Trump Lawyer Drops Defamation Suits Related to Russia Inquiry

In early January, Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, filed a pair of lawsuits claiming that the political research firm Fusion GPS and the website BuzzFeed had defamed him by promoting the so-called Steele dossier, an intelligence report that alleged connections between Trump’s associates and Russia. The dossier depicted Cohen as a central figure in what it described as a conspiracy.

In the suits, Cohen complained that Fusion GPS had disseminated the dossier to reporters and that BuzzFeed put it on the internet, even though both companies knew that it contained what Cohen believed were lies.

But much has changed in the past three months. Just last week, Cohen discovered that he is now the subject of a federal investigation seeking to determine if he broke the law by trying to tamp down scandals involving women who claimed they had affairs with Trump. Because of that investigation, Cohen’s lawyer dropped both lawsuits in a sudden move Wednesday night.

“The decision to voluntarily discontinue these cases was a difficult one,” the lawyer, David M. Schwartz, said Thursday. While Schwartz insisted that he still believes that BuzzFeed and Fusion GPS defamed Cohen, he added, “Given the events that have unfolded, and the time, attention and resources needed to prosecute these matters, we have dismissed the matters, despite their merits.”

Cohen’s chief complaint about the Steele dossier — a series of papers written by Christopher Steele, a former British spy — was its allegation that Cohen had secretly met last summer with a Russian official in Prague. Cohen has denied attending the meeting, and in one of the suits he said that the dossier’s defamatory claims turned him into “collateral damage in a U.S. political operation.”

At the time the suits were filed — in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and in state Supreme Court in Manhattan — Cohen’s lawyer said that he had sought legal action because it was the only way that he could “get back his reputation.” Last week, Fusion GPS responded with a court filing saying that the suit was barred by the statute of limitations and failed to “allege actual malice.”

The suit against BuzzFeed was dropped before the media outfit had a chance to respond. But in a statement Thursday, a spokesman for BuzzFeed defended its decision to publish the Steele dossier, calling it an “important part of the government’s investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

The statement added that Cohen’s decision to end the suit “suggests that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer no longer thinks an attack on the free press is worth his time.”

One result of dropping both complaints is that Cohen will not have to undergo discovery or be questioned by lawyers from either organization. The discovery process in defamation cases can often lead to depositions or the release of private documents and emails.

In a separate case that also appeared related to the Cohen investigation, tabloid news company American Media Inc. agreed Wednesday to let a former Playboy model out of a contract that had kept her from talking freely about her alleged affair with Trump.

As part of the agreement, the former model, Karen McDougal, dropped her own suit that claimed, among other things, that Cohen had inappropriately intervened in the initial deal to keep her silent. That deal and the extent of Cohen’s role in it are subjects of the broader federal probe looking into Cohen’s efforts to protect Trump’s presidential prospects in 2016.