Following the money from Putin friend Vekselberg to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen

The dealings of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen pose potentially the biggest threat to the US President.

Porn star Stormy Daniels. Picture: Getty Images

When Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg flew into New York on his private jet in March, he found FBI agents waiting on the tarmac. They were armed with questions about a porn star, a bank account and Donald Trump.

Vekselberg is the fourth richest man in Russia, with a $100 million collection of 19th-century Faberge imperial eggs and a close personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The FBI agents from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team wanted to ask the Russian about a mysterious bank account set up by Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen. The bank account was used by a shell company called Essential Consultants that Cohen established in September 2016, shortly before the US election.

That very month Cohen used this new company to quietly pay $US130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels to win her silence over potentially explosive claims that she had extramarital sex with Trump a decade earlier.

But Mueller’s team discovered some other unusual transactions in this account. Among them was a series of payments totalling $US500,000 between January and August 2017 from a New York investment firm called Columbus Nova, a US affiliate of the Renova Group founded by Vekselberg.

Vekselberg, who made his fortune in oil and gas after the collapse of the Soviet Union and who sometimes meets Putin privately, wanted Trump to win the election as much as Putin did. He attended Trump’s inauguration, and his business associates and family donated heavily to the Trump campaign and to the Republican National Committee.

Vekselberg’s cousin Andrew Intrater, who heads Columbus Nova, donated $US250,000 to Trump’s campaign.

Mueller’s investigators want to know why the President’s personal lawyer was accepting money from a company linked to a friend of Putin’s, and why that money was paid into the same bank account used to pay hush money to a porn star alleging an affair with Trump. Is there a link between Russia, Daniels and Cohen that will eventually lead Mueller to the President?

Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Picture: AP

According to Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti, who revealed the Russian-linked payments this week, the connections suggest that Cohen was a conduit between Moscow and Trump.

“(Cohen) appears to have been selling access to the Russians and to other foreign interests,” Avenatti says. “Michael Cohen should not be selling access to the President of the United States.”

Mueller, who is heading the sprawling investigation probing links between Trump associates and Moscow, did not get a chance to interview Vekselberg a second time. In April, a month after Vekselberg was interviewed, the oligarch was among the Russians sanctioned and banned from the US by the Trump administration. The move was made in response to Moscow’s use of a nerve agent in an assassination attempt against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Britain in March. By this stage Mueller knew he needed to find out more about Cohen’s connections, as well as suspicions that Cohen had engaged in bank fraud and election-law violations.

On April 9 the FBI raided Cohen’s home, office and safe-deposit box, taking hundreds of files, including private correspondence between Cohen and Trump.

The leaked bank details of Essential Consultants show how Cohen was trying to profit from his position as Trump’s personal lawyer. He did this by selling his knowledge of the administration to outside companies.

Since 2007, Cohen had been the chief lawyer for the Trump Organisation while also pursuing a range of other business interests. He saw himself as an entrepreneur as much as a lawyer.

But in 2016 Cohen left the Trump Organisation to become Trump’s personal attorney — and with that he spied a lucrative business opportunity.

He sold himself to potential corporate clients as a “fixer” for Trump — an insider who knew how the administration worked. Calling himself Trump’s “personal attorney”, he would brag about his access to the President and show potential clients photos of himself with Trump.

For businesses trying to gain access to, or an understanding of, Trump, Cohen appeared to offer a potential pathway into the administration outside the traditional lobbying channels.

“I’m crushing it,” Cohen boasted to a colleague last year about his rapidly growing consultancy contracts, according to The Washington Post.

Since Trump’s election, Cohen has collected at least $US2.35m ($3.12m) from corporate clients ranging from telecommunications giant AT&T to the Swiss drug maker Novartis and the Vekselberg-linked Columbus Nova.

Exactly what Cohen promised and delivered for these companies in return for this payment will be closely scrutinised by Mueller.

AT&T says it engaged Cohen through Essential Consultants “to provide insights into understanding the new administration”.

Novartis said it paid Cohen $US1.2m after he approached the company promising insights into Trump’s views on healthcare.

The Russian-linked Columbus Nova, caught in the spotlight by the revelations this week, tried to distance itself from the oligarch Vekselberg and speculation that it paid Cohen in an attempt to seek influence over, or favours from, the President.

Russian President Vladimir Putin with oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Picture: AP

The company played down its Russian connections and said it hired Cohen only “as a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures”.

“Reports that Viktor Vekselberg used Columbus Nova as a conduit for payments to Michael Cohen are false,” it said.

“That is untrue,” Daniels’s lawyer Avenatti responded. He says the alarmist reaction of Columbus Nova suggests that “where there is smoke, there is fire”.

“(This) is going to be very bad for them, for Michael Cohen and ultimately the President,” he says.

Cohen is likely to argue that his courting of corporate clients in return for helping them understand and navigate the Trump administration is no crime, even if it does feed into the “swamp-like” Washington behaviour that Trump railed against during the presidential campaign.

But Cohen could be in legal trouble if he promised specific government decisions in exchange for these payments from clients.

Similarly, if he sought to persuade decision-makers, including Trump, to pursue particular actions his clients were keen on, then he should have registered himself as a lobbyist.

What is most remarkable is why Cohen would accept payments from a company with clear links to a friend of Putin at a time when he knew the FBI — and then Mueller — was probing links between Trump’s associates and Russia in an investigation that posed potentially grave risks for his client, the US President?

And what is the link, if any, with the Stormy Daniels hush money payment?

Could it be that the Russia-linked payments in Cohen’s Essential Consultants account were used to facilitate the $US130,000 payment to the porn star?

“We don’t know,” says Avenatti, whose access to and public disclosure of the confidential banking records this week is now the subject of an investigation by the Treasury Department’s inspector general.

Avenatti’s disclosure was aimed at increasing the pressure on Cohen, who is facing a civil lawsuit from Daniels as she tries to break the non-disclosure agreement with Cohen about her alleged affair Trump.

But the banking records offer stark proof that Cohen’s business affairs are more murky and extensive than previously believed.

To make matters worse, the Mueller team’s raid on Cohen captured electronic records of his dealings with Trump.

Trump is said to be more upset by this than about any other issue of his presidency.

Cohen, meanwhile, is fighting to keep his conversations with the President legally confidential, arguing lawyer-client privilege.

“Attorney-client privilege is dead,” Trump fumed on Twitter after the raids, which he denounced as a “disgrace”.

Cohen may also have dragged the President into murky waters with his payment of the hush money to Daniels shortly before the 2016 election without declaring the payment as a campaign contribution.

The debate about whether it amounted to a campaign contribution hinges on whether the money was paid to influence the election campaign.

Trump has strongly denied that the payment qualified as a campaign contribution, which would need to be disclosed by law. “The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair,” the President tweeted. He said the payment was a “private agreement” rather than a “campaign contribution”.

Cohen and Trump have changed their story about how the hush money was paid. Cohen ­originally said he paid it himself and was not reimbursed by the President.

Trump then said he knew nothing about the payment.

But following a loose-lipped interview given by Trump’s new legal adviser and former New York major Rudy Giuliani, it was revealed that Trump paid Cohen a monthly fee that the lawyer used to pay Daniels.

Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

Cohen’s emergence at the centre of this Russia-Daniels-Trump vortex, coupled with the FBI’s suspicion that he engaged in crimes such as bank fraud, makes him a juicy target for Mueller. No details of an alleged bank fraud have been revealed.

The White House and Trump are worried that it makes Cohen a candidate for Mueller to flip by persuading him to tell the special counsel all he knows in exchange for avoiding jail.

The President betrayed these concerns publicly last month when he launched a twitter storm in response to an article in The New York Times that claimed Trump had treated Cohen poorly for many years.

“The New York Times ... are going out of their way to destroy Michael Cohen and his relationship with me in the hope that he will ‘flip’,” Trump tweeted.

He said Cohen was “a fine person with a wonderful family” and someone “who I have always liked and respected”.

“Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if it means lying or making up stories. Sorry, I don’t see Michael doing that despite the horrible Witch Hunt and the dishonest media!”

There are some in the White House who fear that if Cohen co-operated fully with Mueller, his testimony could pose a greater threat to Trump than would the testimony of former FBI chief James Comey.

Meanwhile, Stormy Daniels has signalled that she has no intention of disappearing quietly. She has deliberately lifted her profile in recent weeks, speaking publicly and appearing as herself on a skit on Saturday Night Live.

But as so often happens, it is the cover-up — or in this case the payment — rather than the crime that poses the greatest discomfort for the President.

Americans are relatively blase about the notion that Trump had affairs before he became President, including an alleged tryst with Daniels at one of his golf resorts in 2006.

A CNN poll released this week found that more than two-thirds of Americans believe Trump had a fling with Daniels and that he knew about the hush money payment at the time it was made. Trump has denied all of this.

Yet polls also show that Americans don’t care. A Quinnipiac University poll last month found a hefty three-quarters of all those polled, including a majority of Democrats, do not believe the alleged affair with Daniels is “an important issue”.

When Mueller weighs up the evidence he has gleaned through his exhaustive year-long investigation, the porn star is likely to be little more than a lurid subplot in a bigger story.

But this bigger story — whatever it turns out to be — looks certain to feature the murky world of the president’s private attorney.

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.