Looks like Michael Cohen gave up Ivanka Trump
Here’s the funny thing about the Trump-Russia scandal. Whenever a truly weird storyline or inexplicable clue surfaces and we don’t know what to make of it, even if it’s then forgotten about, it always finds its way back into the picture down the road. It’s happened again, and if you connect the dots, a key piece of the Michael Cohen sentencing memo suggests that he gave up Ivanka Trump to federal prosecutors.
Back when BuzzFeed first broke the Trump Tower Moscow story this past summer, the strange part was that Michael Cohen had reportedly gone through a Russian bodybuilder named Dmitry Klokov to try to negotiate the deal with the Kremlin. Even more strangely, it was Ivanka Trump who connected Klokov with Cohen. Last night’s Cohen sentencing memo reveals that the Cohen-Klokov wasn’t just some weird stray detail; it’s a centerpiece of the scandal.
In fact it was Klokov who made the instantly infamous reference to “synergy” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. It was also Klokov who suggested that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet in person in order to plot out this synergy. While there is no evidence that a Trump-Putin meeting ended up happening, and the plug obviously got pulled on Trump Tower Moscow at some point, prosecutors see the Cohen-Klokov connection as being so crucial to Trump-Russia, they spelled out in Cohen’s sentencing memo that he helpfully gave them information about it.
This brings us back to the fact that it was Ivanka Trump who connected Michael Cohen to Dmitry Klokov in the first place. This on its own does not prove that Ivanka was in on the Trump-Russia election plot. If you introduce two of your friends to each other, and then they rob a bank together, you’re only guilty of a crime if you knowingly introduced them for that criminal purpose. But it’s clear that Cohen gave up Ivanka’s role in connecting him to Klokov. Robert Mueller now has the details – and if there was criminal intent on Ivanka’s part when she made this introduction, Mueller will find it.
