Kremlin says it tossed email
A spokesman for Putin confirms Trump’s lawyer sought help on a project in Moscow.
MOSCOW — The Kremlin on Wednesday confirmed it received an email from President Trump’s personal lawyer during the 2016 U. S. presidential campaign in which the lawyer asked for help with a potential skyscraper project in Moscow.
Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said he did not respond to lawyer Michael Cohen’s email because the Kremlin does not address “such business requests.”
“It is not our job,” Peskov told reporters in a conference call Wednesday.
The Washington Post reported Monday that a Cohen statement to a House Intelligence Committee indicated that the president’s company pursued a project in Moscow during the Republican primary. The company later abandoned the project for unspecified reasons. The committee is investigating Russian interference in the presidential election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
The email specifically asked for help with plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, a project that Cohen said he was working on with Felix Sater, a Russianborn New York businessman who claimed to have deep connections in Russia. The New York Times reported that Sater told Cohen that Russian government approval was required for the project to move forward and that he suggested that Cohen reach out to Peskov directly for assistance.
“Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in an email to Cohen. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
Peskov said his office had found a copy of Cohen’s email, which was sent to a general address for the Kremlin press office. The address can be easily found online, he told reporters.
Cohen’s email said “the business had been stalled, and they were asking for help or some kind of recommendation about how to advance the issue,” Peskov said.
“We left it unanswered,” Peskov said.
The issue was never discussed with the Russian president, because it would be “impossible to discuss with President Putin the hundreds and thousands of requests of all kinds from a variety of countries” that are received in that general Kremlin address, Peskov said.
The Kremlin spokesman said he did not know Cohen personally.
“No, we never met, sadly — or thankfully,” Peskov said.