I thought it was a DIFFERENT Michael Cohen!
It was. Trump called him in and made him produce his passport. Cohen was in California with his son at the time they claimed he was in Prague. He produced proof of that too. The plant was Carter Page.
I heard two different Michael Cohens. It was all a set up. Good thing his name isn’t John Smith or “they” would get digging up even more suspicious trips, meetings and transactions to put onto him.
It WAS a different Cohen.
That’s the meat of all the hyperbole in the Michael Cohen scandal right now.
If you take any single person and look hard enough, you WILL find dirt and, even by extension of a business associate, client or otherwise, that which might be activity that could be prosecutable.
It just so happens that this was a marriage of convenience...
Yes of course, the real Michael Cohen never went to Prague. Also, the pee party never happened and Carter Page never agreed on Trump’s behalf to drop sanctions in return for a financial payoff.
The dossier was bogus.
That didn’t stop the FBI from using it to open counterintelligence investigations. In fact, I’m sure they never did a real investigation into the dossier because they didn’t want to disprove it; they wanted to use it as a pretext for surveillance on team Trump.
I would guess that the FBI opened counterintelligence investigations on a number of Trump people, who knows how many, but they included: George Papadopoulos; Carter Page; Michael Cohen; Michael Flynn; and Paul Manafort. Maybe even Donald J. Trump himself.