"The New York Times has confirmed the explosive claims made by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, that Columbus Nova, a New York investment firm whose biggest client is a company controlled by a Russian oligarch, deposited half a million dollars into a secret account set up by attorney Michael Cohen to pay off Donald Trump’s sexual partners. The possible reasons for this arrangement run from brazenly corrupt to far worse (Columbus Nova said it was a “consulting fee,” hardly a benign explanation). The payments, by Viktor Vekselberg – who, like all Russian oligarchs, operates in cooperation with the Putin government – gave Russia several sources of possible leverage over Cohen and Trump. First the payment itself amounts to some kind of bribe, in return for which a favor would be expected. Second, Russia had knowledge of the secret payoff, which it could always expose. Third, the possibility (at minimum) exists that Russia knew the account was being used to silence Trump’s mistresses, yet another source of kompromat. For all the speculation about the existence of the pee tape, the latest revelations prove what is tantamount to the same thing. Russia could leverage the president and his fixer – who, recall, hand-delivered a pro-Russian “peace plan” with Ukraine to Trump’s national security adviser in January 2017 – by threatening to expose secrets they were desperate to keep hidden. Whether those secrets were limited to illegal payments, or included knowledge of sexual affairs, is a question of degree but not of kind. Perhaps even more alarming has been the response of the political system to this crisis. The House of Representatives has assigned Devin Nunes, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, as its point man to defend Trump against the Mueller investigation. The Department of Justice has a longstanding policy of keeping Congress out of acting investigations, for the obvious reason that elected officials have a powerful incentive to interfere."
