Rigged polling report undenied; obeyed Trump, ex-lawyer says

Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer to U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives at federal court with his daughter Samantha Cohen, left, in New York on Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Peter Foley
Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer to U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives at federal court with his daughter Samantha Cohen, left, in New York on Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Peter Foley

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former lawyer and fixer, did not dispute a report Thursday that he hired a technology company to help rig online polls in his boss's favor ahead of the 2016 presidential campaign and said what he did was at Trump's direction.

Cohen responded on Twitter to a Wall Street Journal article that said Cohen had promised to pay $50,000 to a small firm run by the chief information officer at Liberty University in Virginia, where evangelical leader and Trump supporter Jerry Falwell Jr. is president.

"As for the WSJ article on poll rigging, what I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of realDonaldTrump POTUS," Cohen wrote. "I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn't deserve it."

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, on Thursday walked back comments from the night before in which he maintained that he had "never said there was no collusion" between Russia and members of Trump's 2016 White House campaign.

According to the Journal article, the university information officer John Gauger, who owns RedFinch Solutions, showed up at Trump Tower in New York in early 2015 expecting to collect $50,000 for his firm's work.

Instead, Cohen gave him a blue Walmart bag containing $12,000 to $13,000 in cash and a boxing glove that Cohen said had been worn by a Brazilian mixed-martial arts fighter, Gauger told the Journal. (Cohen denied to the Journal that he had paid cash.)

Gauger told the Journal that he never got the rest of what he was owed. But Cohen in early 2017 received a $50,000 reimbursement from Trump and his company for the RedFinch work, the Journal reported.

Cohen also has said he helped arrange payments at Trump's direction to silence women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.

Giuliani told the Journal that the RedFinch reimbursement showed that Cohen -- who has since had a falling-out with Trump -- is a thief.

"If one thing has been established, it's that Michael Cohen is completely untrustworthy," Giuliani said.

Cohen has pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations, tax evasion, lying to Congress and other charges unrelated to the RedFinch payment. He was sentenced last month to three years in prison, and is scheduled to testify before Congress next month before he begins his sentence.

According to the Journal, Cohen also instructed Gauger to create a WomenForCohen Twitter account. Posts on the account, created in May 2016, described Cohen as a "sex symbol" and included other laudatory statements about the lawyer.

GIULIANI CLARIFIES

Giuliani issued a statement Thursday aimed at clarifying a Wednesday night CNN interview that appeared to leave open the possibility of improper contacts during the presidential campaign, in light of court filings in the past year that have detailed ties between Trump aides and Russia.

"I represent only the president, not the campaign," he told The Associated Press in an interview. "And I can only speak of what I know, and that is that I have no knowledge that anyone on the campaign illegally colluded with Russia. But I can only speak definitively about the president, as he is my client."

In a separate statement Thursday, he said "there was no collusion by President Trump in any way, shape or form" and that he had "no knowledge of any collusion by any of the thousands of people who worked on the campaign."

That was an apparent reversal from the television appearance in which he said, "I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign." He had previously denied any collusion.

It was not clear whether Giuliani in the television interview was reflecting a new position or talking point from the Trump legal team or was attempting to get ahead of potentially damaging findings from special counsel Robert Mueller, who has been investigating potential coordination between Russia and the president's campaign.

Either way, the comment reflected a stark turnabout from long-standing denials by the White House and Trump advisers of improper collusion, and it underscored how the president's lawyers have adapted their message and defenses as additional revelations have emerged.

On Wednesday, Giuliani told CNN that even if some people working on the campaign did something wrong, the president was not part of any collusion.

"There is not a single bit of evidence the president of the United States committed the only crime you could commit here, conspired with the Russians to hack the DNC," Giuliani said, referring to the Democratic National Committee.

The comments on collusion came after Giuliani was confronted with prosecutors' allegations, detailed in court papers earlier this month, that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had lied to investigators about sharing campaign polling data with an associate whom U.S. authorities have tied to Russian intelligence.

Giuliani repeated to the AP on Thursday that there was no collusion "connected to Russian hacking" and that Manafort's sharing of polling data had nothing to do with the campaign or the president.

So far, Mueller has charged 33 people, including five Trump associates and 32 Russians accused of interfering in the 2016 election either through hacking or through a hidden social media campaign aimed at swaying American public opinion.

Giuliani's efforts to create distance between the president and top aides ensnared in the special counsel investigation come amid new signs of how extensively Mueller has mapped interactions between Trump associates and Russians in his 20-month-long investigation.

Manafort is among at least 14 Trump associates who interacted with Russians during the campaign and transition, according to public records and interviews.

Giuliani told The Washington Post that he is "not worried" about the Manafort case.

"With regard to the president, he was not involved in any collusion in any way, and he has no knowledge of any collusion," Giuliani said. "The rest I can't be responsible for, except I can tell you the state of my knowledge, which is that I have no knowledge that anyone on the campaign illegally colluded with the Russians."

Asked about Manafort sharing polling data, Giuliani said Trump "didn't know about it. Does it lead to anything else? I don't think so. So far, every one of these things has turned out to be nothing."

Even as he said he could not speak for Manafort, Giuliani went on to play down the significance of Manafort's relationship with Konstantin Kilimnik, who had helped Manafort navigate the Ukrainian political scene.

"Sharing polling data with Ukrainians who happen to have or are alleged to have a favorable relationship with Russia? They're not Russians," Giuliani said. "They're not Russian government officials. I don't know. It would be like sharing polling data with an English guy and say we're colluding with America. It's really far afield. We're at a point where everything becomes hysteria."

LAW FIRM CITED

A law firm tied to Manafort's Ukrainian consulting work has agreed to pay more than $4.6 million and publicly acknowledge that it failed to report its work for a foreign government, the Justice Department said Thursday.

The civil settlement with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, one of the largest law firms in the world, brings to a close at least one part of a probe that developed from Mueller's Russia investigation.

"Sharing polling data with Ukrainians who happen to have or are alleged to have a favorable relationship with Russia? They're not Russians," Giuliani said. "They're not Russian government officials. I don't know. It would be like sharing polling data with an English guy and say we're colluding with America. It's really far afield. We're at a point where everything becomes hysteria."

The 44-page settlement agreement contains a damning narrative of Skadden's conduct and that of a senior partner who is not named.

RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION

Facebook identified two disinformation campaigns originating from Russia -- including one tied to an agency controlled by the Kremlin -- that were targeted at users in Europe and Central Asia. The company said Thursday that it had deleted nearly 500 pages and accounts that had posted the misleading messages.

Many of the pages were discovered to be linked to employees of Sputnik, an agency controlled by the Russian government that was established to spread reports and information sympathetic to Russia. Facebook said it used independent news pages on topics like weather, travel and sports to mask its efforts.

The company has been under pressure to more aggressively address the spread of misinformation, and to counter manipulation on its social network that is aimed at stirring division and discord, ever since it became evident that Russia used it to target groups of voters, sow division and spread false information in order to sway the 2016 presidential election.

The activity revealed by Facebook shows how Kremlin-linked groups continue to use the social network to spread misleading materials around the world. Several of the countries targeted share a border with Russia.

"We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don't want our services to be used to manipulate people," Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, said in a blog post.

Information for this article was contributed by John Wagner and Philip Rucker of The Washington Post; by Eric Tucker, Jonathan Lemire, Chad Day, Eric Tucker and Michael Balsamo of The Associated Press; and by Adam Satariano of The New York Times.

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Regarding an article on his actions to rig online polls, Mi chael Cohen said on Twitter that “what I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of ” then-candidate Donald Trump.

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AP

Rudy Giuliani

A Section on 01/18/2019

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