Michael Cohen informed us last Friday that Trump colluded with the Russians (and he was certainly in a position to know)

On Friday, the following exchange took place between Michael Cohen and George Stephanopoulos:

STEPHANOPOULOS: The special counsel did say that you are doing your best to tell the truth about everything related to the investigation, everything related to Russia. Do you think President Trump is telling the truth about that?

COHEN: No.

…

Stephanopoulos: How does this end for Donald Trump?

Cohen: That sort of gets into the whole investigation right now between special counsel’s office, the attorney general’s office, you also have the Southern District of New York — I don’t want to jeopardize any of their investigations.

Stephanopoulos: Are you still cooperating?

Cohen: If they want me. I am here and I am willing to answer whatever additional questions that they may have for me.

Stephanopoulos: Right, so you’re saying there’s certain areas that you can’t get into because you’re still cooperating with them.

Cohen: Correct. And out of respect for process.

Neither Stephanopoulos nor Cohen parses the wording “everything related to the investigation, everything related to Russia,” but they didn’t have to, because “the investigation, everything related to Russia,” is clearly a reference to the Mueller probe, which everyone knows is about getting to the bottom of Russia’s interference in the election and possible collusion with members of the Trump campaign team. So what Cohen meant, unquestionably, is that Trump’s claim, which he has made countless times, that there was no collusion, is a lie. And that is exactly how Stephanopoulos took Cohen’s statement. In response, Stephanopoulos said simply: “That’s a big statement.” And indeed it is.

But it gets even worse for Trump. Trump and his defenders could be expected to reply that Cohen is a proven liar, so his testimony cannot be trusted. Ignore for the moment that Trump himself is a proven pathological liar. What Trump, Giuliani, and other spinmeisters (who are growing increasingly incoherent and desperate) must find ominous is that Mueller doesn’t have to rely solely on Cohen’s witness testimony, because Cohen says that his testimony is backed up by corroborating evidence:

Stephanopoulos: But you pleaded guilty to lying to Congress.

Cohen: Yes.

Stephanopoulos: So why should we believe you now?

Cohen: Because the special counsel stated emphatically that the information that I gave to them is credible and helpful. There is a substantial amount of information that they possessed that corroborates the fact that I am telling the truth.

We don’t have to take Cohen’s word for that, either, for we find Mueller saying the very same thing in the Government’s Sentencing Memorandum:

“Cohen provided the SCO with useful information concerning certain discrete Russia-related matters core to its investigation that he obtained by virtue of his regular contact with Company executives during the campaign. … The information [Cohen] has provided has been credible and consistent with other evidence obtained in the SCO’s ongoing investigation.”

We don’t know what the special counsel meant by “certain discrete Russia-related matters core to its investigation that he obtained by virtue of his regular contact with Company executives during the campaign.” [Added material, 27 Dec 2018:] However, it is notable that Lanny Davis, Cohen’s spokesman at the time, had this to say on August 21 on the Rachel Maddow Show:

“Mr. Cohen has knowledge of certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel and is more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows — not just about the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election, which the Trump Tower meeting was all about, but also knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on — and we know he publicly cheered it on, but did he also have private information?”

So far as I can tell, Davis’ remarks should be taken at face value, notwithstanding statements Davis made later, on August 27–28 to WaPo, BuzzFeed, and NBC News. The media took these later statements by Davis to be a walkback, but I think this was unwarranted.

Davis had previously said that Cohen had told people that he witnessed Trump being informed of Don Jr.’s 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer before it happened. Then on Aug 27–28, Davis said:

“I should have been more clear — including with you — that I could not independently confirm what happened,” Davis told The Post of the claim, adding: “I regret my error.”

Davis also backed off his claim, this time made on the record, that Cohen has information suggesting that Trump knew in advance about Russian hacking of Democrats’ emails in 2016. “I am not sure,” Davis said. “There’s a possibility that is the case. But I am not sure.”

Note that Davis said, “I’m not sure.” He did not deny that Cohen had said such-and-such, and so far as the allegation about Trump’s foreknowledge of the June 9 meeting is concerned, it is essential to keep in mind that CNN (Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen) stood by their earlier reporting of the same story, claiming that Davis was not their only source.

All considered, the most likely scenario is that Davis did have discussions with Cohen on the “special subjects” mentioned in his interview with Rachel Maddow and had good reasons to think that Cohen was able and willing to testify about them, but that Guy Petrillo — who, after all, has been Cohen’s actual lawyer both in his dealings with Mueller and the SDNY — told Davis to stifle himself and shadow his earlier remarks, which Davis was compelled to do. That scenario makes perfectly good sense, because prosecutors do not like witnesses or potential witnesses talking publicly about matters material to their investigations. If anything this is particularly true of Mueller, and it was Petrillo, not Davis, who was meeting with Mueller.

We can also infer that the references in the government’s sentencing memo to discrete matters that are core to the investigation concern matters that are different from those concerning the Trump Tower Moscow project specifically. Without knowing the full meaning of “discrete” in this passage, it is clear that there is at least one matter discrete from (different from) the subject matter of the sentencing memo, which only concern Cohen’s lying to Congress about the termination date of the Moscow Trump Tower project. [End of added material, 27 Dec 2018:]

This will be disconcerting to those collusion theorists who believe that Trump Tower Moscow was of fundamental importance to collusion between Trump and Russia. But as I argued in a thread shortly before the sentencing memo was released, there never was any good reason to think that Trump Tower Moscow played such a role. It was a deal that greatly appealed to Trump’s vanity and intense desire to develop a real estate empire in Russia, and it was clearly a factor that predisposed him to desire good relations with Putin and indisposed him to the sanctions the U.S. had placed against Russia, but a predisposition to collusion does not an actual collusion make.

The actual conspiracy, as I’ve argued many times, was the one set out in one of the early Steele memos by one of his American sources: a mutual understanding that Trump would lift sanctions in return for Russian help in the election. So while Mueller has given a pass to Cohen (and by implication Trump himself) for any collusiveness with respect to Trump Tower Moscow, the wording “discrete Russia-related matters core to its investigation” suggests matters that are really ominous for Trump, like the core issue of Russian interference in the election and Trump campaign collusion with it.

Cohen was able to provide Mueller with useful information that is core to the Russia investigation “by virtue of his regular contact with Company executives during the campaign.” As far as the sentencing memo is concerned, Cohen got his information about Trump-Russia collusion, not from Trump himself, but from Trump Organization executives during the campaign.

If there was collusion and Trump Organization executives knew about it, it isn’t surprising that Cohen learned of it, because he was Trump’s consigliere and had an office inside the Trump Organization in Trump Tower, and would have had “regular contact,” as Mueller put it, with those executives. So it comes as no surprise that the special counsel has subpoenaed the Trump Organization (the business entity). Alan Futerfas, a lawyer representing the company, has said that it has been cooperating with all federal investigations, including the Mueller investigation, since July of 2017.

It is also worth noting that Mueller does not want Cohen to get ahead of him by disclosing any details about the collusion himself. Cohen is to let Mueller do the talking for him in the form of indictments and reports.

Cohen’s statement to Stephanopoulos that Trump is lying about Russia makes it clear that Trump is totally screwed — about collusion.

In fact, on Sunday Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, in a fit of lawyerly incompetence that was remarkable even for Giuliani, admitted as much:

Stephanopoulos asked Giuliani about Michael Cohen‘s cooperation with the special counsel investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russian interference in the election. The ABC anchor pointed out the special counsel said Cohen provided them “valuable information” for their investigation.

“I have no idea what they’re talking about,” Giuliani said. “I know that collusion is not a crime. It was over with by the time of the election.”

Of course, collusion — more properly “conspiracy,” as in 18 U.S.C. § 371 — is a crime, and it is a crime if the conspiracy is committed during an election.

With lawyers like Giuliani, who needs enemies?

Cohen’s bombshell statement to Stephanopoulos and the Steele dossier

Cohen’s statement that Trump colluded with Russia during the election hasn’t received the amount of attention that it deserves. But Cohen’s statement is important as well because it greatly enhances the credibility of the Steele dossier — and that important point has gone unnoticed completely.

Surprisingly, even David Isikoff, one of the journalists who first broke the news about the Steele dossier and who co-authored the very valuable book Russian Roulette, seems to have missed the significance of Cohen’s statement. The Stephanopoulos-Cohen interview was on Good Morning America on Dec 14. The next day, Dec 15, John Ziegler interviewed Isikoff in a podcast. In that interview, Isikoff expressed considerable skepticism about the collusion narrative generally, and in the Steele dossier in particular — apparently missing completely the significance of the statement Cohen had made on ABC just the day before.

The revelation about Steele’s sourcing in the Corn-Isikoff book Russian Roulette

In order to fully appreciate the significance of Cohen’s statement and its implications for the Steele dossier, one must get a handle on the kinds of sources and intermediaries that Steele was able to use, particularly for the early memos.

From the day I first read read the Steele “dossier” (the very day that it was published by BuzzFeed) I had questions about this. Steele, as all of us soon learned, had retired from his job as an agent for British military intelligence (MI6) and its Moscow desk in 2009. All the journalistic writing about Steele then proceeded on the assumption that it was these old contacts from his Moscow days who conveyed to Steele what the sources were saying about Russian interference in the election and Trump campaign collusion with it.

This seemed questionable to me — even a bit weird. How I wondered, could an old Russia hand who had not been in Russia since 2009 have gotten an extraordinarily intimate, inside view of an American political campaign using Russian sources in faraway Moscow?

Over time, in a series of long threads, I came to the conclusion that, particularly in the early memos, which deal largely with American sources close to the campaign, both Steele’s sources and his informants must have been American. And it turns out that this was right, for in Russian Roulette, which was published in March of this year, we learn (from Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS) that Steele used as his principal informant a “Russian émigré living in the West who travelled frequently to Moscow and was acquainted with well-informed Russian professionals and officials” [Russian Roulette, p. 167). Steele called this individual the “collector.” Corn and Isikoff refer to him as Steele’s “undercover operative.”

We do not learn from the book where in the West the collector lived. Since Steele is based in London, and there is a lot of work in London for people like Steele who work in business intelligence and who investigate Russian oligarchs who park a lot of their money there, it would be natural to suppose that the “Russian émigré living in the West” Steele used as his principal intermediary lives there, too. But I believe this would be mistaken. New York City (and the Trump Organization in particular!) is the other major center in the West for Russian money laundering. And what makes New York City the more likely of the two leading alternatives is the language that Steele repeatedly uses like: “speaking to a trusted compatriot.”

He uses this phrase, not only in connection with sources like A and B (a Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin) but also in connection with the American sources D and E. For example, in memo #095, Steele says: “Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian associate of Republican US presidential candidate…”. The sources cited in the early memos who are close to the campaign are clearly Americans, and since they spoke, directly or indirectly, “in confidence” to Steele’s undercover operative, it is likely that the person they were speaking to “in confidence” — the collector — was based in New York City and not London.

Who were Steele’s American sources — especially Sources D and E?

With all that in hand, we are in a position now to appreciate the explosive significance of Michael Cohen’s statement to George Stephanopoulos, that Trump was not “telling the truth” about the investigation, about Russia — for Michael Cohen must have been either identical with, or very close to, the all-important Source E of the dossier.

As fraught as this claim is, there is nothing speculative about it, because the number of individuals who could fit the descriptions of the American sources given by Steele is almost vanishingly small.

The dossier’s American sources are described in terms like “a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow”; an “ethnic Russian close associate of US presidential candidate Donald Trump;” a “Russian émigré figure close to Trump’s campaign;” an “émigré associate of Trump”; and an “ethnic Russian associate of Trump who is also a Trump campaign insider.”

It is helpful to think of this in terms of intersecting Venn diagrams. The two principal American sources we are talking about, D and E, must have been Russian ethnics who live in NYC. Now the set of NYC residents who are Russian ethnics is quite large, but the intersection we are talking about — Russian ethnics etc. who were close enough to Trump, the Trump Organization, and the Trump campaign to have served as the collector’s sources — is exceedingly small. In fact, it is so small that enterprising journalists who have worked hard to identify the American sources in the dossier have come up with only three individuals who could plausibly fit the bill: Boris Epstheyn, Sergei Millian, and Felix Sater.

Nowadays, the field can be narrowed even further. My research on Epstheyn, which I reported in a thread on 29 Nov 2017, shows that the identification of Source E with Epstheyn must be dismissed. Since Sergei Millian is disclosed in Russian Roulette (again, by Glenn Simpson) to be Source D of the dossier, Sergei Millian must be excluded as a candidate for Source E as well. By process of elimination, then, Source E must be Felix Sater.

In light of Michael Cohen’s disclosure to Stephanopoulos last Friday, however, I think we should at least consider the possibility that Michael Cohen is the Source E of the dossier.

Was Michael Cohen the Source E of the dossier?

In retrospect, it is not entirely clear why no one who discussed the dossier — including me — seems to have considered that Michael Cohen might be the Source E of the dossier. After all, Cohen is a Russian ethnic, and he was much closer to Trump and to the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign than any other “Russian ethnic,” including Felix Sater.

In fact, if Sater was Source E of the dossier, much of the intelligence that he spilled, either directly or indirectly, to Steele’s collector must have come from others who were actually in the campaign. Sater acknowledged as much in an interview with a Russian newspaper nine days after the election (Google translation):

Q: And what did you have to do with the election campaign?
Sater: Nothing.
Q: But you seem to be aware of it.
Sater: Well, I talked with the team, with people.

For sure, one of the individuals Sater talked to during the campaign was Michael Cohen, his lifelong buddy who was also his partner in the Trump Tower Moscow project during the campaign. So, whereas Sater could only have been an indirect (though extremely good) source for Steele’s collector, Cohen would have been a direct source.

That said, I continue to believe that Sater was Source E of the dossier, for three reasons.

First, unlike those who are actually described as sources in the dossier, Cohen is described as a major protagonist on whom Steele’s sources reported. Furthermore, Michael Cohen is actually named in the dossier; those who are described as sources are not. Steele, clearly, was loathe to identify individuals he used as sources. If he did so in Cohen’s case, Cohen would be a singular exception.

Another reason for thinking that Cohen was not Source E of the dossier is found in the first memo (#080), in the part that contains the “golden showers” allegation. There Steele’s collector says that Source E was told about the golden showers incident by Source D.

This makes it unlikely (though not impossible) that Source E was Cohen. That is because we now know that Source D was Sergei Millian. (We also know that MIllian was in Moscow during the Miss Universe pageant; Sater and Cohen were not.) But Millian does not seem to have had close relations with Cohen. In fact, it appears likely that Millian really had no relationship with Cohen at all.

Cohen has called Millian a “phony,” and in January of last year, Cohen told ABC News:

“I’ve never met the guy … I have spoken to him twice. The first time, he was proposing to do something. He’s in real estate. I told him we have no interest. Second time he called me, I asked him not to call me anymore.”

On the other hand, it is quite plausible that Millian and Sater know each other — and probably fairly well. ABC News asked Millian about Sater in a July 2016 interview:

ABC NEWS: And what about Felix Sater? Do you know Felix — who is connected with Sapir I guess in some way? You don’t know him at all?

SERGEI MILLIAN: Unh-uh

ABC NEWS: He’s one of the advisors for Trump. Who else…

SERGEI MILLIAN: Because my advisor, he’s best friend of Tamir. He’s regretfully he passed away. But he was one [of] his best friends. So that’s how [sic] are connected.

The Millian-Sater connection through a friend of Tamir Sapir is significant.

Tamir Sapir was a co-funder of Trump Soho. Trump Soho was the major project of the Bayrock Group, for which Sater was executive director. The Tamir Sapir connection makes it likely that Millian and Sater do know each other — and probably fairly well. This, in turn, makes it likely that Millian (Source D) conveyed the allegation about the “golden showers” incident to Sater, not Cohen, making it likely that Sater is Source E of the dossier.

(Here’s a pic of Sater with Tamir Sapir):

The third reason, which is important though not dispositive, comes from some reporting about the Mueller investigation. A British paper, reporting that Mueller’s team had met with Steele, strongly implied that Felix Sater is Source E of the dossier.

CNN was the first American media outlet (5 Oct 2017) to report that Mueller’s team had met with Steele. NBC News, citing a source “close to the ex-spy,” reported the same on the following day. The NBC article reported that the Mueller team had “traveled” to interview Steele. The CNN article reported that the interview had taken place that summer.

The first article mentioning the meeting, however, appeared in the British paper The Independent on 27 Sept 2017. That article provided details that are not found in the CNN and NBC articles.

The article in The Independent — entitled “Trump-Russia investigators close in on sources named in explosive dossier” — says: “It has been reported that ‘Source D’ and ‘Source E,’ may be the same person, and that that person might be Sergei Millian.” (The reference is to a 29 March 2017 article in WaPo by Helderman and Hamburger.) But we know now that Millian was Source D, and the very notion that Source D and Source E are the same person makes no sense at all if you read the memos at all carefully.

The author of the Independent article, Kim Sengupta, is dismissive of the WaPo article (at least so far as Source E is concerned), but he takes very seriously the idea that Source E is Felix Sater. “But some with inside knowledge of the Steele report say that one of the ‘sources’ could be Felix Sater,” he says. Sengupta, the Defence and Security Correspondent for The Independent, lives and works in London, and probably has Christopher Steele as one of his sources. So “some with inside knowledge of the Steele report” could very well be a reference to Steele himself.

Whether Source E of the dossier was Cohen or Sater, Cohen’s disclosure is devastating for Trump and the whole no-collusion narrative

If Cohen was Source E, the implications of his disclosure on Friday for the dossier are clear. Source E reported to Steele’s collector in late July of 2016, either directly or indirectly through an intermediary, that there is a “conspiracy of campaign coordination between Trump and the Russian leadership.” And if Cohen was Source E, we also learned on Friday that Cohen has testified to Mueller about this conspiracy of campaign coordination. Moreover, we also know that Mueller has found Cohen’s testimony to be consistent with other evidence he has.

If Source E was Felix Sater, the implications of Cohen’s remarks on Friday are still dire for Trump, because they mean that Felix Sater must have testified to the same collusion as well. How do we know this? We know it because (1) according to Jason Leopold of BuzzFeed, Mueller interviewed Felix Sater sometime in December of 2017; and because (2) we know that Mueller has found Cohen’s testimony credible. If Sater’s testimony to Mueller in December of 2017 wasn’t consistent with Cohen’s, Sater is in big trouble, because in that case he will have perjured himself — a federal felony.

Sater must have been the first of the two to spill the collusion beans on Trump to Mueller, because Sater was interviewed by the Mueller team in December of 2017, whereas Cohen didn’t start meeting with the Mueller team until sometime (we’re not sure exactly when) after the FBI raid on his office on April 9 of this year, about four months later.

Initially, Cohen was probably hoping for a pardon from Trump. Giuliani confirmed this in an interview on ABC’s This Week. Giuliani said he had had a conversation with Michael Cohen’s lawyers about a possible pardon, but, Giuliani says, “I told his lawyers there will be no discussion of a pardon.” This contradicts what Lanny Davis said in late August, that Cohen wanted to come clean and didn’t want a pardon, but Davis might have been talking about Cohen’s position at a later date.

In any case, it is likely that Cohen did expect a pardon from Trump for quite a long time. Otherwise, his false testimony before Congress about the date when the Trump Tower Moscow project was shuttered is hard to explain. It would be very foolish for someone to lie under oath in a Congressional hearing unless he had some reason to think he could get away with it. Cohen has said that when he gave his false testimony before Congress, officials in the White House knew what he was going to say. So it would be natural for Cohen to expect that if he ever needed protection against a perjury charge, he would get it from Trump in the form of a pardon. But that never came.

Sater does not seem to have made that mistake. In fact, in the specific matter of the date of the shuttering of the Trump Tower project, we know that Sater got out in front of Cohen and left him hanging out to dry. Sater told Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold of BuzzFeed in May of this year that the Trump Tower Moscow project was alive as late as July of 2016. When Sater said this in May, he knew that his statement would be problematic for Cohen, who had issued a public statement on 19 Sept 2017 that he had terminated the project in January of 2016. (Cohen gave the same testimony under oath to the House and Senate Intel committees on 27 Oct 2017.)

NBC News reported on 29 Nov 2018:

Sater said he has known for some time that Cohen faced potential legal jeopardy over the false testimony he gave about the timing of the deal. He has always told authorities the truth, he said.

Cohen must have thought — for a while anyway — that he could get away with lying. He did it, Cohen said, because that is what Trump wanted, and he probably expected to get a pardon from Trump for his loyalty if he needed one.

Sater was a lot more savvy, and a lot better judge of Trump’s character than Cohen. With good reason, Sater had no expectation of a pardon, so he told the truth.

While Sater’s statement about the termination date of Trump Tower Moscow created legal problems for Cohen, Cohen’s statement on Friday about a Trump-Russia conspiracy is problematic for Sater for reasons that have nothing to do with the Trump Tower project at all. It is problematic because Cohen has now testified to Trump-Russia collusion. That is a problem for Sater, because (1) it is not an issue that Sater wants to confront publicly at all, and (2) because Sater has on several occasions made public statements denying that there was collusion.

Sater’s discomfiture was evident in a brief phone conversation Ken Dilanian had with him on Nov 29, the day the Cohen guilty plea story broke. Dilanian’s account of the conversation makes Sater sound like Sergeant Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes.

In the video, under the MSNBC chyron: “FELIX SATER REACTS TO COHEN GUILTY PLEA,” there is the following exchange:

Question (by Ken Dilanian): “Felix, you must have known Cohen was lying.”

Sater: “I don’t know anything, all I know is I always told the truth.”

Ruhle: “What else did Sater tell you?”

Dilanian: “That’s about it. He quickly got off the phone.”

Cohen’s disclosure that Trump colluded with Russia makes it pretty clear that Felix Sater has been saying one thing to the “authorities” (including Mueller) in private (there was collusion) and another thing in public (there was no collusion).

If Cohen was telling the truth when he said that he has always told the truth under oath, that statement is helpful and clarifying, because in a number of public statements, Sater has said or implied that there was no Trump-Russia collusion.

On 19 Aug 2017, for example, Edward Rice reported in NYMag that Sater had told him:

“The next three years of hearings about Trump and Russia will yield absolutely nothing. I know the man, they didn’t collude. Did a bunch of meetings happen? Absolutely. The people on the Trump team who had any access to the Russians wanted to be first in and be the guys that ran the whole détente thing. Michael Flynn wanted to be the détente guy, and then [Paul] Manafort, I’m sure, wanted to be the détente guy. Shit, I wanted to be the détente guy, why not? But was it really a conspiracy between Putin and Donald to get him elected? A little bit of a stretch.”

And here’s Sater on March 16 of this year in an interview with ABC News:

Asked if he knew certain key member of the Trump campaign, he claimed to have had “zero contact” with many of the Trump allies who have fallen under the spotlight. He denied knowing Michael Flynn. And Paul Manafort. And Rick Gates. And George Papadopoulos. And Carter Page. …

Sater called Trump’s claim that he couldn’t pick him out of a lineup “disappointing,” but says Trump has nothing to fear from his testimony to investigators. He is unaware, he said, of any Russian money in any of the Trump projects he worked on [!] and unaware of anyone in Trump’s orbit who may have colluded with foreign powers during the campaign.

If Mueller finds any, Sater recommended stiff penalties.

“Send ’em to jail,” he said. “Anybody who colluded with anybody — with any other country against America — is guilty of crimes against our country.”

But as for himself, Sater isn’t worried.

“Eventually, it will become known that I’m guilty of trying to build the world’s tallest building,” Sater said, “and that’s about it.”

But that is only what Sater has been saying publicly. Privately, he seems to have been saying something quite different. On the same date as the publication of the Edward Rice article in NYMag cited above (19 Aug 2017), the U.K. paper The Spectator published an article by veteran BBC journalist Paul Wood, in which we find the following:

“For several weeks there have been rumours that [Felix] Sater is ready to rat again, agreeing to help Mueller. ‘He has told family and friends he knows he and POTUS are going to prison,’ someone talking to Mueller’s investigators informed me.”

As we have learned repeatedly about Trump and his associates, one cannot infer anything about what they are saying in private (to the “authorities”) on the basis of what they say in public. And that is certainly true of Sater, for a number of reasons.

If Sater was Source E of the Steele dossier, as I have argued, then what he should have done as an American patriot is pick up the phone and call the FBI. But he didn’t.

There could have been a number of reasons why Sater didn’t make the call. There was, of course, the consideration that such a phone call would have involved snitching on Cohen, his lifelong buddy, and others in Trump Org he knew well and had worked with. He might even have been reluctant to snitch on Trump himself, with whom Sater has had an on-again, off-again relationship for more than a decade. But for Sater the most compelling reason would likely have been greed.

The Trump Tower Moscow project was Sater’s idea. He proposed it to Cohen and Trump in September of 2015, and worked on it with Cohen until late July of 2016. In fact, according to a remark that Rudy Giuliani made on Sunday in an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Sater & Cohen might have worked on the project right up to election day.

Picking up the phone and calling the FBI would have entailed scuttling the Trump Tower Moscow project. Sater hoped to make a cool $250 million + on this project. Sater has said that those hopes were dashed in mid- to late-July when Trump announced that he had no business interests in Russia. But by then Sater was already, in a sense, compromised, because by late July of 2016 he had probably known about Trump-Russia collusion for some time.

Sater probably thought that he could wait it out. Perhaps, he thought, Trump wouldn’t win. If he didn’t, the “authorities” wouldn’t bother to investigate anything, even if it looked suspect, and he would escape being held accountable for doing nothing when he learned that the Trump campaign, under the management of then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, was colluding with Russia. But that didn’t work out, either. To everyone’s surprise, Trump was elected president on November 6.

Sater must have known that the game was up for sure, and that he would not escape accountability, in early January of 2017, when he, like everyone else, read the Steele dossier. When Sater read it, he knew that Steele had somehow found him out. He was Source E of the dossier, and Steele knew it. (Try to imagine the shock this must have given him!) Sater knew in January, then, that he would have to fess up to the “authorities” sooner or later. And the “authorities” did come knocking. To judge from Kim Sengupta’s article in The Independent, Sater was already spilling the beans to the “authorities” by September of 2017.

In the meantime, Sater is hard at work crafting and burnishing an image of himself as an American hero and patriot who has saved thousands, maybe millions, of American lives because of the undercover work he did in Russia in the 1990s for the CIA. He has been remarkably successful in this endeavor. His project benefited enormously from an article that Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold wrote about him that was published in BuzzFeed. “The Asset” is certainly worth reading, but it presents only one side of Sater’s complex character.

In fact, Sater always was and still is a superbly accomplished con artist. If I had to choose one word to describe Sater, it would probably be “duplicitous.” The duplicitous character of the man was captured perfectly by a lawyer involved in a complicated money laundering case that has gone on for years. The money was laundered through the Bayrock Group, where Sater served as the executive director.

“Given his colourful past, some on the team pursuing the Khrapunovs are wary of Mr Sater. ‘To the extent that he is on anyone’s side, he’s probably on our side,’ said one lawyer involved in the investigation. Nonetheless, Mr Sater is being paid handsomely for his assistance, people with knowledge of the arrangement said.”

As I put it in my review and critique of the Cormier-Leopold article:

Sater is in fact a complex character. He has not been, and is not now, a “good guy,” and his motives have always been complicated and to some degree or other suspect.

(Note: I have collected a number of links to my writings on Felix Sater and posted them on Medium.)

Sater as a complex, shady character is an interesting subject. But Sater these days is not interested in presenting himself in this light. He is bent on presenting only one side of himself: the good side. That was undoubtedly what he wanted to achieve in his interview with Cormier and Leopold (who complied), and when he went recently to Hollywood to work with an agent on a film about his life. If the film project had worked out, it might actually have helped Sater to further craft, burnish, and publicize his image and improve his finances, which are apparently under great stress from legal fees. But the project went nowhere, so that didn’t work out for Sater, either. (Apparently, life has been hard on Sater recently.)

All of this helps to explain the discrepancy between what Sater has been saying publicly and what he appears to have been saying privately, and what he must surely have been telling the “authorities,” including Robert Mueller.

Like Cohen, Sater is waiting, at Mueller’s direction, for Mueller to tell the real story, including his own. And that is no doubt fine with Sater: it is not in Sater’s interest to disclose now what he undoubtedly knows about Trump-Russia collusion. It certainly wouldn’t help to sell tickets to a movie on his life depicting him as an American patriot and hero who has been — at least since his earlier, “colorful” years — as pure as the driven snow.

But as with Cohen, the truth will out about Sater, too, and it will be Robert Mueller who will tell it. An important part of Mueller’s story will be of a Sater-Cohen duo that knew of a conspiracy of coordination between Trump, the Trump campaign, and Russia in the 2016 presidential election, even if neither of them was an important actor in it.

Friday was a horrible, no good, very bad day for Trump and the no-collusion narrative …..

Here, in summary form, are some of the important things we now know:

We know that Cohen has stated publicly that Trump colluded with Russia (and he was certainly in a position to know).

We know that Cohen has testified under oath to the special counsel that Trump colluded with Russia.

We know that Cohen is waiting for Mueller to disclose, either in indictments or an impeachment report or both, what he knows about the collusion.

We know that Sater has already been questioned by Mueller, and unless Sater lied (not very likely), Sater must have given similar testimony to Mueller. (If he didn’t, he is in big trouble with Mueller.) Like Cohen, Sater is holding back and waiting for Mueller to tell his story about Trump-Russia collusion, too.

We know that Cohen got at least some of his information from executives within Trump’s company (the Trump Organization), and that Mueller has subpoenaed the company for materials relating to his Russia investigation. Sater would have known through Cohen what his close buddy Cohen had learned inside the company. But Sater probably had additional information as well, as he told a Russian newspaper shortly after the election that he was knowledgeable about the campaign because he had “talked with the [campaign] team, with people.”

Friday was a very good day for Steele and his dossier

Whether Source E was Sater or Cohen (it was almost certainly Sater), Cohen’s disclosure to Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America — that he has given testimony to Mueller on Trump-Russia collusion — made Friday a very good day for Steele and for those who, like me, have always been strong adherents and defenders of the dossier.

The dossier is not perfect. It is raw, unprocessed human intelligence, and all such intelligence will have errors and flaws. (Steele has said that he expects 70–90% of the dossier will be confirmed, so even he has never claimed that all of it will be confirmed.) The memos became somewhat less reliable as time went on. To his credit, Steele seems to have been aware of this: he said in one of the later memos that it became harder as he worked on the project to get source reporting out of the Kremlin. He mentions this specifically in connection with the alleged trip to Prague by Michael Cohen, which he was never able to pin down to time and place. The much publicized allegation of Cohen’s trip to Prague is undoubtedly false, at least as it stands, and is probably the result of Russian disinformation or deza.

However, much of the dossier has been confirmed, and on Friday Cohen basically confirmed the most important claim of the dossier. That claim is contained in a nutshell in a paragraph of memo #095 that Steele wrote on or about 23 July 2016.

When reading the explosive memo #095, it is important to keep the following points in mind:

Source E is either Felix Sater or Michael Cohen — almost certainly Felix Sater. As I have pointed out, however, it really doesn’t matter, because if it was Sater, we might as well think of Source E as the Sater-Cohen duo, since Sater probably got much, though not all, of his inside information about the campaign via Cohen.

Steele is reporting what Source E told someone in confidence. That person was either Steele’s collector, to whom E confided directly, or more likely, someone who had the confidence of Source E who also had confidence in the collector.

The collector (Steele’s undercover agent) is not someone who lives and works (at least not primarily) in far-away Moscow. We know now that the collector is a Russian émigré living in the West (probably NYC) who travels frequently to Moscow and is acquainted with well-informed Russian professionals and officials.

With that in hand, we can see just how devastating for Trump the Steele dossier is. As Glenn Simpson put it in his House Intelligence Committee hearing on 14 Dec 2017: “You know, we threw a line in the water and Moby Dick came back…” This story will go down in the history books as one of the most extraordinary, unexpected, and consequential sleuthing discoveries of all time.

Here is the crucial paragraph from Steele’s memo #095 — the beating heart, one might call it, of the Trump-Russia collusion story:

Granted, this is sketchy. It lacks the kind of detail and finality of, say, a Mueller indictment or sentencing memo. But it is unfair to compare the Steele memos with what one could expect to find in a federal indictment like the ones that Mueller has gotten from the grand jury.

After all, Steele was out in front of everybody else on this; did not have the benefit of everything we have learned since December of 2016 about the extent of the campaign’s contacts with the Russians; and most importantly of all, didn’t have Mueller’s prosecutorial powers, including the subpoena power.

But to get a proper appreciation of the value of the Steele dossier, just try to imagine memo #095 as it has undoubtedly been worked up by now by team Muller, sitting as a large file in the form of extensive emails, text messages, company documents, and 302s that the team has obtained from Felix Sater, MIchael Cohen, and a host of Trump Org executives under oath.

Those who impugn the Steele dossier for its unavoidable weaknesses and failings deserve our scorn. Geez, give the guy some slack, people, and be willing to acknowledge the enormous contribution Steele has made to the defense of American national security, law, and justice against the malignant tumor of Trump and Trumpism. And he’s not even an American.

As I put it in my first long thread on the Steele dossier on 20 Nov 2017:

“The most decisive and damning evidence that can be used by PROSECUTORS in the matter will come from Mueller’s use of the grand jury, garden-variety (non-FISA) court warrants, searches and seizures, and subpoena powers. Here, too, Steele has made a signal contribution, for it was the publication of the dossier that more than anything else has made the public aware of the collusion, and driven the discussion of all things RussiaGate in the public sphere. And it is that PUBLIC discussion that has made the Mueller probe possible, and also made it possible to overcome the fiercely partisan opposition to it by some GOP members of Congress, and even more severe opposition to it by Trump’s voter base.

Steele, despite his preference for staying out of the limelight — a preference shared by everyone who works in his profession — travelled first to Rome and then later to the US on more than one occasion, and apparently at his own or his company’s expense, to raise the alarm about Trump. His very unwelcome and totally alarming message was this: the man who had become the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party had been severely compromised by the Kremlin, was in collusion with it, and therefore represented a dire threat to the alliance of free, democratic nations that the US had been instrumental in building during the entire post-war period. The alarm was successfully raised, by Steele and others, and the upshot is a political culture inside and outside Congress that has made it impossible for Trump to stop Mueller, although he desperately needs to do so.

Due in large part to Steele’s efforts, Mueller is now in an enviable position that neither Steele, nor US and friendly foreign intelligence, have had: the subpoena power to compel Trump and those around him in the campaign to tell exactly what happened, under oath, and at risk of spending years in jail for perjury if they DON’T tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. …

We are on the cusp now of seeing Team Mueller moving like a fiery wrecking ball through a traitorous horror show of half wits, pussy grabbers, race hustlers, misogynists and sexists, angry faux populists, pathological liars, xenophobes, second and third tier Goldman Sachs plutocrats, industry lobbyists and other denizens of the Washington DC swamp, neo-Nazis, environmental polluters, white nationalists, pedophile apologists, Western alliance wreckers, enemies of NATO and the European Union, pro-Brexit conspirators, faux intellectuals, con men in finance and economics, reality deniers, gaslighters, and science deniers (I could go on, but you get the idea) and burning it all right down to the ground — because of RussiaGate.

If one had to name one single person who has made this possible, it turns out that he’s not even an American. He’s a Brit.

Someday the American people will have to build a monument to him.

Christopher David Steele, former British intelligence officer, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, 9–11 Grosvenor Gardens, Westminster, London SW1W 0BD, UK.

Trump, of course, will go on saying “No collusion” and his die-hard supporters will go on believing it, but to no avail.

The day of reckoning is coming. Mueller indictments for collusion and a report on collusion are coming.

The only question left is when they will arrive.

Buckle up, folks. This is going to get wild.