aren’t all of President Donald Trump.

Federal authorities have seized more than 100 recordings made by Cohen, including the bombshell tape CNN published on Tuesday that appeared to feature the president discussing a payoff to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, the Washington Post reports.

President Donald Trump unleashed his indignation again on former attorney Michael Cohen after the publication of a secret tape Cohen made of a conversation between the two men. In the recording, which the FBI obtained and CNN aired, the pair are apparently discussing a potential payoff to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who says she had an affair with Trump between 2006 and 2007.

Trump has slammed Cohen’s taping of their discussion as “inconceivable,” framing the attorney as a villain and seeking to cast doubt on any negative ramifications this conversation might have for him. “Why was the tape so abruptly terminated (cut) while I was presumably saying positive things?” he wrote in his Wednesday tweet. The tape is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation examining Cohen’s business dealings.

President Donald Trump called it “inconceivable” that his former attorney Michael Cohen would tape their conversations. But he did — and now CNN has published one of the recordings, which includes a discussion about paying off a former Playboy model who claims she had an affair with Trump.

On the tape, Cohen and Trump discuss a payment to Karen McDougal, who says she had an affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007. CNN aired the conversation, which was reportedly recorded in September 2016, on Tuesday night.

President Donald Trump lashed out at his former attorney Michael Cohen on Saturday, reacting to a report that Cohen secretly recorded the two discussing a payoff to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claims they had an affair. Trump called Cohen’s actions “inconceivable,” but emphasized he himself did nothing wrong.

The New York Times reported on Friday that the Justice Department’s investigation into Cohen includes a recording of a September 2016 conversation between him and Trump about paying McDougal, who says she had an affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007. Trump’s current lawyer Rudy Giuliani acknowledged the tape in interviews with the Times and CNN but claimed the president hadn’t done anything wrong.

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, has reportedly resigned from his position as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee.

Perhaps more surprising than the news that Cohen — who remains under federal investigation — was still on the RNC’s finance leadership team at all was his rebuke of his former boss in his resignation letter.

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, is battling legal troubles on all fronts.

On Thursday, Cohen asked a California judge to issue a gag order against Stormy Daniels’s attorney, Michael Avenatti. The filing claimed that Avenatti’s frequent media appearances — where he frequently blasts Cohen and Trump — were “depriving” Cohen of “his right to a fair trial.”

Longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is changing his legal team, in what may be a sign that he’ll cut a cooperation deal with Justice Department prosecutors.

There are conflicting reports on Cohen’s current intentions. George Stephanopoulos of ABC News reported Wednesday morning that Cohen’s legal team will leave his case and that he is now “likely to cooperate with federal prosecutors in New York,” with that cooperation “believed to be imminent.”

Michael Cohen — Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer and business associate, who’s now under federal investigation and reportedly thinking about striking a plea deal with prosecutors — doesn’t mince words.

“I’m the guy who protects the president and the family. I’m the guy who would take a bullet for the president.”

One of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s business partners has now agreed to cooperate with government investigators.

Evgeny “Gene” Freidman, known as the “Taxi King,” entered a guilty plea in New York state court Tuesday as part of a cooperation deal, the New York Times’s Danny Hakim, William Rashbaum, and Vivian Wang report.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia reached the one-year mark on Thursday.

But based on events over the past day, it seems like his probe won’t be drawing to a close anytime soon.

Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’s attorney, published a memo last week that he said detailed Michael Cohen’s financial transactions. The “Project Sunlight” memo revealed Cohen’s firm Essential Consultants LLC had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from major corporations, including a $500,000 payment from a company with ties to a Russian oligarch.

Various companies that paid Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, for amorphous consulting services — AT&T and Novartis among them — confirmed the payments. The admissions corroborated Avenatti’s revelations.

President Donald Trump has now admitted repaying Michael Cohen more than $100,000 for the Stormy Daniels hush money on his new financial disclosure form — but the admission may have gotten him into even more legal trouble.

That’s because David Apol, the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), is disputing Trump’s assertion that he wasn’t required to report the debt — and has sent along the matter for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to look into.

Michael Cohen made Ford an offer the company easily refused.

The Wall Street Journal’s Peter Nicholas and Christina Rogers report that Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal attorney and fixer, reached out to Ford Motor Company in January 2017 to offer his “consulting services” — otherwise known as promoting his access to the president.

It turns out Michael Cohen was using his shell company to do a lot more than pay off Stormy Daniels. He was also using it to take in hundreds of thousands of dollars from Russian oligarchs and major international corporations to — well, that’s what we don’t know.

AT&T, which paid his company, Essential Consultants LLC, up to $600,000, says it was for “insights” into the Trump administration. Novartis says it was for Obamacare advice that didn’t really pan out. Korea Aerospace Industries wanted legal advice on accounting standards.

Since Stormy Daniels lawyer Michael Avenatti spilled details of Michael Cohen’s bank accounts on the internet Tuesday night, several corporations have faced questions about why exactly they were secretly paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to the president’s personal attorney.

Columbus Nova LLC, a company tied to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, paid Cohen at least $500,000 last year. The pharmaceutical company Novartis paid him $1.2 million. AT&T forked over more than $200,000. Korean Aerospace Industries paid at least $150,000.

Thanks to Stormy Daniels’s attorney, Michael Avenatti, we learned last night that Michael Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants LLC, whose existence came to light as the vehicle for the hush money payments to Daniels, also had considerable income from Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg as well as corporations including AT&T and Novartis.

This raises any number of possible legal and political questions — including the disturbing but very real possibility that under currently prevailing legal standards, there’s nothing actually illegal about putting cash into the president’s fixer’s slush fund and hoping to gain political access in exchange.