UPDATE–– 3/29/19: The BBC has since retracted this report and as of March 28th, 2019, has apologized to President Poroshenko for it, and will be paying him damages.
The article as it originally appeared is below.
The BBC dropped a stunning report on Wednesday revealing that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was paid at least $400,000 on behalf of Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to fix talks with President Donald Trump.
The report, based on anonymous sources from Ukraine who spoke with the BBC, reads like a laundry list of potential corruption: Cohen, without registering as a foreign agent, arranged a meeting between Poroshenko and Trump after receiving the payment from Ukraine (which was either 400k or 600k, depending on who you ask), which went down in June 2017.
Poroshenko reportedly wanted his meeting with Trump to be a substantial “talk,” instead of an embarrassingly brief photo-op, and paid Cohen to lock that in.
Cohen struggled to deliver, per the BBC:
The Ukrainian side were angry, the official went on, because Mr Cohen had taken “hundreds of thousands” of
dollars from them for something it seemed he could not deliver.Right up until the last moment, the Ukrainian leader was uncertain if he would avoid humiliation.”Poroshenko’s inner circle were shocked by how dirty this whole arrangement [with Cohen] was.”
Oh, and there’s also this:
Shortly after the Ukrainian president returned home, his country’s anti-corruption agency stopped its investigation into Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
This comes after it was revealed Cohen was paid millions by a series of U.S. corporations for his “consulting” services.
The BBC report, which, if true, seems to indicate that Cohen is royally shafted, stunned Twitter:
[Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images]