IF YOU'VE GOT A PROBLEM, I DON'T CARE WHAT IT IS, I CAN HELP
Paul Campos, writing in NEW YORK MAGAZINE (link below), has an interesting theory about Elliott Broidy. Broidy, you may remember, is one of only three clients that Michael Cohen has, along with Sean Hannity and Donald Trump. He’s a Republican fundraiser, and – as Campos found out – a fixer in his own right. In fact, he’s the kind of guy that Michael Cohen aspires to be.
Broidy is the handsome devil on the left in the photo accompanying this post. You recognize the handsome devil on the right. But who’s the woman between Broidy and Trump? She looks a whole lot like Stormy Daniels, but her name is Shera Bechard, who was PLAYBOY’s Playmate of the Month for November 2010.
Cohen’s version of the story is that Broidy had an affair with Miss November, who got pregnant. Broidy then went to Cohen, who brokered Bechard’s abortion and a $1.6 million payoff for her silence. Paul Campos dug a little deeper and found out that Broidy has a history of helping out wealthy men with girlfriend problems.
Given that information, you might stop and think. Which guy – Broidy or Trump – has a history of dating Playboy models? Here’s a hint – it’s not Broidy. And which man was accustomed to using Michael Cohen to pay off his exes? Another hint – it wasn’t Broidy.
As you’ve probably guessed, Campos speculates that it was Trump, not Broidy, who impregnated Miss November and paid her to get an abortion. That scenario does beg the question of why a guy like Broidy would take the fall for Donald Trump. Campos’ research suggests that it’s the kind of thing Broidy does for his wealthy friends. Take a look at the article.
In the meantime, we’re learning more about where all this payoff money came from. The Wall Street Journal reported that at least one bank filed a Suspicious Activity Report with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network regarding Cohen’s pattern of deposits and withdrawals. Inevitably, someone leaked information about the SAR to Stormy Daniels’s attorney, Michael Avenatti, who shared it with the world.
Long story short, once Trump was elected, Cohen conned a few American companies into funneling money into his shell corporation, Essential Consultants LLC. Ostensibly, they were paying Cohen for advice on Donald Trump’s thinking about policy matters. It is to laugh.
Novartis has already admitted that it didn’t take them long to figure out that Cohen was an idiot who couldn’t help them with anything. And yet they kept paying him, to the tune of $1.2 million over the course of a year. Curiouser and curiouser.
If Novartis wants to pay me not to help them, I’ll take their money. But nah, that wouldn’t be fair. In return for $1.2 million, I’ll give them better advice than Cohen ever did. Here is Trump’s policy “thinking” (not that much thought goes into it) in a nutshell. Whatever President Obama was for, Trump is against. That’s basically it. I’ll take my money in monthly installments, or in one lump sum, whatever works best for Novartis.
But the larger story is that a big chunk of the payoff money (I’ve seen estimates ranging from $500,000 to $1 million) came from Columbus Nova, which is an American subsidiary of the Renova Group. The names are innocuous enough, but Renova is controlled by one Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch. And there you have it. A Russian oligarch helped Donald Trump’s fixer pay off Miss November.
It is increasingly obvious that Cohen has served not only as Trump’s fixer, but also as his bag man, as a conduit for moving money from Russia to the Trump crime family in the US. Trump has repeatedly claimed that he has no contact with Russia. But there sure are a lot of Russians who are in close contact with people close to Donald Trump.