https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/22/michael-cohen-paid-a-mysterious-tech-company-50000-in-connection-with-trumps-campaign.html
Michael Cohen paid a mysterious tech company $50,000 ‘in connection with’ Trump’s campaign
Published Wed, Aug 22 2018 • 5:42 PM EDT | Updated Wed, Aug 22 2018 • 7:03 PM EDT
Christina Wilkie
President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, arranged hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments during the summer and fall of 2016 to silence two women who claimed they’d had sexual relationships with the married candidate.
But silence is not all that Cohen appears to have purchased in order to help his boss win the White House.
Buried in the legal documents released Tuesday as part of Cohen’s guilty plea on eight felony counts, there was a new, previously unreported payment Cohen made in 2016 to help Trump: $50,000 for work that prosecutors say Cohen “solicited from a technology company during and in connection with the campaign.”
The documents do not identify which tech company Cohen paid the money to, or what, exactly, the company did for him. But the mere existence of the previously unknown payment suggests that Cohen may have been doing more for Trump, and for the Trump campaign, than simply paying off women.
Furthermore, the way that Cohen reported the $50,000 expense to the Trump Organization in January 2017 suggests the money may not have been paid out through traditional financial channels.
According to prosecutors, Cohen presented Trump executives with bank records for several of the expenses he incurred on Trump’s behalf. But for his $50,000 payment to a tech company, Cohen provided no paperwork, just a handwritten sum at the top of one of the other bank documents.
The Trump Organization would later say that the $50,000 was a “payment for tech services.” However, prosecutors say the $50,000 “was in fact related to work Cohen had solicited from a technology company during and in connection with the campaign.”
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