Some dates. Early May 2016: Cohen discusses business travel to Russia with Trump, Sater, and a “senior campaign official”. He agrees to make a trip himself the following month, and says Trump might do so after being formally nominated. June 3: Trump Tower meeting arranged.
June 9: Trump Tower meeting occurs. June 14: First public report that suspected Russian hackers broke into the DNC network. The same day, two days before he is scheduled to leave for Moscow, Cohen bails on the trip. July 22: Wikileaks releases hacked DNC e-mails.
Obvious question: what changed between May, when Cohen agreed to make a trip to Moscow, seemingly with Trump’s approval, and June 14, when Cohen bailed on that trip at the last minute? Did Trump or the campaign decide that obvious links to Russia were suddenly undesirable?
Because for some reason or other, it’s clearly OK with everyone for Cohen to schmooze at the “Russian Davos” in May, but by June 14 is sufficiently unacceptable that Cohen has to back out of a business trip related to an important deal, long in the works, on two days notice.
The long-sought Trump Tower Moscow deal is seemingly abandoned following the last-minute June 14 cancellation of Cohen’s trip. On face, it looks like Trump is quite abruptly keen to avoid overt ties to Russia that had not been considered a problem just weeks earlier.
Conceivably this is an almost immediate response to the public attribution of the DNC hack to Russians—an attribution Trump will publicly continue to doubt for many months. But if so, it would be an awfully drastic and rapid response to a single news story.
But it also sounds like Cohen was dodging Sater’s efforts to nail down the trip for a couple weeks prior to the 14th. So there’s potentially a period of waffling, and then something puts the nail in the coffin.
