Donald Trump’s counsel Michael Cohen is denying the allegations posted by Buzzfeed that he traveled to Prague or Russia to work out secret financial deals for Trump.
The allegations in the Buzzfeed document dump are that Trump had secret financial dealings with Russia, and that Trump’s special counsel Michael Cohen was a main point of contact between these mysterious Russian forces and Team Trump.
The documents allege that Cohen traveled to Russia and Prague to arrange these deals. But Cohen says he has never even been to Prague or Russia.
“I’m telling you emphatically that I’ve not been to Prague, I’ve never been to Czech [Republic], I’ve not been to Russia,” Cohen said. “The story is completely inaccurate, it is fake news meant to malign Mr. Trump.”
Cohen was contacted by The Atlantic’s Rosie Gray about the story, and Cohen insisted the whole story is fake news.
Buzzfeed’s story, Cohen told Gray, is “totally fake, totally inaccurate.”
Cohen said that on the day that he was supposedly overseas making secret deals for Trump, he was actually visiting the University of Southern California with his son to meet with a baseball coach.
Gray found a USC source that confirmed Cohen was there during the time the documents claim he was in Prague.
The information Buzzfeed went live with on Monday — after CNN described the contents — has already been passed around for months, but very few news outlets even hinted at the existence of the claims. For example, left-wing reporter David Corn of liberal Mother Jones magazine noted on his own Twitter feed that he had seen the allegations months ago but never made a big deal out of it because he could not verify any of the claims in the documents.
Buzzfeed’s own editor, Ben Smith, said in a post to Twitter that there is “reason to doubt” the allegations’ accuracy and that Buzzfeed published the story so that “Americans can make up their own minds” about whether or not the documents are real.”
Trump jumped to his own Twitter account to call the story a “political witch hunt.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.