Says who?
If Cohen was Five Towns and Sater was Brighton Beach/Coney, geography is not going to be how they knew each other as teenagers. Might well be some religious/community/whatever organization, but that’s a little like East 85th st and East 103d.
Interesting how Cohen refers to the Trumps as “the family.”
They are several years apart in age, right? This isn’t the whole story
This documentary from Dutch Public Television is well worth watching.
This link is for Parts 1 & 2.
Less than six months after Trump was inaugurated, Cohen made two career moves I find interesting:
1 - He resigned from the Trump Organization and set up his own law firm. Two weeks later, on June 3, his brand new firm announced a “strategic alliance” with powerhouse law and lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs, which has clients that include Russia’s third-largest bank, Gazprombank (as well as the government of Turkey - ha!).
SPB issued a press release that baldly stated what the “alliance” with Cohen established: “The deal makes official a link between the president and foreign and corporate interests, many of whom rely on Squire Patton Boggs for legal and lobbying counsel.”
2 - Also on June 3, Cohen - a Democrat until Trump ran for president - became one of three Republican National Committee deputy national finance chairmen, giving him sway over the GOP’s allocation of money among candidates. He tweeted that within just hours of the announcement he’d raised half a million dollars for the GOP.
So hey, you want to slip Trump a hundred thou or two or three to be in his good graces? Michael’s ready to help you whether you’d like it to be on the books or… wherevah.
Each of these articles contributes pieces of the picture of Cohen’s very busy June day: ABC News, Politico; more on Cohen’s new firm and SPB - Legal Week, Yahoo News; more on Cohen’s RNC role - TPM, Cohen’s brag-tweet on his fundraising
Nothing shady here, no siree!
What about the mysterious and untimely death of the political fixer on the Ukrainian side TPM had reported who had been working with them so diligently to put together this deal?
Was there any insight from Cohen and Sater as to why he just seemed to suddenly drop dead immediately after the Times story on this broke in February? We never did get an explanation on his official cause of death.
Sater & Cohen’s “peace plan” sure paid off! As in Cohen got a piece, Sater got a piece and I am sure the Trump Disorganization got a piece too 
Alex Oronov? Bryan Cohen - that is, Michael’s brother and Oronov’s son-in-law - says Oronov died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City after a three-month stay, so sick that he could breathe only with a forced-airflow machine. (Patient privacy laws mean this hasn’t been confirmed by the hospital.)
The “peace plan” meeting was in January 2017 and Oronov died on March 2, 2017, so when Bryan Cohen maintains his father-in-law was too sick to have been at the meeting, he may be on the level.
Snopes pulled a bunch of the pieces together here if you want to check it out. It’s rated “unproven.” Or were you thinking of another dead Russian? There are so many these days . . . .
To say the five towns and Brighton Beach are nearby areas is like saying St. Louis is the next town over from Kansas City. There has to be a million people separating the two areas. Plus Queens lies between the two areas as well.
Try telling Brooklynite that they are from Long Island (even though technically they are) and fuggetabouit, you just might find yourself embroiled in a heated argument.
I guess you can call it a “peace plan” if you consider “peace for sale to the highest bidder” a peace plan…
Thanks, for the citations and insight. I remember Josh giving this story a lot of play in his editorial blog after the Times story on Slater delivering the sanctions lift proposal to Flynn broke and found it odd Oronov’s death wasn’t more fully explored or picked up by other media. I must have missed the followup posting examining Cohen’s explanation at odds with Artemenko.
I appreciate you clearing that up for me.
Congratulations, Sam. Another nice bit of reporting. That you can get these jokers to talk to you at all is nothing short of astonishing. Although, I’m sure talking about themselves is something these schmucks love to do, but to a (Gasp!) reporter for some lefty Web site? You are a sly devil. Keep up the excellent work!
Trump Coin Laundry…
Well, now that you put it that way, it all seems legit…
Doesn’t that guy downtown who owns parking lots have his own peace plan too?
Great comment, full of good information. My takeaway is that creeps like Cohen exist in both political parties, and a legitimately honest candidate–especially a Democratic candidate–for any office needs to get as far away from these people as he or she possibly can. With most Republicans, having people like Cohen and Sater around is a given. The Atwater-Rove axis pretty well killed any desire for ethical conduct on that side… Guys like this hang around in order to take care of their business or the “family’s” business. The candidate is a mere means to an end, and the losers are the voters.
Thanks. Y’know, it’s like Dostoevsky’s writing this stuff: So many people, so many complexities. It’s hard to keep it all knitted together across time and continents.
That the Trumpets continually mislead and just plain lie about all manner of things makes it very hard to debunk any allegation. Here, if it wasn’t the father-in-law who attended, was there someone else there in better health with similar connections - and maybe even the name Oronov? Gets so conspiracy-theory-think so fast, but the weird blend of coyness and thuggishness these people display plus the constant dishonesty of the Trumpets make it nearly impossible to trust any piece of information.
Maybe that’s their goal, eh? Don’t envy Mueller’s people in the least.
Newt Gingrich was interviewed by NPR’s.Rachel Martin this morning. It devolved into a Gingrich tirade . Sounding like he was on the losing end of a high school debate, he asserted unverified and made-up numbers (97% of Mueller’s team has donated to Democrats [ not true but not pertinent at any rate]) while repeatedly saying Robert Mueller “has hired killers” for his team. He sounded insane.
Rachel Martin sounded, understandably, flabbergasted and failed to challenge his “killer” statement
http://www.npr.org/2017/07/26/539451693/newt-gingrich-on-jeff-sessions-and-russia-investigation