Trump’s ‘pit bull’ to testify on Russia

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer and longtime confidant, will testify before congressional investigators on Tuesday in the midst of a slew of probes into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Cohen is a fiercely loyal aide known from his days as an executive at the Trump Organization as the president’s “pit bull.”

He will likely be pressed on the president’s business ties to Russia as investigators probe whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Moscow to swing the election toward Trump.

{mosads}Cohen is seen as a key figure in the myriad investigations into election meddling, thanks both to his work on a proposed Trump Tower deal in Moscow and his appearance in a dossier full of incendiary, unverified allegations about Trump and Russia.

The interview with staff on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is expected to take place behind closed doors, will not be under oath, but witnesses nevertheless face criminal charges for misleading congressional committees.

The validity of the dossier has been a focal point of the storm surrounding the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia. Some Republican lawmakers have zeroed in on its compendium of unproven allegations as the basis for the furor over Trump and Russia.

Cohen’s name appears in numerous allegations in the dossier, including an alleged secret meeting with Kremlin officials in August 2016 in Prague.

The dossier also claims that Cohen was deeply involved in a “cover up and damage limitation operation in the attempt to prevent the full details of Trump’s relationship with Russia being exposed.”

The dossier — which circulated around Capitol Hill for months before BuzzFeed made the controversial decision to publish it in its entirety in January — contained sensational allegations of an “ongoing secret liaison” between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. It detailed shady real estate deals and alleged evenings the president spent with prostitutes.

Produced by a former British spy as opposition research into then-candidate Trump, the dossier has yet to be independently confirmed and appears to contain some inaccuracies. Trump has fiercely denied its contents.

Cohen’s counsel provided a point-by-point denial of the dossier’s allegations in an August letter to the House Intelligence Committee. Among these: Cohen’s passport shows no stamp to the Czech Republic.

But not all of the allegations in the document have been discredited.

Numerous congressional committees are seeking to understand the sourcing behind the dossier as well as any role it may have played in the federal investigation into Russian meddling, now in the hands of special counsel Robert Mueller.

John Sipher, a former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, has written that while the document contains some factual inaccuracies, as a series of raw intelligence reports, it could also contain valuable clues for investigators.

The company that paid for its production, Fusion GPS, has said that it stands by the dossier’s salacious allegations.

Cohen has also come under scrutiny for his role in promoting a stalled Trump development project in Moscow that the Trump Organization was pursuing during the campaign.

In January of 2016, he emailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s personal spokesman to ask for help with speeding along languishing negotiations, according to emails reported by The Washington Post.

The revelation of the request — perhaps the most well-documented confirmation yet of a direct interaction between a senior Trump aide and a senior Putin aide — comes as Trump’s business ties to Russia continue to be under intense scrutiny.

Trump has repeatedly said he has no business ties to Russia.

But at the time, Cohen had been in negotiations with Felix Sater, a Russian-American businessman who was serving as a broker for the Trump Organization, to attempt to build a Trump Tower in the Russian capital.

The project was envisioned as a licensing deal, in which a Moscow-based developer would have paid Trump for the use of his name. Trump signed a letter of intent with the developer in October 2015, according to the Post.

At the time, the Republican primary campaign was well underway and Trump was surprising observers with his unusually warm rhetoric about Putin.

Cohen has said that he did not receive a response from Peskov and the deal fell through two weeks later. He characterized the deal as nothing more than a routine business proposal in a statement to the Post.

But in a series of emails to Cohen written in 2015, Sater had argued that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would benefit the businessman’s candidacy, The New York Times reported.

Cohen has previously rebuffed overtures to appear before congressional investigators.

“We believe the allegations are so profoundly wrong about Mr. Cohen that the dossier is libelous and any repetitions of its allegations by the committee should be rejected,” Cohen’s lawyer wrote in the August letter to the House committee, published by The Daily Beast.

It’s unclear how much information Cohen will be required to disclose to investigators. He could claim attorney-client privilege during the interview — and in fact may be obligated to unless Trump waives the privilege, according to Bradley Moss, a lawyer who specializes in national security.

That privilege could cover conversations that Cohen has had with Trump since the president took office, Moss said in an email to The Hill.

“The exception to the privilege rule is if Cohen was himself engaging in the furtherance of a crime or criminal conspiracy,” Moss continued, but noted that “at the moment, I do not anticipate that exception would be at issue.”

Cohen acted as an informal surrogate on TV for Trump during the presidential race but never took on a formal role in the campaign.

Though Cohen recently told Vanity Fair that he would “take a bullet” for the president, he said that he has not spoken to Trump in “several weeks,” on the advice of counsel.

“At times I wish I were there in D.C. more, sitting with him in the Oval Office, like we used to at Trump Tower, to protect him,” Cohen said.