Some detail here, i think you guys have the equity track right.
"So maybe his bank knew he'd be good for it. Yeah, I guess that makes sense."
Think i read or heard somewhere earlier Cohen lied to the bank as to the reason he wanted to set the new LLC up. Not sure if that's in here:
Edit -- ok, this from the link below relates/confirms what i understood earlier:
Essential Consultant’s KYC form, which is dated Oct. 26, 2016 (and according to the time stamps apparently took First Republic 12 minutes to complete), said Cohen opened the company for “real estate consulting” and “to collect fees for investment consultanting [sic] work he does for real estate deals.” A question on the form asked whether the entity was “associated with Political Fundraising/Political Action Committee (PAC).” The answer was “no.”
Trump Hush-Money Payment Revealed in Bank Records
Evidence at the center of Trump’s criminal trial was just released by the FBI in response to an ongoing FOIA lawsuit.
By Jason Leopold May 11, 2024 at 12:30 AM GMT+10
The FBI just sent me a juicy set of documents that’s directly related to former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial currently taking place in a Manhattan courtroom. They're business records from First Republic Bank, where Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen opened an account to pay off adult film star Stormy Daniels.
The details around the bank activity have been widely reported, but many of the underlying financial documents haven’t surfaced. And since cameras aren’t allowed in the courtroom, the public largely hasn’t seen the evidence at the center of the trial — until now.
How I got these documents is kind of a long story. Five years ago, I filed a FOIA lawsuit against the FBI. It was for all the interview summaries – or ‘302s’ as they’re known – from key witnesses questioned during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference and attempts by Trump to obstruct the probe. I also sought the supporting material FBI agents collected from witnesses, such as emails, handwritten notes and bank records.
There are thousands of pages of responsive records, which the FBI continues to trickle out each month as part of its legal requirement to satisfy my request. Since Cohen was a witness, I’m now in possession of 25-pages of his supplemental interview material.
The contents are newsworthy, to say the least. Last week, as part of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump, Cohen’s First Republic Bank records were front and center during witness testimony.
Prosecutors showed them to jurors as they described how Cohen set up a bank account just weeks before the 2016 presidential election, under a shell company named Essential Consultants LLC. He did so after Trump directed him to pay Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her silence about their alleged affair, which Trump has denied. Gary Farro, then a managing director at First Republic Bank and Cohen’s banker, testified for two days about setting up Essential Consultants for Cohen and the paper trail associated with it, which I’m sharing here.
The hush-money bank records: An annotation
The first document identifies the various accounts where Cohen was listed as the primary account holder: checking accounts, a home equity line of credit, or HELOC, and a couple of homes. The HELOC is noteworthy because that’s what Cohen has said he used to fund Essential Consultants.
Trump “directed me to use my own personal funds from a home equity line of credit,” Cohen testified before Congress in 2019, “to avoid any money being traced back to him that could negatively impact his campaign.”
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