One of the intelligence reports in the dossier said that Cohen’s meeting in Prague concerned “how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the CLINTON campaign and various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the TRUMP team more generally.”
Trump and Cohen have denied the allegations in the dossier since it was first published, and Cohen sued BuzzFeed, the news outlet that first published the intelligence reports online for defamation. He later dropped the suit, citing his limited resources to pursue legal action, but maintained that the dossier was defamatory.
The Prague saga has been drawn out by reporting from McClatchy. In April, the news outlet reported that Mueller had evidence that Cohen was in Prague in 2016, “confirming part of dossier.” That report cited two unnamed sources.
Eight months later, McClatchy followed up with a second report that appeared to further the story. On Thursday, it reported that a phone traced to Cohen “briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016 … leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials.”
Notably, other outlets, including CNBC, have not been able to verify McClatchy’s reporting, which would be expected for a story of its magnitude. Cohen has continued to deny ever having been to Prague, and a representative for Cohen told CNBC on Thursday that the lawyer had never been to the country.
WATCH: Mueller’s investigation could make money for taxpayers
from Update News Zone http://bit.ly/2AkZEx3
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