The Mueller Report: Cohen and Prague

I want to preface this post by saying I hate conspiracy theories. My whole life, I've tried to immunize myself from cognitive biases that lead people to see patterns where they don't exist and believe things for which they have no firm rational foundation.

There are many things I despise about the Donald Trump era, but one of the biggest ones is actually the way it makes me feel like a conspiracy theorist. I've tried to be as informed as possible about what's going on because I feel like this is a pivotal time in history, and I want to absorb and remember as many details as possible. And there are a ton of details. The effect is that I end up sounding like Carrie in Homeland ranting at a pegboard full of criss-crossing yarn.

All I can do is continue to guard against my biases and try to look at things as clearly and objectively as possible.

Anyway...

The Steele Dossier says that Michael Cohen secretly met with three Kremlin officials in August 2016 in Prague. Now some things in the dossier have been confirmed. Many things haven't. But it's been public for a long time. I can understand Mueller and the FBI not wanting to lean on its reliability, but from what I understand, Steele isn't an amateur, and you'd probably want to follow up on the allegations in the dossier, at the very least to rule them out.

When the dossier first came out, Cohen tweeted a picture of the cover of his passport and said he'd never been to Prague. That's a super-convincing way of knocking the story down. That's like trying to convince someone you don't have any five dollar bills by tweeting a pic of the outside of your wallet. In other words: It proves nothing. It's dumb. And it's suspicious.

He then showed the inside of the passport to Buzzfeed. There was no stamp for the Czech Republic, but there was one for Italy in July of 2016.

The Italian trip is the most intriguing, because it places Cohen in what’s known as the Schengen Area: a group of 26 European countries, including the Czech Republic, that allows visitors to travel freely among them without getting any additional passport stamps.
...
Cohen, 50, said he understands the scrutiny this will bring. He said credit card receipts would prove he stayed in Capri, an island off the Italian coast, but he declined to make those receipts available. Cohen was with family and friends, he said, including the musician and actor Steve Van Zandt. Van Zandt did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Well, Van Zandt later did make a comment on Twitter:

So Cohen made it sound like he was spending significant time with Van Zandt in Italy, and he wasn't. Again, it's a small, stupid lie, but it's weird. It raises suspicion.

Then there were a couple of reports from McClatchy, generally a well-regarded news source. One was from April 2018, and cited two sources saying that Mueller had evidence that Cohen had entered the Czech Republic via Germany in late August or early September 2016. A second report from McClatchy in December of 2018 cited four sources saying that Meuller had data from cell phone pings placing Cohen in Prague in "late summer 2016".

Now the spokeperson for the Special Counsel's office didn't do a lot of speaking during the investigation. But they did speak up to knock down a story from Buzzfeed reporting that Trump had instructed Cohen to lie to Congress.

If the Cohen stories were so preposterous and unfounded, why didn't the SC office knock them down as well? Maybe they didn't feel it was worth their time. Maybe they had better things to do. But the allegations of Cohen in Prague are so impactful and damning, they certainly seem like they need to be addressed, don't they? We're talking about the President's personal lawyer being accused of meeting with Kremlin agents. If it did happen, that's pretty conclusive evidence of a conspiracy directly implicating Trump, right? If it didn't happen, we need to know that, don't we?

Okay, so what does the Mueller Report say about all this? Certainly it clears it right up, right?

In early May 2017, Cohen received requests from Congress to provide testimony and documents in connection with congressional investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. At that time, Cohen understood Congress's interest in him to be focused on the allegations in the Steele reporting concerning a meeting Cohen allegedly had with Russian officials in Prague during the campaign. Cohen had never traveled to Prague and was not concerned about those allegations, which he believed were provably false.

Okay, then. Cohen had never traveled to Prague. So the FBI dug around in his bank and phone records and verified that, right? They interviewed Van Zandt and others, right? Well, we don't know. Because this is all Mueller says.

Oh wait, there's a footnote for this sentence. Surely that will provide some justification for simply stating he wasn't in Prague. Oh, it's just a citation for an interview with Cohen.

So basically, they asked him if he'd been to Prague. He said no. End of story.

No. No, no, no, no, no.

You gotta show your work here, man. I read the Mueller report as if I were a juror. And dammit, there should be some evidentiary standards. There should be some freaking evidence, you know.

You can't just say a thing and make it true. You have to back it up. And this is a report. A final report. I'm not going to infer a lot of investigative work that isn't described. That's not how this works. We've had two damn years of smoke and fragments. I just want the facts.

And in this case, they seem incredibly easy to come by. We already know that the Feds looked into Cohen's finances. We know they got a warrant on him and raided him. So surely they checked that information to rule out that he met with Kremlin officials in the summer of 2016, right? RIGHT???

If you took those steps, why not say it? There was a media report specifically noting that Mueller had checked Cohen's cell phone data during that time period. Why not, for God's sake, say in the report that the FBI did in fact look at those records, and Cohen was in New York the whole time? Or California? Or an Arby's in Minnesota?

That's what makes this so stupid. If the Steele dossier is wrong, and the McClatchy stories are wrong, it seems relatively simple to knock this false little story down. When Mueller doesn't do that, when according to the plain text of the report, he relies solely on Michael Cohen's word, what the hell are we supposed to think?

You know who else has those records? Michael Cohen. Supposedly he has said that he would sit down, any time, with reporters, and share all the records that would clearly show he didn't go near Prague in the summer of 2016. But remember what happened when he sat down with Buzzfeed:

He said credit card receipts would prove he stayed in Capri, an island off the Italian coast, but he declined to make those receipts available. 

He has reported to prison now, but as far as I know, he never sat down with any reporters to share receipts or phone records. Why not?

Now Derek, you might say. If he showed you those, you'd just want more. Your conspiratorial little brain would just work overtime to keep this story alive.

No. No it wouldn't. If Cohen sat down with a respectable reporter and shared records covering the time period in question, that'd do it for me. Or better yet, Mueller could have squashed this with a single line in the report, something like:

Investigative efforts into Michael Cohen's personal records established his whereabouts during this time frame, strongly indicating he did not travel to Prague in the late summer of 2016.

Boom. That would have done it. Just say you did something other than just ask him.

Apparently a lot of other people are satisfied. The Washington Post cites this very example as a lesson for the media to chew on for it's substandard reporting of the investigation.

McClatchy reported that Mueller had evidence about Cohen-Prague; in a document disclosing his findings, Mueller cited no such evidence. 

Right. Hey, he didn't cite any evidence, other than Cohen's testimony. Cohen is not the most trustworthy witness. Presumably you would cross-check it with other people's testimony, right? And in those cases where you could get hold of corroborating physical evidence, you'd do that, too, right? I'm not an investigator or in law enforcement or a lawyer, but this just seems like common sense.

This makes me mad. When the Mueller report came out, I wanted some definitive answers. I was hoping that Mueller would verify or discount most or all of the Steele dossier, for the sake of the truth and of the reputations of the people involved, and for the country.

Instead, we get the kind of justification that wouldn't pass muster in a 5th-grade book report, much less the final word on the most important investigation in our country's history.

Call me a conspiracy nut if you must, but for me, the question of Cohen's whereabouts in the summer of 2016 are still an open question, and Mueller, as he did in many other areas, dropped the damn ball in clearing this up.