Michael Cohen ‘took secret payment from Ukraine’

Donald Trump’s long-time personal lawyer Michael Cohen accepted a payment of at least $400,000 to help arrange a meeting between Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, according to the BBC.

Both Cohen and Poroshenko have denied the existence of any payments, but a second source has told the BBC that Cohen received $600,000.

According to the report, the payment was made before Poroshenko’s visit to the White House in June 2017, where he was initially scheduled to have a brief photo opportunity with Trump in the Oval Office during staff briefings in the morning.

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Poroshenko “needed something that could be portrayed as ‘talks’”, says the BBC. “Cohen’s fee was for getting Poroshenko more than just an embarrassingly brief few minutes of small talk and a handshake”.

Following his encounter, Poroshenko told reporters he had had a “full, detailed meeting” with the US president.

Soon afterwards, Ukraine’s anticorruption agency “pumped the brakes on its investigation into Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort”, says Business Insider.

Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn actress Stormy Daniels, who is engaged in a legal battle against Trump, said that “suspicious activity reports” filed by Cohen’s bank with the US Treasury showed payments from “Ukrainian interests”.

The BBC report opens another line of investigation into Cohen for failing to declare himself as a foreign agent working for Ukraine at the time the payments were allegedly made.