Cohen denies traveling to Prague in 2016: ‘Mueller knows everything’

President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen denied a report Thursday that added to an unverified claim that Cohen took a trip to Prague in summer 2016 to meet with Russian officials.

Cohen, who has been cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference since this summer, tweeted that he had never been to the Czech capital, adding, “Mueller knows everything.”

{mosads}Cohen’s tweet came after McClatchy reported that foreign intelligence agencies identified a mobile phone linked to Cohen pinging cell towers around Prague sometime between August and September 2016. McClatchy also reported that a European intelligence service had intercepted a conversation between Russians during which one noted that Cohen was in Prague. 

The report gave credence to the claim in the controversial Trump-Russia dossier that Cohen, at the time Trump’s lawyer, secretly met with Kremlin representatives in Prague in August 2016, at which point Trump was the Republican nominee for president.

“I hear #Prague #CzechRepublic is beautiful in the summertime. I wouldn’t know as I have never been. #Mueller knows everything!” Cohen wrote on Twitter late Thursday afternoon in response.

Cohen became ensnared in the Russia investigation earlier this year, after the FBI raided his Manhattan office and hotel room on a referral from Mueller. Cohen pleaded guilty to a slew of unrelated federal charges in August and later admitted to lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, striking a plea deal with the special counsel to cooperate in the probe.

Mueller is investigating whether members of the Trump campaign coordinated with Moscow to interfere in the election and has said that Cohen provided valuable information and went to significant lengths to assist the investigation. Cohen has since been sentenced to three years in prison for his crimes. 

The dossier, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele for a Washington research firm that had been hired by Democrats, has attracted massive scrutiny since BuzzFeed published it in full shortly before Trump’s inauguration. The document contains numerous allegations about Russian interference and Trump’s ties to Moscow that are unverified and a few that have been confirmed. 

Cohen initially sued BuzzFeed and the research firm, Fusion GPS, for libel over the dossier but eventually dropped the lawsuits. 

Conservatives and allies of Trump have sought to highlight the dossier in their criticism of the Russia investigation and its origins. They have particularly taken aim at the FBI for using parts of Steele’s research in a renewal application to surveil Carter Page, who worked as a foreign policy adviser on the Trump campaign.