Trump’s lawyer ‘received hundreds of thousands from Kiev to set up WH meeting’

US President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen established a backchannel with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko and accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars to arrange a meeting for the leader with Trump, the BBC reported Wednesday.

The payment was said by one Ukrainian source to have been $400,000 and by another to have been $600,000, despite Cohen not being listed as a representative of Ukraine, as required by US law, the report said.

Both sources, one of whom was described as a “high-ranking Ukrainian official,” described how Poroshenko tried to reach Cohen in his frustration over not managing to secure more than a photo-op with Trump.

They said the president contacted a former aide, who with the help of a Ukrainian lawmaker managed to use contacts who attended Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish ultra-Orthodox charity in New York state, to reach Cohen and establish the backchannel.

Chabad said its officials were not involved, and the BBC did not dispute that.

The June 2017 meeting at the White House was widely marketed by Poroshenko as a victory in that he had met Trump before Russian President Vladimir Putin did.

Even as Poroshenko was on the plane to Washington, it wasn’t clear whether he would have more than a few minutes, with negotiations continuing until the last moment, the sources were quoted as saying. The Ukrainian side was “angry” that it had spent so much money without apparently receiving anything in return.

Days later, a Ukrainian investigation against Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort — forced to resign after a document showed he received millions from pro-Russian interests — was halted.

The report said there was no indication that Trump knew about the payment, nor that he had asked Poroshenko to stop the Manafort probe. But it cited sources in the investigation, as well as a report by a Western country’s intelligence, suggesting that Ukraine’s leader had possibly decided to do so as part of a “non-aggression pact” with the US.

Cohen, as well as the two Ukrainian officials said to have helped Poroshenko establish the backchannel and make the payment, denied the report. The Ukrainian president’s office slammed it as a “blatant lie, slander and fake.”