President Trump’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen scored $1.2 million by promising pharma giant Novartis inside access to not only the president but his inner…
President Trump’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen scored $1.2 million by promising pharma giant Novartis inside access to not only the president but his inner circle.
But it took Novartis officials just a single sitdown with the self-described fixer to realize he had nothing to offer — but they kept paying him anyway because they didn’t want to incur the president’s wrath, according to a report in stat.com, which covers the health care industry.
“He reached out to us,” a Novartis insider told the website.
“With a new administration coming in, basically, all the traditional contacts disappeared and they were all new players. We were trying to find an inroad into the administration. Cohen promised access to not just Trump, but also the circle around him. It was almost as if we were hiring him as a lobbyist.”
Cohen personally contacted the company early in 2017, after Trump’s election victory, and spoke with then-CEO Joe Jimenez, who ordered subordinates to sign Cohen on to help the company navigate changes in ObamaCare and other health care issues.
Novartis inked a contract that would pay Cohen a total of $1.2 million from February 2017 to February of this year.
In March 2017, the company sent a team to huddle with Cohen in New York.
But the insider said the meeting was a bust after it quickly became clear that Cohen — with no experience in the field — and his company Essential Consultants were ill-equipped to offer any meaningful help dealing with the complexities of health care law.
“At first, it all sounded impressive, but toward the end of the meeting, everyone realized this was probably a slippery slope to engage him. So they decided not to really engage Cohen for any activities after that,” the employee told stat.
Rather than cancel the contract, the company simply didn’t renew it in February out of fear of angering the volatile president by stiffing his longtime crony.
“It might have caused anger,” the insider said.
Cohen created Essential Consultants to conceal a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an affair she said she had with Trump in 2006.
Novartis’ payment to Cohen was first disclosed Tuesday by Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who also revealed payments to Cohen’s company by a Kremlin-connected Russian billionaire and several other companies, who were trying to curry favor with the president.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team questioned company officials in November, and Novartis cooperated fully with his probe, a company spokesman said.
