Michael Cohen

Michael D. Cohen (born August 25, 1966) is as prominent American attorney and longtime personal real estate lawyer for Donald J. Trump.

The purported evidence against Michael Cohen was gathered by the Obama administration's illegal misuse of FISA Title I surveillance authority. FISA Title I surveillance of U.S. citizens is the most intrusive, exhaustive and far reaching type of search, seizure and surveillance authority, permitting the FBI to look at every aspect of a target's life. All communication, travel and contact can be opened and reviewed. All aspects of any of the target's engagements are subject to being secretly monitored. The authority is only granted by the FISA court when the Department of Justice represents the target as an agent of a foreign power, member of a terrorist organization, weapons smuggling group, or drug cartel. The law requires notification to Congress if the target is an American citizen.

The FISA court determined in March 2017 that the Obama administration had abused FISA authority. Former FBI Director James Comey failed to inform Congress of the FBI's illegal surveillance.

Steele dossier

Any information from the illegal FISA searches could not be directly used by the FBI because they would have to explain how they gained it. All search queries without a warrant are illegal. The illegal search queries were funneled to FusionGPS through DOJ Deputy Attn. Gen. Bruce Ohr to his wife Nellie Ohr, who worked with Christopher Steele on the Steele dossier. The FBI needed to launder the intelligence product.

Christopher Steele would be the laundry for the intelligence information pulled from the U.S. system. Unauthorized FISA queries were passed to Steele by Nellie Ohr. Steele then washed the intelligence product and repackaged it into what became known as the Steele dossier. The dossier then was passed back to the FBI ‘small group’ as evidence for use in their counterintelligence operation beginning in July 2016.

Proof of this laundry process is found in a “search query” result that was actually a mistake. The faulty intelligence mistake was the travel history of Michael Cohen, a long-time Trump lawyer. The FISA search returned a Michael Cohen traveling to Prague, but it was the wrong Michael Cohen. However, that mistaken result was passed on to Chris Steele, and it made its way into the Steele dossier. Absent of a FISA search, there’s no other way Christopher Steele could identify a random “Michael Cohen” traveling to Prague. The Cohen mistake created a trail from Chris Steele to the FISA database.