Michael Cohen's cellphone signal was picked up in the Prague area during the summer of 2016, four people with knowledge of the matter told McClatchy. Cohen, President Trump's former personal lawyer and fixer, has denied ever going to Prague, denouncing reports that he attended a secret meeting there with Russian officials.
Two people also told McClatchy that an Eastern European intelligence agency overheard Russians discussing his visit to Prague, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, is aware of this intercept.
In 2016, former British spy Christopher Steele put together a dossier based on information he received from people with ties to the Kremlin. It states that Cohen and at least one Russian official met in Prague in order to come up with a plan to conceal ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The dossier asserts that a member of the Russian Senate, Konstantin Kosachev, "facilitated" the meeting and may have been at it; he has denied going to Prague in 2016.
The dossier was first made public in January 2017, and Cohen was adamant that he never visited Prague. He is now cooperating with Mueller's team, and pleaded guilty in August to bank and tax fraud and campaign finance law violations and in December to one count of lying to Congress. He was sentenced to three years in prison. Read more about Cohen and how cell phones are easily tracked at McClatchy.