Nyet too smart!
TRUMP STOOGE’S PUTIN PLOT
A LONGTIME Trump business partner with ties in the former Soviet Union reportedly boasted about working to get Trump elected with the help of Vladimir Putin.
The late 2015 email from Felix Sater was revealed the same day it was reported that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen personally asked Putin’s chief spokesman for business help two months later.
Sater, who worked for years with the Trump Organization, told Cohen the businessman’s budding campaign could benefit from support from the Kremlin if he pressed ahead with plans for a Trump Tower Moscow.
“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” says an email from Sater in November 2015 reported by The New York Times on Monday.
“We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way . . . . Buddy our boy can become President of the U.S.A. and we can engineer it,” he continued before saying he “will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.”
Sater’s exact contacts with the Kremlin are unknown, though the email was part of documents from the Trump Organization given to the House Intelligence Committee on Monday.
He said he lined up financing for the project with VTB Bank, a Russian bank that was under American sanctions, The Times reported.
Part of Sater’s claims of influence include saying that he “arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin.”
In a statement to The Times, Ivanka Trump said she took a “brief tour” of the Kremlin during a 2006 trip, but could not recall whether she sat in Putin’s chair.“I have never met President Vladimir Putin,” she said.
The trove handed over Monday also includes a message first reported by The Washington Post showing Cohen asking Putin (photo inset) spokesman Dmitry Peskov, a senior figure in the Kremlin, for help with the Trump Tower project.
“I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals,” Cohen said in January 2016, adding that progress had stalled.
Cohen told Congress that a letter of intent for the “Trump Tower Moscow” was signed in October 2015, but it was ultimately rejected shortly after his entreaty to Peskov, according to a letter seen by the Daily News.
He added that Sater had pushed him to write the email to Peskov, and that plotting Trump’s path to power stems from his friend’s penchant for “colorful language” and “salesmanship.” Cohen discussed the Moscow project three times with Trump, according to his letter to Congress.
Trump has previously denied having any business dealings in Russia.
The emails are not the first time that Cohen, and, particularly, Sater, who has
not been formally involved with the campaign or the administration, have linked Trump to questionable dealings abroad.
Both met with Ukrainian lawmaker Andrey Artemenko this year as the politician proposed a controversial peace plan that would see Russia lease the Crimean peninsula it took from its neighbor.
Sater’s connections to Trump stretch back for years.
The 51-year-old Russian-born Brooklynite once convicted of stabbing a man with the stem of a margarita glass avoided prison time for financial fraud by becoming an informant for the government in the early 2000s.
He went to work for Bayrock, a developer that’s come under fire for accepting money from a pair of Kazakh billionaires accused of laundering money through U.S. real estate and an Icelandic bank popular with off-shore Russian money. Bayrock worked on Trump SoHo, and Trump celebrated the opening with Sater and Bayrock co-founder Tevfik Arif.
Trump said he wouldn’t know what Sater looked like if he were in the room during a 2013 Florida deposition where he was told about the businessman’s alleged Mafia ties and criminal record.
Cohen’s letter to Congress says Sater would have been paid as a broker if the Moscow deal went through.