Robert Mueller and his pack of angry Democrat prosecutors were jumping for joy.
Their rigged witch hunt against President Trump dragged on for nearly 18 months without turning up a shred of proof implicating Trump and his campaign had colluded with the Russians.
But then all hell broke loose when Mueller and his gang turned up this smoking gun.
The most explosive allegation in the Christopher Steele dossier was that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to meet with Konstantin Kosachev – a high ranking Russian official who’d be the equivalent of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – to cement an agreement on the campaign working with the Russians to release hacked emails obtained from the Democrats.
Cohen, as well as his lawyer – the former Clinton aide Lanny Davis – denied the story up and down.
Cohen even provided social media postings showing he was in southern California during the time Steele claimed he had snuck off to Europe for his clandestine meeting with the Russians.
Yahoo reporter Michael Isikoff – who worked with Steele as a source for stories – also dismissed the possibility that the meeting took place.
It looked like the allegation was about to fade away.
But then McClatchy reporters Peter Stone and Greg Gordon – who appear to have a direct line to Fusion GPS – dropped a bombshell story claiming that four eastern European intelligence agencies had turned up evidence that Cohen traveled to Prague.
McClatchy claimed these unnamed intelligence agencies picked up Cohen’s cell phone signal pinging off a cell tower in the Prague area.
Stone and Gordon also reported that the intelligence agencies had intercepted Russian communications where officials spoke about Cohen traveling to Prague.
The reporters claimed Mueller held all this evidence in his hands.
And although fake news reporters initially jumped for joy that Mueller could finally nail Trump for treasonous Russian collusion, the facts tempered their enthusiasm.
First, Cohen took to social media to strongly deny the story.
Cohen even played up the fact that he sat for 70 hours of interviews with the special counsel.
“I hear #Prague #Czech Republic is beautiful in the summertime,” the former Trump lawyer wrote. “I wouldn’t know as I have never been. #Mueller knows everything!”
Secondly, Mueller charged Cohen for making false statements to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
In Cohen’s Congressional testimony, he denied under oath ever traveling to Prague.
Mueller never charged him for making false statements about that.
Finally, this would not be the first time a foreign intelligence service took gullible media members for a ride with a fanciful story about Russian collusion.
Last month, Ecuadorian intelligence planted a blatantly false story in The Guardian about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort traveling to London to meet with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The fake news media hyperventilated about the story for a few hours until it dawned on them that there would have to be security camera footage of Manafort entering the embassy.
There wasn’t any.
And Manafort’s name was also not on the visitor’s log.
With that in mind, we know it’s not unprecedented for a foreign intelligence service to exploit the fake news media to create mischief for the Trump administration.
We will keep you up to date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
