Michael Cohen took $400,000 to fix a meeting between Trump and Ukraine’s president, report says

UPDATE (5:50 p.m. EST): This story has been updated with a comment from the press office of Ukraine's president.

President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was secretly paid at least $400,000 to help arrange a meeting between Ukraine’s president and Trump last summer, the BBC reported Wednesday, citing two unnamed sources in Ukraine.

The payment was made by intermediaries acting on behalf of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in an attempt to extend the length of his arranged meeting with Trump beyond an embarrassingly short handshake and photo op, the BBC reported.

A spokesperson for Poroshenko denied the report in a statement to VICE News. Cohen and the two Ukrainian officials reported to have been directly involved in the negotiations likewise all told the BBC that no such payment had been made.

The BBC bombshell marks a particularly turbulent 24 hours for Cohen. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that his longtime business associate in the taxi industry, Evgeny Freidman, agreed to cooperate with the government as a potential witness as part of a plea deal over Freidman’s alleged failure to pay $5 million in taxes. Cohen denied being “partners” with Freidman on Twitter, despite their shared taxi business.

Read: Taxi mogul who borrowed millions from Michael Cohen swears it wasn't for his weed business

Cohen, who is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, has been under massive scrutiny for accepting big cash payments from corporations, including AT&T and Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, who said they were seeking a deeper understanding of the unpredictable Trump administration.

Cohen also reportedly took half-a-million from a U.S. investment company with deep links to Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian billionaire seen as close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, supposedly for consulting on real estate transactions.

Poroshenko ultimately hailed his session with Trump as a “substantial visit,” and staged a triumphant news conference in front of the White House. But it was almost a disaster, according to the report.

The BBC cited a high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence officer who said Poroshenko’s team remained in the dark over the length of the meeting up until hours before it began. This uncertainty angered the Ukrainian side, the official told the BBC, because there was a growing sense that Cohen appeared to have taken “hundreds of thousands” of dollars for a promise he couldn’t deliver.

There is no suggestion that Trump knew about the payment, the BBC reported.

President Poroshenko’s press office released a statement calling the BBC report a “blatant lie, slander and fake.”

The statement went on to say that the “Ukraine-U.S. summit in June 2017 [was] arranged exclusively by means of official diplomatic channels, in particular by Ukraine’s embassy in the U.S.”

Cover image: President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, June 20, 2017, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)