Boom! Taking Stock of the Wild New Michael Cohen News - TPM/Josh Marshall

By JOSH MARSHALL Published AUGUST 28, 2017 3:59 PM

Much as the first reports of the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr., last night’s report about Trump Tower Moscow seems to be the tip of a very large iceberg. As I noted last night, the first Post report was substantially the same as our report on Trump’s 2015 Trump Tower Moscow effort published a month ago. The key point – the significance of which will become more apparent – is that they were working from different sources. We had TPM Investigations Desk reporter Sam Thielman’s series of interviews with Felix Sater. The Post was working from accounts of what seems to be a large cache of emails which the Trump Organization is in the process of turning over to Congress.

That was only the first hint.

The Times, not surprisingly got access to some more of those emails early this afternoon. Now the Post has followed up with a new report which dramatically expands the story. The Post is now reporting that in January 2016, on the eve of the earliest primary voting and some six months into the Trump presidential campaign, the Trump Tower Moscow deal had “stalled”. Michael Cohen – Trump’s nominal “lawyer” who is actually his dealmaker with channels into Russia and Ukrainian cash – emailed Vladimir Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov asking for assistance in pushing the deal forward.

Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page in terms of what this means. Cohen was running the deal from Trump’s side. He was also acting as Trump’s part-time press spokesman. When talks broke down Cohen contacted Putin’s Press Security – his equivalent of Sean Spicer or Josh Earnest – to get the deal back on track.

I’d wager that most people don’t have Peskov’s email for starters. I don’t. Cohen apparently did. Cohen now says he did so at the urging of Felix Sater, the Russian emigre convicted fraudster who spearheaded numerous Trump building projects and who Trump later said he would barely recognize.

more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/boom-taking-stock-of-the-wild-new-michael-cohen-news