All the President’s comrades

The borscht thickens. As a candidate for President who refused to make his tax returns public, Donald Trump over and over again asked the American public to trust his insistence that he had no relationship with and no deals in Russia. The assurance was necessary because of Trump’s bizarre penchant for, even as he insulted his way through the phone book, never having a bad word to say about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

We now know that the “nothing to do with Russia” line was simply untrue.

According to documents Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen handed over to congressional investigators, Cohen and Russian-American businessman Felix Sater — a convicted felon and longtime Trump associate — pressed to ink a deal on a Trump Tower Moscow in mid-2015, even as the presidential campaign was in motion.

Cohen admitted that in October 2015, he had Trump sign a letter of intent to license Trump’s name on the Moscow development, and discussed the project three times with his boss.

Nor were the Trump Organization’s ambitions in Moscow limited to mid-level business-to-business contact. When the project began to falter in early 2016, Cohen wrote to a Putin spokesman to try to get the Kremlin to intercede directly.

Why would a presidential candidate’s business minions seek to get Putin himself involved in a real-estate deal, and how might the pursuit of the project have contorted that candidate’s priorities? Could that contact have established lines of communications that morphed into potential collusion on election interference? That’s for Trump to answer. For now, let the umpteenth revelation of previously undisclosed Russia contacts put to rest the notion that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is somehow going beyond his legal charge by diving deep into contacts between the Trump family businesses and Russia.

That could well be the whole ballgame.