Michael Cohen’s evil twin skippy

| 6:02 pm EDT May 10, 2018
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Even as everyone from AT&T to Novartis to a firm controlled by a Russian oligarch are confirming they’ve made six figure payments to Michael Cohen since Donald Trump took office, Trump supporters are insisting that it didn’t happen and that Cohen has been exonerated. They’re claiming that these payments all went to some other Michael Cohen. Some of them are even insisting that Trump’s Michael Cohen was framed. But that’s not what happened, of course, and refuting their nonsense requires understanding where the confusion came from.

Michael Cohen is not even bothering to dispute that he received the large payments from the oligarch and the corporations. Why would he? Now that those entities have admitted to the payments, Cohen wouldn’t gain anything by denying it happened. Instead he’s latching onto the fact that some of the small and obscure transactions in this week’s data dump did in fact involve other people named “Michael Cohen.” For instance, to the surprise of no one, Donald Trump’s Michael Cohen did not actually receive a nine hundred dollar payment from an airplane mechanic in Kenya.

But even as NBC News has documented that some of these small payments were to other people named Michael Cohen, it doesn’t matter in the least bit. The only relevant part here is that the high-dollar transactions, the ones that came from Donald Trump’s Kremlin overlords and from the corporations that were trying to buy influence over Trump, really did involve Trump’s Michael Cohen.

When you have a common name, these kinds of things happen. Trust me, I know. I share the same name as the founder of Applebee’s and a historically significant accordion player. But the bottom line here is that, no matter how badly Trump supporters want to spin this one, Donald Trump’s Michael Cohen really did receive millions of dollars in payoffs from entities who wanted influence (or already had influence) over Trump. They can’t blame this one on Michael Cohen’s evil twin skippy.