Podcast
Main Justice
The speaker, Andrew Weissman, referenced a book he wrote about the Muller investigation, mentioning a specific event that occurred during the investigation in the summer of 2017. He described receiving a report from a defense lawyer for a bank about a payment from a Russian oligarch to Michael Cohen's account, which then led to the discovery of a $130,000 payment from Cohen to an account linked to Stormy Daniels.
So I was fascinated by that. But my first impression was I went back to pages 143 and 144 of the book I wrote about the Muller investigation and people are probably going what? Why are we hearing abou...
— Episode: It's Not About Sex
Episode: It's Not About Sex
The speaker, Andrew Weissman, referenced a book he wrote about the Muller investigation, mentioning a specific event that occurred during the investigation in the summer of 2017. He described receiving a report from a defense lawyer for a bank about a payment from a Russian oligarch to Michael Cohen's account, which then led to the discovery of a $130,000 payment from Cohen to an account linked to Stormy Daniels.
So I was fascinated by that. But my first impression was I went back to pages 143 and 144 of the book I wrote about the Muller investigation and people are probably going what? Why are we hearing about the Muller investigation?
So what I recount there and I got I still remember it in the summer of 2017 we started in basically in June of 2017 and shortly after we started I was communicating with a defense lawyer for a bank and we were looking at Information involving Michael Cohen where a bank had filed a report that involved a payment related to a Russian oligarch that had been received in an account related to Michael Cohen and The defense lawyer is sending us this report saying I want to give you a heads up because you're gonna get it eventually So I'm just gonna send it to you directly And so he does and I pull it up in my email and I'm reading it but the bottom half of the report relates to a $130,000 payment by Michael Cohen to an account that at the time we didn't understand what it was But we did some quick googling and we saw it was related to an adult film star However, you want to describe it and I first see it I bring in Jeannie Rhee because she's sort of dealing with a Russian part of the investigation and we google and we see that it's Related to something something called Stormy Daniels, which we didn't know what it was and I remember we both were like Oh like just a sinking feeling and we go into Robert Mueller and say this is my term I said we have a blue dress problem referring back to the Bill Clinton issue. We didn't want anything salacious We had a very defined remit But we realized that we couldn't ignore this information and it was something that could potentially relate to campaign federal violations by Michael Cohen It could relate to false statements to a bank about the purpose of creating this account and thus leverage To get him to cooperate. So that was sort of the genesis of all of this We ultimately split the Michael Cohen case in two and we kept sort of the directly Russian related piece and gave the quote blue dress unquote right pace of it to the US Attorney's Office You're straight, right? Yep. And so that was the Him. Yes, exactly