For nearly 20 months, the allegations made in the infamous Steele dossier have hung like a cloud over the Trump administration and several of his former advisers.
The salacious 35-page document has become Exhibit A in President Donald Trump critics’ conspiracy theory that the campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. Numerous news outlets, pundits and lawmakers have also pushed the theory.
But the dossier arguably suffered its heaviest blow on Wednesday after Clinton-connected lawyer Lanny Davis emphatically denied one of the document’s most intriguing allegations.
Davis said the dossier’s claims that his client, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, traveled to Prague in August 2016 as part of a conspiracy with the Kremlin are “100 percent” false.
Davis’ comments received little attention from the both the mainstream press and the entities that have pushed the dossier.
“We have no comment on Mr. Davis’s statements,” said Matt Mittenhal, a spokesman for BuzzFeed News, which published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.
Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the dossier on behalf of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, has also not weighed in. Joshua Levy, a lawyer for the firm, did not respond to a request for a response to Davis’ comments.
The DNC did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Marc Elias, the attorney who hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC.
McClatchy News, which in April reported that special counsel Robert Mueller has evidence that Cohen did travel to Prague, says that it is sticking by its report. The article, written by reporters Greg Gordon and Peter Stone, breathed new life into the dossier’s claims about Cohen, but it has never been corroborated. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]Lanny Davis, the Clinton-connected attorney for Michael Cohen, said Wednesday that the former Trump lawyer had never been to Prague, as the infamous Steele dossier alleges.
“Thirteen references to Mr. Cohen are false in the dossier, but he has never been to Prague in his life,” Davis said Wednesday in an interview on Bloomberg.
The statement is a significant denial given that, according to Davis, Cohen has turned over a new leaf by deciding to discuss his work on behalf of President Donald Trump.
Cohen pleaded guilty on Tuesday to tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations. He claimed that he acted at the direction of Trump by paying off two women who claimed they had affairs with the former real estate mogul in 2006.
But Cohen did not address a larger question of whether he was involved in a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian government, as former British spy Christopher Steele claimed in the Democrat-funded dossier. – READ MORE
[contentcards url=”http://dailycaller.com/2018/08/23/dossier-lanny-davis-michael-cohen-prague/” target=”_blank”]