Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

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

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

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.