Fusion GPS Testimony: Michael Cohen Is A ‘Very Intimidating Person’

Michael Cohen Image by Getty Images

By Nathan Guttman January 10, 2018

The name of Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s attorney, comes up only toward the end of the lengthy testimony provided to the Senate by Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, a research firm connected to the famous “Russia dossier.”

Simpson’s testimony, made public by Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, describes Cohen as the Trump campaign’s go-to person when questions were raised regarding ties with Russia.

“We learned that his job included dealing with inquiries about Russia and he seemed to get all of the serious inquiries, investigative inquiries about Russia. He seemed to know a lot about that,” Simpson told Senate investigators. He also made another observation about Cohen: “We learned that he was a very intimidating person who had a history of threatening reporters with libel suits.”

Fusion GPS’s dossier claims that Cohen met with Russian agents in Europe to “clean up the mess” surrounding other Trump associates’ ties to Russia. Cohen filed a defamation suit on Tuesday against Fusion GPS and BuzzFeed News, which published the dossier in January 2017.

The research firm’s link tying Cohen to Russian sources was, according to Simpson, a Russian Facebook friend of Cohen. He also noted that Cohen’s father-in-law is a Ukrainian emigre and that Cohen had connections to the “taxi industry in New York which is heavily populated with Russian emigres.”

Contact Nathan Guttman at [email protected] or on Twitter @nathanguttman

Nathan Guttman, staff writer, was the Forward’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the staff in 2006 after serving for five years as Washington correspondent for the Israeli dailies Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. In Israel, he was the features editor for Ha’aretz and chief editor of Channel 1 TV evening news. He was born in Canada and grew up in Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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