Trump, Russia deal for decades
Cohen’s guilty plea puts ‘Art of the Deal’ in news
President Donald Trump’s interest in developing luxury real estate in Moscow stretches back decades, according to court documents, his public statements and interviews with Trump.
Trump’s long-standing ties to Russia are back in the spotlight because his former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty Thursday to lying to Congress in connection with the Justice Department’s special counsel probe into whether Trump or any members of his inner circle colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The investigation has been going on for 18 months.
Cohen, who previously pleaded guilty to tax fraud and other campaign-related financial violations, admitted making false statements to lawmakers about the timing of Trump’s efforts to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow. The development is potentially significant because Trump has consistently denied any financial ties to Russia.
Trump called Cohen a “weak person” and accused him of providing false testimony to get a reduced sentence from special counsel Robert Mueller.
“He’s got himself a big prison sentence. And he’s trying to get a much lesser prison sentence by making up this story,” said Trump as he left Washington for a Group of 20 economic summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “He’s lying about a project that everybody knew about. I mean, we were very open about it.”
Trump tweeted Friday that he “Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!” He defended that effort as “very legal.”
But Trump’s known connections to Russia go back more than 30 years.
In “The Art of the Deal,” his 1987 book about his business style, Trump wrote about wanting to build “a large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government.” Trump was invited that year to Moscow by the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United States to discuss the project. The deal fell apart because, Trump later told Playboy magazine, Russia “was out of control and the leadership knows it.” Four years later, the Soviet Union dissolved, and Russians who had been allowed to buy stateowned enterprises amassed enormous fortunes.
Less than a decade later, Trump announced in a 1996 news conference in Moscow that he intended to invest $250 million in various Russian building projects. Trump said he would license his name for use on two luxury residential buildings. “We have tremendous financial commitments from various groups,” Trump said, speaking at the plush Baltschug Hotel in Moscow. “We’re ready to go anytime we want to go,” he said. It is not clear what happened to those efforts, but they never materialized.
In an interview with The New Yorker in 1997, Trump said: “We are actually looking in Moscow right now, and it
would be skyscrapers and hotels, not casinos. Only quality stuff ... I’ll be soon going again to Moscow. We’re looking at the Moskva Hotel. We’re also looking at the Rossiya. That’s a very big project; I think it’s the largest hotel in the world. And we’re working with the local government, the mayor of Moscow and the mayor’s people. So far, they’ve been very responsive.”
At the same time, Trump was selling dozens of condominiums in Trump World Tower in midtown Manhattan to Russians, according to Dolly Lenz, a real estate broker who sold many of the units.
She said many of these Russian buyers sought an audience with Trump because they respected his business acumen and personal style.
By the early 2000s, Trump was courting wealthy Russian investors to help fund several foreign construction projects from Canada to Panama. He launched his eponymous Super Premium Vodka brand in Moscow in 2007. It ceased production four years later.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., traveled to Russia a half-dozen times in 18 months looking for deals around 2008, he told eTurboNews, an online business publication. While in Moscow, Trump Jr. explained to investors that the Trump Organization had trademarked the Donald Trump name in Russia and planned to build housing and hotels in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi, and sell licenses to other developers.
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump Jr. said at the time. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
In 2013, Trump brought the Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow, funded by $20 million from Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov. The venue was Agalarov’s Crocus City Hall on the outskirts of Moscow. Trump took part in a music video with Agalarov’s son, Emin. Meanwhile, Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet official who co-founded Bayrock Group, a New York-based real estate company, had helped Trump fund Trump SoHo in New York, a 46-story, residential-hotel hybrid building later renamed “The Dominick.”
“It’s ridiculous that I wouldn’t be investing in Russia,” Trump testified under oath in a 2007 court deposition as his business relationship with Bayrock broke down.
“Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment,” he added.
Felix Sater, the other Bayrock founder, is also being scrutinized by Mueller as part of his investigation into alleged 2016 campaign collusion with Russia.
Sater, according to The New York Times, wrote a series of emails in 2015 to Trump’s lawyer – Cohen – in which he boasted about his ties to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. “Our boy can be president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in one of the emails. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.”
The Times noted that Cohen never replied to the emails and viewed them as “puffery.” Sater said he was simply expressing “enthusiasm” for the Trump Organization. Russia-born Sater had spent a year in prison in 1991 for stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass at the Rio Grande restaurant and bar in New York.
A report by BuzzFeed News said that at one point Sater and Cohen hatched a plan to offer Putin a $50 million penthouse in the proposed Trump Tower in Moscow to help sell other apartments. “In Russia, the oligarchs would bend over backwards to live in the same building as Vladimir Putin,” Sater told BuzzFeed News.
Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, declined to comment on the report when reached by USA TODAY.
Still, to expand his real estate developments over the years, Trump, his company and partners have repeatedly turned to wealthy Russians and oligarchs from former Soviet republics – several allegedly connected to organized crime, according to a USA TODAY review last year of court cases and government and legal documents.
At least five close advisers to Trump have admitted wrongdoing or been convicted since his election.