Proof of Collusion, Chapter 1: Russia and the Trumps

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{Note: The thousands of endnotes—each pointing to major-media citations—that appear in the print edition of this book are exclusively in that volume. Click here to purchase Proof of Collusion (by Seth Abramson, first published by Simon & Schuster in 2018) in print. If you would like to comment in the comment fields below, feel free to do so whether you are a paid Proof subscriber or not. Comments may be lightly moderated as/if it becomes necessary. Note that Proof of Collusion is only 300 pages of a four-book, 2,500-page series, so this volume is just one piece of a massive trove of evidence relating to the political career of Donald Trump.

This text has been carefully reviewed by a team of lawyers and professional fact-checkers at a cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. See the print edition of this book for all citations and endnotes, which are implicitly incorporated into this republication. This republication also incorporates all five volumes of the 2019 Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian Interference in the 2016 United States Presidential Election and the two-volume Mueller Report, which can be found here and here, respectively. Any disparity between this book and those reports—though this author isn’t aware of any—should be resolved in favor of the latter.

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Table of Contents

The chapter you are now reading is in bold. Any chapters already published are active links to those chapters as published here at Proof.

• Introduction: A Theory of the Case

  • Date: October 2018

• Chapter 1: Russia and the Trumps

  • Dates: 1987 to 2012

• Chapter 2: Trump and the Agalarovs

  • Date: 2013

• Chapter 3: Kompromat

  • Date: November 2013

• Chapter 4: The Campaign Begins

  • Dates: 2013 to 2015

• Chapter 5: The National Security Advisory Committee

  • Dates: January to March 2016

• Chapter 6: The Mayflower Hotel

  • Date: April 2016

• Chapter 7: The Back Channels

  • Dates: May to June 2016

• Chapter 8: The Republican National Convention

  • Date: July 2016

• Chapter 9: The Hunt for Her Emails

  • Dates: July to September 2016

• Chapter 10: The October Surprise

  • Date: October 2016

• Chapter 11: The Transition

  • Dates: November 2016 to January 2017

• Chapter 12: The Firings of Flynn and Comey

  • Dates: February to May 2017

• Chapter 13: Testimony and Plea

  • Dates: June to December 2017

• Chapter 14: A Nation in Suspense

  • Date: 2018

• Afterword: The Death and Rebirth of America

  • Date: 2019

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Chapter 1: Russia and the Trumps

1987 to 2012

Summary

After fifteen years of financial failures in Russia—failures born not of a lack of desire to succeed but a lack of access to the people in Russia who make wealth creation possible—the Trump family discovers that the key to making a fortune in real estate in Russia is greasing the skids with influential Russian officials.

When the Trumps finally learn this lesson in the early 2000s, the result is the Russian riches that the family, particularly its patriarch, Donald Trump, had long sought.

The family gains, too, a new set of Russian, Russian-American, and Soviet-born allies who will in time rescue the family from its business struggles in the recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s—when many U.S. banks are declining to lend to the Trump Organization. Many of these new allies have criminal histories, dubious business practices, close ties to the Kremlin, or all three.

But the Trumps’ many years of candor about their fondness for Russia, as well as their boasts of the money their many business ties to that nation have brought them over the years, will dissipate instantly once Donald Trump decides to run for president of the United States not long after the 2012 presidential election.

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The Facts

Up until 1987, Donald Trump is not regarded as a particularly political public figure.

However, in 1987 he publishes The Art of the Deal and takes a trip to Moscow—one or both of which send him in the direction of a political career.

Trump’s trip to Moscow in 1987 comes at the invitation of Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Yuri Dubinin. In Moscow, Trump stays in the Lenin Suite of the Hotel National, which, as Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine notes, “certainly would have been bugged” in 1987. Trump holds meetings on the possible construction of a Trump hotel with Soviet officials, coming away from the meetings certain that the officials are “eager” to do business with him.

On returning to the United States, Trump spends nearly $100,000 on politically charged newspaper ads, attacking American allies like Japan and Saudi Arabia for spending too little on their own defense. He urges America to “tax these wealthy nations” and shortly thereafter makes a high-profile trip to New Hampshire—the sort of trip that is often considered a prelude to a presidential bid. 

Trump’s 1987 bid for a Trump hotel in Moscow falls through, according to the Washington Post, only because Trump was “preoccupied with other business projects.”

Once Trump’s companies recover from a string of bankruptcies in 1991 and 1992, he returns his attention to the Russian market. In 1996, he returns to Moscow with Howard Lorber, “one of his two closest friends”, according to the Post. Together they scout locations for an office tower and eventually find both a location for the tower and a prospective Russian partner for the project. Trump announces plans for a Trump International–branded building in November 1996; the deal will see him investing $250 million and licensing his name to two buildings. “We have an understanding we will be doing it”, Trump says. At the press conference promoting the deal, he says he doesn’t think he’s ever been “as impressed with the potential of a city as I have been with Moscow.”

However, Trump has a problem: American banks will no longer lend to him, citing his track record for paying back only “pennies on the dollar”—what the banks call “the Donald risk.”

By 1997, though no construction has begun on Trump’s hoped-for Moscow projects, the New Yorker is writing of “the breadth of Trump’s hopes for Moscow investment and business connections.” Trump’s plans for the expansion of his real estate portfolio into Russia go well beyond a single Trump International Hotel; Trump envisions a much larger series of investments. He tells the New Yorker, “[I]t would be skyscrapers and hotels. . . . [W]e’re working with the local government, the mayor of Moscow, and the mayor’s people. So far, they’ve been very responsive.”

As Trump’s 1996 plans finally fall through for good, Russia begins a period of political upheaval that sees the nation led by five successive prime ministers appointed by Boris Yeltsin over a fifteen-month period in 1998 and 1999. The last of these prime ministers is a man by the name of Vladimir Putin.

Putin, the former first deputy chairman (the equivalent of a deputy mayor) of St. Petersburg, develops a fondness for Miss St. Petersburg, Oxana Fedorova, sometime before she is crowned Miss Russia in 2001. It is widely known that Putin has a picture of her in his office. After Fedorova wins the 2001 Miss Russia pageant, rumors abound—spurred in part by the presence of Putin’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB, acting as security at the competition—that the pageant has been rigged so that Fedorova will win. Local media say that either the pageant was corrupt or its organizers knew instinctively it would be unwise—not “politically correct”, according to the Telegraph—to let anyone but Fedorova win.

In winning the Miss Russia pageant, Fedorova becomes Russia’s entrant to the 2002 Miss Universe pageant, an international competition owned by Donald Trump.

Though the 2002 pageant is scheduled to take place in Puerto Rico, anticipation for the event is high in Russia because of Putin’s admiration for Fedorova and because no Russian woman has ever won the Miss Universe pageant in its then half century of continuous operation.

At the time of the 2002 Miss Universe pageant, Fedorova’s publicly acknowledged boyfriend is Vladimir Golubev, a St. Petersburg crime boss heavily involved in the construction industry. But the scuttlebutt in Moscow is that Fedorova is actually with a different Vladimir; a May 2002 article published immediately after the 2002 Miss Universe pageant calls Fedorova “Putin’s girl.” There is substantial press attention in Moscow on the pageant in Puerto Rico as Fedorova wins the competition and makes pageant history as the first Miss Universe from Russia.

On November 2, 2017, an eyewitness to the judging process at the 2002 Miss Universe contest will contact this author to say that the contest was “rigged.” After the eyewitness’s identity has been verified, the eyewitness recounts the following: after there are only ten contestants left in the 2002 Miss Universe pageant—an elimination process that Trump directly participates in at this point in the pageant’s history, at the pageant’s concession—Trump addresses the pageant’s celebrity judges and indicates that he wants Miss Russia crowned Miss Universe. The source reports Trump saying, “There’s definitely, clearly one woman out there who’s head and shoulders above the rest. She’s the one I’d vote for.” Given the context of the statement—Trump issuing his formal instructions to the judges as they prepared for the conclusion of the pageant—as well as his demeanor while speaking, the eyewitness asserts that Trump “told the judges who to vote for”, adding that a subsequent conversation among the celebrity judges revealed that several had had the same impression.

The judges vote for Miss Russia, who thereby becomes Miss Universe until her dethroning 120 days later for failure to faithfully execute the duties of her office. The contest’s celebrity judges are later told by parties affiliated with the pageant that Fedorova has been dethroned because of unspecified criminal conduct by her boyfriend, Vladimir Golubev.

In the forty-eight months following the 2002 Miss Universe pageant, Trump’s fortunes in Russia change dramatically. After fifteen years of failed attempts to break into the Russian market—the Moscow market specifically—Trump finds that Russia is suddenly a critical component of the Trump Organization’s investment portfolio, as Donald Trump Jr. will explain in a 2008 speech to investors at a Manhattan conference. While this is partly attributable to the fact that “the push to sell units in Trump World Tower to Russians expand[s] in 2002”—when Sotheby’s International Realty begins partnering with Kirsanova Realty, a Russian company—another reason is that a matter of months after the Miss Universe pageant, a Russian émigré associated with the Russian criminal underworld, accompanied by his Soviet-born business partner Tevfik Arif, approaches Trump about a business partnership. The émigré, Felix Sater, will for the next few years deliver a large number of Russian clients to Trump and be instrumental in finding Russia-born partners for the biggest Trump construction project of the 2000s, Trump SoHo.

Sater’s access to the highest levels of the Russian government is made evident when, in 2006, he arranges for Ivanka Trump to sit in Putin’s office chair during a tour of the Kremlin. According to Daniel Treisman, a professor of political science at UCLA and an expert on Russian politics, anyone able to get a visitor to the Kremlin into Putin’s chair would have to have “the highest [Russian] security clearances and [be] personally trusted by Putin.”

The same year—2006—Paul Manafort moves into a forty-third-floor apartment in Trump Tower, paying $3.6 million for it at a time when he is making millions working for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. Just a year earlier, “Manafort proposed in a confidential strategy plan . . . that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government.” Manafort’s proposal is eventually accepted, and he is paid $10 million in 2006 by “close Putin ally” Oleg Deripaska—the same year he buys his apartment in Trump Tower.

Down on the twenty-fourth floor of Trump Tower, Sater and his company, the Bayrock Group, have become critical to Trump’s business success—especially with Russian investors and business partners. Yet when asked at a civil deposition in November 2013 whether he knows who Felix Sater is, Trump, under oath, says he has seen Sater only a “couple of times” and that he “wouldn’t know what [Sater] look[s] like.” At a deposition six years earlier, in 2007, Bloomberg reported that Trump had testified under oath that Sater’s Bayrock “brought Russian investors to his Trump Tower office to discuss deals in Moscow . . . and he [Trump] was pondering investing there.” “It’s ridiculous that I wouldn’t be investing in Russia”, Trump says at the time. “Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment.”

Indeed, Trump had signed a one-year development deal with Sater’s Bayrock for a Trump Tower Moscow in 2005; though the deal fell through, a site had been selected. 

In 2006, Trump’s partners on a real estate project in Panama go on an investor-recruiting trip to Moscow.

In 2007, Trump again, through Bayrock, “line[s] up with Russian investors . . . a deal for a Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow.” According to Trump, “[i]t would be a nonexclusive deal, so it would not have precluded me from doing other deals in Moscow, which was very important to me.” After this deal falls through as well, Trump says—in the same 2007 deposition in which he speaks glowingly of Sater’s real estate development company—“We’re going to do [another Moscow deal] fairly soon. [Moscow] will be one of the cities where we will be.”

That year, Trump attends the Moscow Millionaire Fair, at which he unveils Trump Vodka for the Russian market. He also partners with Russian Alex Shnaider to salvage an ailing project, Toronto’s Trump International Hotel and Tower. In 2005, Forbes had written a profile on Shnaider referencing his participation in the “shadowy”, “murky”, violent Ukrainian steel business, where to get along with other steel traders and avoid death (“at least seven steel executives were assassinated in Ukraine in the 1990s”) you had to “hire their relatives, give them gifts—whatever could be done.” Trump would “[claim] to have a financial stake [in the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto], only later to admit that it was a licensing deal. . . . Trump family members [also] presented inflated sales figures when the towers, in reality, stood nearly empty.”

In 2010, when the Toronto project falters yet again, it is rescued with nearly a billion dollars in new investment by the Kremlin-owned development bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB. In December 2016, during the presidential transition, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will meet secretly at Trump Tower with VEB’s chairman, Sergei Gorkov, who graduated from the academy of Russia’s chief intelligence agency, the FSB. Observing that VEB is “known for advancing the strategic interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin”, the Washington Post will report that VEB called the meeting with Kushner “part of a new business strategy” and that its chairman met with Kushner “in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business.” Hope Hicks, a White House spokesperson, will insist instead that it was merely a “diplomatic” meeting.

In 2008, Trump strikes a deal with Russian heavyweight mixed martial artist Fedor Emelianenko—who Rolling Stone will note in May 2018 “has very close ties to Vladimir Putin”—for a reality show in Russia that never materializes. Trump even forms a company with Emelianenko, Affliction Entertainment, to manage and promote their joint venture; he makes his attorney Michael Cohen Affliction’s COO.

All of the above helps explain how, by 2008, Donald Trump Jr., speaking to a group of investors on the topic of emerging overseas markets, could boast that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our [Trump Organization] assets.” He adds that the Trump Organization “primarily” looks for new real estate in Russia.

Trump Jr.’s comments are striking for both their clarity and boldness. eTurboNews (eTN), the global travel industry news website that reports on Trump Jr.’s address, writes that, per Trump Jr., “[i]f he were to choose his top A-list for investments in the emerging world . . . his firm [the Trump Organization] would choose China and Russia.” eTN quotes the eldest Trump son as saying, “Given what I’ve seen in Russia’s real estate market as of late relative to some of the emerging markets, [Russia] seems to have a lot more natural strength [than China], especially in the high-end sector where people focus on price per square-meter. . . .I really prefer Moscow over all cities in the world.” 

Trump Jr. reveals to the investors that he has made “half a dozen trips to Russia” in the preceding eighteen months—one trip every ninety days—and that on these trips he brings clients to the Trump Organization’s “projects” in Moscow; his travel partners are, he says, “buyers [who] have been attracted to our projects there.” In September 2017, Trump Jr. will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and say that he has been to Russia only “four or five” times in his life.

Trump Jr. does, however, note to investors in 2008 some potential obstacles for those who want to invest heavily in Russia. He explains that, based on his significant experience seeking investments in Russia, investor concerns about the Russian market are “not an issue of [not] being able to find a deal—but . . . ‘can I actually trust the person I am doing the deal with?’” He explains that success in the Russian market is finally attributable to “who knows who” and “whose brother is paying off who.” 

eTN describes Trump Jr.’s depiction of Trump Organization activities in Moscow this way: “Despite a current [Russian] government that projects a ramrod posture, to Trump the current leaders [of Russia] make the scene more scary. Holding back his grin, he said, ‘It’s so transparent—everything’s so interconnected that it really does not matter what is supposed to happen as what it is they want to happen is ultimately what happens’” (emphasis added). It is unclear from eTN’s coverage of the Trump Jr. speech who the “they” is that the young Trump Organization executive is referring to.

Trump Jr. also discusses the Trump Organization’s reliance on Russian investors investing in the United States. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia”, he says, adding that the soon-to-be-completed Trump SoHo is also specifically targeting investors in the United Arab Emirates. Trump Jr.’s boast is not an empty one; from sixty-five Russians buying units in a single Trump building in the late 1990s to a Bloomberg report finding that by 2004 fully one-third of units on floors seventy-six through eighty-three in Trump World Tower involved “people or companies connected to Russia or neighboring states”, the Trump Organization has for years counted Russian clients among its most enthusiastic customers. The New Republic describes how Trump International Beach Resort in Florida was so popular among Trump’s Russian clientele that the area, Sunny Isles Beach, came to be known as “Little Moscow.”

One of the deals Trump Jr. may be referring to in saying the Trump Organization “see[s] a lot of money pouring in from Russia” is a deal his father is working on the very summer Trump Jr. makes his claim. In November 2004, Trump had bought for $41 million a parcel of land in Florida that—despite the improvements he thereafter made to it—he couldn’t unload. In 2006, it was on the market for $125 million, more than three times what Trump paid for it; by the time the Great Recession begins in the latter half of 2007, Trump has had to drop the price by 20 percent, to around $100 million.

In the summer of 2008, a Russian billionaire named Dmitry Rybolovlev offers nearly the full asking price for the property—$95 million—despite Trump having no competing offers. Trump thereby makes $54 million in forty-eight months. Rybolovlev immediately destroys the structures on the property that Trump had renovated and divides the land into three parcels; by 2018, he is hoping to make a mere $18 million profit—one-third of Trump’s—in over a decade of holding the land.

The Charlotte Observer will note in March 2017 that Rybolovlev’s plane was parked next to Trump’s in Charlotte, not briefly but for hours, five days before Election Day in 2016. The two men—whose planes likewise “met” at a Las Vegas airport four days prior to their second meeting in Charlotte—claim that they’ve never met each other. A representative for Rybolovlev “declined to say whether the oligarch had been aboard the plane when it landed in Charlotte”, according to the Observer. The representative also declined to say “whether anyone associated with Trump was a passenger [on Rybolovlev’s plane] or whether its arrival was in any way connected with Trump’s campaign.” As the Observer concluded, “If Rybolovlev were somehow assisting the campaign, it would constitute an illegal foreign donation.”

The same questions raised by the Trump-Rybolovlev transaction—both at the time and in the ten days before Election Day—can likewise be asked for a number of payments Trump has received from Russian oligarchs in recent years. In March 2017, Reuters reports that just sixty-three Russians have invested a total of nearly $100 million in Trump’s Florida properties, adding, 

Th[is] tally of [Trump Organization] investors from Russia may be conservative. The analysis found that at least 703—or about one-third—of the owners of the 2044 units in the seven Trump buildings are limited liability companies, or LLCs, which have the ability to hide the identity of a property’s true owner. And the nationality of many [other] buyers could not be determined. Russian-Americans who did not use a Russian address or passport in their purchases were not included in the tally. 

The influence Putin wields over his billionaire acolytes is such that if he wanted to turn off the spigot of their money flooding to Trump Organization properties in America he could do so—and quickly. Says Thomas Graham, codirector of the Russian studies program at Yale University, of Russian oligarchs’ holdings, “You can lose your property overnight if you run afoul of the [Kremlin].”

In 2010, Trump SoHo is sued for deceptive sales practices. The building is partly financed by Soviet-born Alexander Mashkevitch, an Israeli citizen who owns homes in Belgium and London. Mashkevitch has been accused at various points, writes Bloomberg, of “laundering a $55 million bribe by purchasing property outside Brussels” (the case has since been settled for an undisclosed fine and no admission of fault) and “[paying] hundreds of millions of dollars in potential bribes . . . to acquire mines in Africa” and “corruption in [the former Soviet republic of] Kazakhstan.”

The investigation of Trump SoHo involves two of Trump’s children, Don Jr. and Ivanka, and mirrors the investigation of the Trump Tower in Toronto a year earlier, with the new claims contending the Trumps “made misleading statements as to what percentage of the units had been sold.” 

The Trump family’s candor is called into question again in 2014, when Eric Trump tells a reporter for Golf magazine, James Dodson, that the Trumps’ golf courses are all financed by Russian banks—and that the Trump Organization has “all the money we need from Russia.” Dodson will report the quote in 2017, after Trump’s election; Eric will contend that Dodson “completely fabricated” it.

In the 2010s, the New York Police Department arrests twenty-nine people suspected of having connections to a Russian money-laundering scheme headquartered in a Trump Tower condo right below one owned by Trump himself. The alleged ringleader of the scheme is notorious Russian organized crime boss Semion Mogilevich—a man who has repeatedly been on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list. In the decade’s early years Trump pursues numerous projects in the former Soviet republics, including a deal announced in 2011 to build Trump Tower Batumi in Georgia, a 2012 signed contract to build Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku in Azerbaijan, and a failed bid to build an “obelisk-shaped tower” near the presidential palace in Astana, Kazakhstan. As McClatchy wrote in June 2017, “Trump dreamed of his name on towers across the former Soviet Union.”

Craig Unger, a former editor for both the New York Observer and Boston Magazine, argues in his book House of Trump, House of Putin that, based on his own research and additional investigation by a former federal prosecutor, Trump was, through Felix Sater’s Bayrock Group, “indirectly providing Putin with a regular flow of intelligence on what the [Russian] oligarchs were doing with their money in the United States.”

Unger’s research suggests “Putin wanted to keep tabs on the [Russian] billionaires—some of them former mobsters—who had made their post–Cold War fortunes on the backs of industries once owned by the state. The oligarchs . . . were stashing their money . . . beyond Putin’s reach. Trump, knowingly or otherwise, may have struck a side deal with the Kremlin . . . secretly rat[ting] out his customers to Putin, who would allow them to keep buying Trump properties.”

On January 11, 2017, just nine days before his inauguration as president of the United States, Trump will tweet the following: “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA—NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

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Annotated History

(with excerpts from the above chapter in italicized bold, followed by regular-font annotations; this section is key to understanding certain of the facts delineated in the Facts section, above)

1

Trump’s trip to Moscow in 1987 comes at the invitation of Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Yuri Dubinin. In Moscow he stays in the Lenin Suite of the Hotel National, which, as Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine notes, “certainly would have been bugged” in 1987. Trump holds meetings on the possible construction of a Trump hotel with Soviet officials, coming away from the meetings certain that the officials are “eager” to do business with him.

In March 2018, the New York Times reported that Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller’s “investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election has expanded to include President Trump’s family business, with the special counsel subpoenaing the Trump Organization for documents related to Russia.”

“For more than 30 years, Mr. Trump has repeatedly sought to conduct business in Russia”, the Times wrote, adding, “[H]is children and associates have met with Russian developers and government officials on multiple occasions in search of joint ventures.”

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2

By 1997, though no construction has begun on Trump’s hoped-for Moscow projects, the New Yorker is writing of “the breadth of Trump’s hopes for Moscow investment and business connections.” Trump’s plans for the expansion of his real estate portfolio into Russia go well beyond a single Trump International Hotel; Trump envisions a much larger series of investments. He tells the New Yorker, “[I]t would be skyscrapers and hotels. . . . [W]e’re working with the local government, the mayor of Moscow, and the mayor’s people. So far, they’ve been very responsive.”

The Washington Post quotes America’s then ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle, as saying of Moscow’s then mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, “Corruption in Moscow remains pervasive with Mayor Luzhkov at the top of the pyramid. Luzhkov oversees a system in which it appears that almost everyone at every level is involved in some form of corruption or criminal behavior.”

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3

Russia begins a period of political upheaval that sees the nation led by five successive prime ministers appointed by Boris Yeltsin over a fifteen-month period in 1998 and 1999. The last of these prime ministers is a man by the name of Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s answers on whether he has ever spoken to or developed a relationship with Vladimir Putin—in the 2000s or anytime after—run the gamut.

The closest Trump came to contradicting Putin’s claim that the two men never spoke before, during, or in the immediate aftermath of the 2002 Miss Universe pageant was in a 2015 interview with radio personality Michael Savage, well before Trump’s relationships with Russian nationals had become controversial. Trump told Savage, in response to a question asking whether he’d ever met Putin, “Yes—one time, yes. Long time ago. Got along with him great, by the way.”

Trump did not specify how long before 2015 he met Putin.

At various points Trump has said he knows Putin, while at other times he has denied it. According to a July 2017 Associated Press report, ever since the Russia investigation began, Trump has categorically denied having ever met Putin. At a July 2016 press conference, Trump said, “I never met Putin. I don’t know who Putin is. . . . I never met Putin. Never spoken to him. I don’t know anything about him. . . .” Shortly thereafter, Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “I have no relationship with [Putin] . . . I’ve never met him.”

Pressed by Stephanopoulos on his prior statements to the contrary, Trump said, 

I have no relationship with Putin. I don’t think I’ve ever met him. I never met him. I don’t think I ever met him. . . . I don’t think I’ve ever met him. I mean if he’s in the same room or something. But I don’t think so. . . . I don’t have a relationship with him. I didn’t meet him. I haven’t spent time with him. I didn’t have dinner with him. I wouldn’t know him from Adam except I see his picture and I would know what he looks like.

Even Trump’s pre-campaign statements about meeting and knowing Putin exhibit an unusual evasiveness for a man known to brag about inconsequential encounters with famous people. In November 2015, Time described an incident in which Trump said, “I got to know [Putin] very well. . . .[because] we were stablemates” on the television program 60 Minutes. In fact, the two men had appeared via satellite from different continents and had never spoken. 

 As noted by the Associated Press in its compilation of Trump’s contradictory statements about his relationship with Putin, in a 2013 NBC News interview Trump said—twice, in fact—“I do have a relationhip [with Putin].” In October of that year, he said to talk show host David Letterman, of Putin, “He’s a tough guy. I met him once”—implying the two men had met prior to 2013. After his alleged speakerphone conversation with Putin on November 9, 2013 (see Chapter 2), but before his relationship with the Russian leader had become controversial, Trump maintained his claim to have had contact with Putin in the past, while adding a new wrinkle: “I spoke indirectly and directly with President Putin [during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant]”, he told the National Press Club in May 2014, “[and he] could not have been nicer” (emphasis added). It is unclear what speaking with someone “indirectly” could mean; certainly, a speakerphone conversation is one possibility. Notable across all of these statements is that not only does Trump insist he has met Putin, but that the two men have established enough of a connection for it to be characterized: “I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today”, Trump said in his 2013 NBC News interview at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow; “[Putin] couldn’t have been nicer [to me]”, he said the next year; “got along with him great”, he said the year after that.

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4

On November 2, 2017, an eyewitness to the judging process at the 2002 Miss Universe contest will contact this author to say that the contest was “rigged.”

Trump has enormous influence over which Miss Universe contestants will advance at the annual pageant. In 2009, TMZ secured an audio recording of Trump that revealed the pageant had since 1996 operated under the “Trump Rule”, pursuant to which Trump himself got to choose the pageant’s semifinalists. On the recording Trump can be heard saying, “We get to choose a certain number [of contestants who will be guaranteed to make it through the first round]. You know why we do that? Because years ago when I first bought it [in 1996], we chose ten people, I chose none and I get here and the most beautiful people were not chosen. And I went nuts. So we call it the ‘Trump Rule.’” In September 2009, the New York Daily News called the pageant’s annual winners “hand-picked [by Trump]”, quoting the pageant’s then choreographer, who said that “Donald Trump hand picks six of the fifteen finalists in the pageant” and that he does so “single-handedly.”

In March 2018, Newsweek reported that Trump applied the “Trump Rule” with two considerations: whether a contestant was “too ethnic” (meaning whether her skin tone strayed too far from white) and whether she had “snubbed his [sexual] advances.” The magazine cited multiple pageant staffers. The accounts of these whistle-blowers erase any confusion about whether Trump was joking when, as reported by Rolling Stone, he said on The Howard Stern Show in 2009 that he couldn’t say if he’d ever slept with any contestants, because “it would be a conflict of interest”, adding, “[B]ut you know, it’s the kind of thing you worry about later—you tend to think about the conflict a little bit later on.” He finished the thought by arguing that a pageant owner in fact has an “obligation” to sleep with contestants.

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5

The judges vote for Miss Russia, who thereby becomes Miss Universe until her dethroning 120 days later for failure to faithfully execute the duties of her office.

Trump’s most extensive comments on Oxana Fedorova’s dethroning, which came in New York on the day Fedorova was replaced by Justine Pasek of Panama, saw him admit that his organization had conducted an investigation to determine if Fedorova was secretly married to Vladimir Golubev.

The notoriously spiteful Trump—who Miss Universe 1996, Alicia Machado, said repeatedly called her “fat” and “ugly” and was “scary” to her, according to a September 2016 Washington Post report—was unusually gracious as he dethroned a Miss Universe for the first time in 2002. “We worked hard with Oxana”, he said of the object of Vladimir Putin’s fascination, according to a September 2002 report by the Sydney Morning Herald. “But a lot of these events are for charity and you just have to be there. She wasn’t able to be there, so we had no choice but to terminate.” Trump added—surprisingly, given his public penchant for firing contestants in his competitions—that he gave Fedorova a chance to resign so that everything could be “done nicely”, but she refused (though he added that she “graciously” returned her tiara). Besides Trump going out of his way to note that Fedorova was a “very nice person”, perhaps Trump’s most unusual comment regarding Fedorova was his reference to her home country during the press conference. “‘Was she homesick?’” the Herald reports Trump asking rhetorically. “‘Well, she certainly enjoyed being in Russia,’ he said, adding quickly that he had ‘great respect’ for Russia as a country.”

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6

Sater’s access to the highest levels of the Russian government is made evident when, in 2006, he arranges for Ivanka Trump to sit in Putin’s office chair during a tour of the Kremlin. According to Daniel Treisman, a professor of political science at UCLA and an expert on Russian politics, anyone able to get a visitor to the Kremlin into Putin’s chair would have to have “the highest [Russian] security clearances and [be] personally trusted by Putin.”

As Business Insider reported in August 2017, in November 2015 Sater wrote to Trump’s then attorney Michael Cohen to simultaneously boast about getting Ivanka access to Putin’s office in 2006 and his present ability to get Vladimir Putin to agree to a Trump Tower Moscow deal for Ivanka’s father. The confluence of the two claims is striking.

The former claim received a nonconfirmation confirmation from Ivanka, who wouldn’t say if she’d sat in Putin’s chair, but simply stated that she’d “never met President Vladimir Putin.”

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7

Sater and his company, the Bayrock Group, have become critical to Trump’s business success in the 2000s—especially with Russian investors and business partners. Yet when asked at a civil deposition in November 2013 whether he knows who Felix Sater is, Trump, under oath, says he has seen Sater only a “couple of times” and that he “wouldn’t know what [Sater] look[s] like.”

The question should have been an easy one for Trump, given that Sater, “the moving force behind Trump SoHo”, according to New York Magazine, had by then, as noted by the Nation in September 2017, been “work[ing] on and off for a decade with the Trump Organization”, sending Russian and other businessmen looking for luxury properties in Trump’s direction. Yet when asked about Sater just days before he headed off to Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe pageant (see Chapter 2), Trump said, “I’ve seen him a couple of times. I have met him. [But] if he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” Trump maintained that story into December 2015, when, per a Chicago Tribune report, in response to a question from an Associated Press reporter about whether he knew Sater he responded, “Boy, I have to even think about it.” 

Trump’s denials and obfuscation on the question of whether he knows Felix Sater are particularly notable given the role Sater has played in Trump’s life since 2002. As Forbes wrote in October 2016, “[Sater] has said under oath that he represented Trump in Russia.” But the timing of Sater’s entrance into Trump’s orbit is also notable, as it coincided with Trump’s selection of a Russian mobster’s girlfriend as Miss Universe in 2002. As Forbes recounts, from the time Sater joined Bayrock, the Trump Tower–housed entity that often sent property-seeking clients to the Trump Organization, Sater would pitch business ideas directly to Trump (“[with] just me and him [in the room]”) “on a constant basis.” And as detailed by Guardian journalist Luke Harding in his book Collusion, Sater “worked on various licensing deals for Trump properties” and had a Trump Organization–issued business card that called him a “senior advisor” to Trump himself.

What Trump presumably didn’t know about Sater when the former Russian underworld operator entered his corporate milieu was that Sater had just finished up a federal cooperation deal that allowed him to escape jail on racketeering and fraud charges. Harding notes that Sater’s decision to begin working for the Bayrock Group in 2000 was either an attempt to “efface his past sins by returning from Moscow and working diligently for the FBI” or Sater “exploiting the fact that his fraud record was under seal . . . to make a lot of money.”

Regardless of Sater’s intentions, in mid-2002, the year “Putin’s girl” was crowned Miss Universe by Donald Trump, Bayrock’s founder, Tevfik Arif, made the decision to move Bayrock’s offices into Trump Tower—just two floors below Trump’s office. The Soviet-born Arif had worked for seventeen years in the Soviet Ministry of Commerce and Trade. His decision to move himself inside Trump’s perimeter both literally and financially, and so soon after Trump had himself come into the orbit of Vladimir Putin and Russian mobster Vladimir Golubev, seems significant. Together, Arif and Sater were central to the Trump Organization’s recruitment of Soviet-born Tamir Sapir into the Trump SoHo project. According to Washington Monthly, Sapir had “ties to Russian intelligence.” By 2013, Rotem Rosen and Tamir’s son Alex—the former the CEO of Tamir’s Sapir Organization—were running the Trump SoHo project and, according to both men, receiving numerous inquiries from Russian “oil and gas” oligarchs about when Trump would construct a new tower in Moscow. They passed these entreaties on to Trump, who took them to heart by signing a letter of intent for Trump Tower Moscow soon after (see Chapter 2). In this way, Sater became essential not only to numerous Trump licensing deals but also to Trump’s two most ambitious corporate projects in the twenty-first century: Trump SoHo and Trump Tower Moscow. Trump SoHo was announced in mid-2006, after a lengthy buildup in 2005; plans for Trump Tower Moscow were announced in 2013.

According to Forbes, Felix Sater received in 2005—perhaps in recognition of his work recruiting the Russian intelligence-connected Tamir Sapir to the Trump SoHo project—“an exclusive deal [with Trump] to develop a project in Russia.” Sater referred to this as “the Moscow deal” and said in a 2008 deposition that the “deal” had a site already selected; he was still working on the deal when he gave Ivanka a special-access tour of the Kremlin. Per Professor Treisman of UCLA, that coincidence of facts suggests Sater had intimate access to Putin—and a high security clearance at the Kremlin—at the same time he was hard at work running point on a “Moscow deal” for Trump.

While we don’t know why Sater and Arif entered Trump’s business network between 2002 and 2003, Trump associate Michael Cohen—who the Washington Post says met Trump in the “late 1990s”—may be one explanation. Cohen and Sater are childhood friends, bonding at a time when the young Cohen was trying to “emulate” the gangs of Soviet immigrants then ubiquitous in his hometown, Brighton Beach.

There is evidence that Sater has at times jumped the fence to the “right” side of the law—albeit under duress and only intermittently. As reported by ABC News in March 2018, “Sater . . . says that for the past two decades he has served as a high-level intelligence asset for the DIA, CIA and the FBI. . . . help[ing] bust mafia families, capture cybercriminals and pursue top terrorists—including Osama bin Laden—and earning praise from some of the country’s top law enforcement officials.” And, ABC adds, while “he won’t say whether he’s been interviewed by the special counsel, it’s almost certain that Mueller knows his body of work well. [Mueller] served as FBI Director for much of Sater’s clandestine career.”

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8

eTN describes Trump Jr.’s depiction of Trump Organization activities in Moscow this way: “Despite a current [Russian] government that projects a ramrod posture, to Trump the current leaders [of Russia] make the scene more scary. Holding back his grin, he said, ‘It’s so transparent—everything’s so interconnected that it really does not matter what is supposed to happen as what it is they want to happen is ultimately what happens’” (emphasis added). It is unclear from eTN’s coverage of the Trump Jr. speech who the “they” is that the young Trump Organization executive is referring to.

Putin was Russia’s president (the first time) from May 7, 2000, to May 7, 2008, and is widely reported to have exercised tight control over the Kremlin during that period. The Guardian wrote, in May 2015, that Putin spent his first two terms in office “mov[ing] toward greater consolidation of his own power.”

When Putin first ascended to power in Russia in 2000, he ushered in an era of brutality, corruption, and fear in the world’s largest nation by landmass. Since Putin assumed control of the former Soviet Union—minus its many breakaway republics—it has come to be ranked 180 out of 199 nations in press freedom; PolitiFact notes that “[Putin’s] regime began to commandeer the press” the very year Putin came to power.

As of 2015, when Trump announced his presidential run and immediately began praising Putin and his leadership, the rate at which journalists were being killed in Russia was 34 times that of the United States. Putin has married this hostile environment for journalists with a deeply unsettling if subtle romanticizing of the Soviet era, publicly decrying Soviet repression while, according Kremlin critics inside Russia, “attempt[ing] to whitewash the image of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin”, for instance by printing “government-sponsored school textbooks that paint[ ] Soviet dictator Stalin in a largely positive light”; these critics call such actions part of Putin’s deliberate, systematic “rollback on democracy.”

Putin’s conspicuously deliberate retreat from democratic processes and rights has given rise to the term “Putinism”—in place of “democracy”—to describe the system of government in Russia. Putinism was decribed by Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, prior to his assassination 100 days before Trump announced his presidential campaign, as “a one-party system, with censorship, a puppet parliament, the ending of an independent judiciary, firm centralization of power and finances, [and] hypertrophied role of special services and bureaucracy, in particular in relation to business.”

Nemtsov’s killers were paid a quarter of a million dollars to assassinate him, with the New York Times noting the evidence suggests a close ally of Putin, indeed a person who considers Putin his “patron”, was behind the payments.

Nemtsov’s critique of “Putinism” points toward the core components of Putin’s “five-year plan”, announced in 2018 and requiring, per the Daily Beast, the “ignoring [of] civil and human rights…[s]ome Russians feel like they’re back in the USSR…[and] compare the new strategy to Soviet-style five-year plans.” Indeed, on the very day Putin formally signed his plan, “police arrested more than 1,600 people for taking part in…protests in more than 22 big Russian cities”—protests that were part of a anti-Putin political movement that Putin had summarily “banned.” 

The mass arrests of protesters and arrests of opposition leaders that Russia observers have noted throughout the 2010s offered a fitting backdrop to Putin’s February 2014 invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, just one day after the flight from Ukraine of its Kremlin-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych—whose Party of Regions Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort worked for from 2005 to 2016, often advising Yanukovych himself. Putin’s unilateral military aggression in Europe deeply unnerved America’s longtime European allies and resulted in sanctions—leveled by a broad coalition of nations, including the United States, Canada, all the nations of the European Union, and others—in July 2014.

Since their initial imposition, the sanctions, which have been increased and enhanced multiple times, have devastated the Russian economy, with CNBC crediting the restrictions on Russia’s international trade and business operations for having “taken a big bite out of Russia’s economy”, “shrinking [the] Russian economy”, and, due to the sanctions’ crippling effect on Russian oil revenues in particular, “help[ing] spark a collapse in Russia’s currency, the ruble, sending the prices of Russian consumer goods soaring.”

Meanwhile, CNBC notes that the effect of U.S. sanctions against Russia on American businesses has been negligible, as “Russia makes up less than 1 percent of U.S. exports.”

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Trump Jr. also discusses the Trump Organization’s reliance on Russian investors investing in the United States. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” he says.

A March 2017 Reuters investigation of Trump properties found twenty units in Trump Towers I, II, and III purchased by customers with Russian passports or addresses.

This figure is sixteen for Trump Palace, twenty-seven for Trump Royale, and thirteen for Trump Hollywood.

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10

In the summer of 2008, a Russian billionaire named Dmitry Rybolovlev offers nearly the full asking price for the property—$95 million—despite Trump having no competing offers. Trump thereby makes $54 million in forty-eight months. Rybolovlev immediately destroys the structures on the property that Trump had renovated and divides the land into three parcels; by 2018, he is hoping to make an $18 million profit—one-third of Trump’s—in over a decade of holding the land.

By January 2018, Artnet News had reported that Rybolovlev had sold two of the three lots for a total of $71.34 million, with the final lot still listed at $42 million.

If Rybolovlev earns his asking price, he will have made an $18 million profit on the property in ten years.

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11

After Fedorova wins the 2001 Miss Russia pageant, rumors abound—spurred in part by the presence of Putin’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB, acting as security at the competition—that the pageant has been rigged so that Fedorova will win.

Putin’s fixation on Fedorova, whether reciprocated or not, was both conspicuous and infamous in 2001. An April 2001 article in the Telegraph, a British media outlet, was entitled “Putin ‘Rigged Miss Russia Contest as Policewoman’s Secret Admirer.’” The article, written by the Telegraph’s Moscow correspondent, referenced not just “whispers that [President Putin] personally intervened in the [Miss Russia] contest”, but “accusations” in local media that the Kremlin had actually “dictat[ed] the result of this year’s . . . beauty contest.”

At a minimum, Oxana Fedorova’s victory in that national competition—which sent her to the 2002 Miss Universe pageant—was “hailed . . . as ‘politically correct’ [because] Mr. Putin has been described as a secret admirer of Oksana Fyodorova and is said to possess a photograph of her. The contest organisers allegedly picked her as winner in a feudal display of loyalty to the head of state.” That these rumors were so ubiquitous in Moscow in 2001 that they were repeated by a media outlet in the United Kingdom is an indication that major investors in the Moscow real estate market could easily have come across them.

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There is substantial press attention on the pageant in Moscow as Fedorova wins the competition and makes pageant history as the first Miss Universe from Russia.

Fedorova had to be removed from her post almost immediately. As the New York Post detailed in September 2002, Fedorova’s was a tumultuous reign that lasted only 120 days—making her the first Miss Universe to be fired in the then fifty-year history of the pageant. According to the Post, Fedorova had a “tangled love life, mysterious links to Russian President Vladimir Putin, a seemingly endless supply of cash and diamond jewelry and an attitude that tested even the most seasoned officials of the Miss Universe Organization.” Fedorova, from St. Petersburg, had a publicly acknowledged boyfriend—a “notorious” “Russian gangster” (per Pravda) named Vladimir Semenovich Golubev, commonly known as “Barmaley”—who also lived in St. Petersburg. Even so, she “insisted on spending most of her time in Moscow”, wrote the Post, which likely helped fuel rumors about her and Putin.

Lest it seem unlikely that Trump would fire a Miss Universe pageant winner he’d rigged a pageant to crown, a September 2002 CBS News report clarified that the Miss Universe Organization didn’t actually fire Fedorova—it merely found that she “was unable to fulfill her duties”, as Miss Universe Organization president Paula Shugart put it at the time. “[Fedorova] needed to spend a lot of time in Russia”, Shugart said. “I believe her mother was ill at one point.” For her part, Fedorova said “she gave up the title herself”, because while “the duties of a world beauty are wonderful . . . my prime goal is my studies and career in Russia.” The notoriously loquacious Trump was muted, saying that it was “too bad it didn’t work out better with Oxana.”

Meanwhile, rumors on both sides of the Atlantic—rumors spread, even, by CBS News—held that Fedorova had had to give up her crown because she was pregnant. The Daily Mail noted in November 2009 that pageant officials were concerned because she suddenly “put on weight.” While those rumors were never confirmed or denied, Fedorova was at the time connected romantically—whether you believe her, Russian media, or both—to only two men: Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Golubev, both strongmen no woman could cheat on, one imagines, without repercussions. 

What makes these allegations of a pregnancy worth noting here, however, is another, related allegation spread by Fedorova herself: that she quit her position because, as International Business Times put it in September 2011, “she was forced [by Trump’s Miss Universe Organization] to go on The Howard Stern Show.” It was during that June 25, 2002, interview with longtime Trump friend Howard Stern that Oxana was asked the following question: “At what point during the contest did you have sex with Mr. Trump?” When Fedorova said that she had not slept with Trump and added that he had a beautiful girlfriend (the then Melania Knauss), Stern replied, “Mr. Trump likes everybody.” A cohost added, “Could you repeat that question to her?”

Rumors that Fedorova had indeed slept with Trump were so persistent that fourteen years later Fedorova would report to the Express, a British media outlet, that “she became annoyed and frustrated during Trump’s presidential campaign because Western media pestered her for information to defame the billionaire.” The Express noted that Trump had “[taken] an interest in Ms. Fedorova”, and that after her victory he “took care of her” as her handler.

Trump’s interest in Fedorova could just as easily have been financial instead of political or romantic, however. Fedorova’s boyfriend, Golubev, was, according to Forbes Russia, a silent partner in a holding company known as Adamant that in the 2000s boasted $540 million in annual profits. Adamant’s business included restaurants, jewelry businesses, an industrial glass manufacturer, an advertising agency, a medical center, and—most significant to Trump, surely—a massive real estate construction and management operation. While noting that there were “many reports [in the 1990s] of [Golubev’s] links with organized crime”, Forbes Russia reported in 2013 that Golubev had since gone straight and was helping Adamant ensure its “operations were conducted without collisions with or participation in the well-known St. Petersburg crim[inal community]. . . . [P]articipants in the real estate market of St. Petersburg believe that it was Golubev who helped [Adamant] in the 1990s successfully resolve issues with criminal structures.” As with any Russian business, Adamant also had to stay on the right side of local government officials; in the mid-1990s, the first deputy chairman of St. Petersburg was a man named Vladimir Putin. Perhaps it’s little surprise, then, that when local beauty Oxana Fedorova won Miss St. Petersburg in 1999, just thirty-six months after Putin moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow to take up his new post there, she became a favorite of his.

Trump’s business profile suggests that business with Adamant—partly controlled by the new Miss Universe’s boyfriend—was a possible motive for attempting to rig the 2002 pageant. At the time, Adamant was building the first large-scale shopping center in St. Petersburg, which history suggests is the sort of real estate project that would draw Trump’s attention. Eleven years later, when Trump signed a letter of intent to build a Trump Tower Moscow, it was for a site in Moscow’s Crocus City complex—whose centerpiece is a shopping mall built by Aras Agalarov.

While Forbes Russia may be right that, by 2013, Golubev had decided to leave organized crime, as late as October 2002—just days after Fedorova’s reign as Miss Universe ended—Golubev was being called a “criminal boss in St. Petersburg” by Pravda. The Russian news outlet added at the time that Golubev was “involved in the construction business” but also “sometimes extorts money from oligarchs with the help of his allegedly powerful links in the criminal world.” Trump becoming Fedorova’s handler put him immediately within hailing distance of Golubev’s orbit as well as Putin’s, apart from any interest he may have had in Fedorova. By 2002, Trump had learned that building in Russia is about who one knows, not the capital one has.

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13

The eyewitness asserts that Trump “told the judges who to vote for,” adding that a subsequent conversation among the celebrity judges revealed that several had had the same impression. The judges vote for Miss Russia, who thereby becomes Miss Universe until her dethroning 120 days later for failure to faithfully execute the duties of her office. The contest’s judges are subsequently told by parties affiliated with the pageant that Fedorova has been dethroned because of unspecified criminal conduct by her boyfriend, Vladimir Golubev.

In a September 2009 statement published by CNN and other media outlets, Paula Shugart told the media that Trump’s involvement in the Miss Universe selection process ends before the final phase of the competition; the Miss Universe Organization does not appear to have ever acknowledged Trump’s involvement in the selection process beyond that point. However, Shugart indicated that the current pageant rules were put in place in 2005, suggesting that Trump had carte blanche to intervene prior to that year. Trump’s co-ownership of the pageant with NBC didn’t begin until 2003, raising the distinct possibility that NBC instituted a new judging policy in 2005 in part because it had, by then, seen how Trump comported himself at his pageants.

Rigging televised contests is a crime under both state and federal statutes. The applicable federal statute, 47 U.S.C. § 509 (prohibited practices in contests of knowledge, skill, or chance) carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison per count. Trump, who allegedly committed the crime while in Puerto Rico—where federal law applies—would have faced two counts, the first for “engaging in any artifice or scheme for the purpose of prearranging or predetermining in whole or in part the outcome of a purportedly bona fide contest”, and another for “participating in the production for broadcasting of” a contest tampered with under 47 U.S.C. § 509. Also in question is whether Trump’s actions would have contravened state or federal statutes protecting advertisers from being defrauded by the organizers of a purportedly “bona fide” broadcast competition.

Whether or not Trump can still be charged with these offenses, they are relevant to the Russia probe as crimes possibly committed to please the Russian president. Much has been made of Putin’s pride at bringing the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2018 World Cup to Russia, so his being the boyfriend—in reality or by reputation only—of the first-ever Miss Universe from Russia could not fail to have flattered him.

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14

A Russian émigré associated with the Russian criminal underworld, accompanied by his Soviet-born business partner Tevfik Arif, approaches Trump about a business partnership. The émigré, Felix Sater, will for the next few years deliver a large number of Russian clients to Trump and be instrumental in finding Russia-born partners for the biggest Trump construction project of the 2000s, Trump SoHo.

That Felix Sater has substantial ties to the mafia and to Russian intelligence officers is uncontested.

In June 2018, Newsweek said he was “linked to the mob”, adding that in the 1990s “he had done business with a number of high-ranking former Soviet intelligence officers. He eventually came back to New York but . . . stayed in touch with some of them.”

In September 2017, the Nation said that Sater had a “decades-long record . . . outside the law”, describing “his past record” as including “a conviction for lacerating a man’s face with a broken margarita glass” and “his involvement in a multimillion-dollar stock fraud and money-laundering scheme.”

In August 2017, New York Magazine, in addition to calling Sater “the moving force behind Trump SoHo”, said that “Sater introduced the future president to a byzantine world of oligarchs and mysterious money”, calling it “verifiably true” that Sater was “tied to organized crime.”

In the Washington Post in May 2016, Sater was “mafia-linked”; in the Guardian in August 2017, he was the son of “a local crime boss in Brighton Beach” who had been “involved in a mob-run stock exchange scam” and had “contacts in the Russian underworld.”

In March 2018, ABC News reported on how, in his youth, Sater discovered at a Moscow dinner party that he had “gained access to a group of high-level Russian intelligence operatives who had valuable information about Russian defense technology.”

Such is the man Trump partnered with on some of his biggest real estate deals in the 2000s and was still working with on business deals in Russia for the first year of his presidential run in 2015 and 2016 (see Chapter 4).

Paul Wood, a BBC correspondent who has repeatedly broken news on the Trump-Russia story, wrote in August 2017 that, according to his sources, “Sater may have already flipped [begun cooperation with Mueller] and given prosecutors the evidence they need to make a case against Trump.” In the same story, Wood revealed the quality of his sourcing, noting that at least one source was in contact with and receiving information from a member of Robert Mueller’s team. That source gave Wood a key piece of corroborating information on the claim that Sater was now a “CI” (meaning, variously, a “confidential informant,” a “cooperating individual,” or a “cooperating informant”) for Mueller. According to Wood, “Sater has told family and friends he knows he and [Trump] are going to prison.” Wood noted in his story that he received this information at a time when he had been hearing “for weeks” “rumors that Sater is ready to rat again.”

Wood’s sources, he explained in the article, believed that Sater was “ready to rat again” because Sater had previously been a confidential informant in an FBI probe. But in fact we know more than this: we know that Sater is specifically willing to act as a confidential informat for Mueller in his current investigation. Sater, through his attorney, has offered to cooperate with Mueller; per his lawyer, Sater “intends to be fully cooperative with any and all government investigations in this matter.” Given that, at the time Sater’s attorney issued his statement, Sater was being asked to cooperate only with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, his attorney’s use of the word “fully” and the phrase “any and all” is notable. 

In the summer of 2017, as Mueller was interviewing now cooperating witness George Papadopoulos following his arrest in late July, Sater discussed becoming a confidential informant in an interview with New York Magazine. At the time, he also made a startling claim that could have been an allusion to an upcoming FBI cooperation deal. He told the magazine, “In about the next 30 to 35 days, I will be the most colorful character you have ever talked about. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it now, before it happens. . . . [But] it ain’t anything as small as whether or not they’re gonna call me to the Senate committee.”

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15

The Trump family’s candor is called into question again in 2014, when Eric Trump tells a reporter for Golf magazine, James Dodson, that the Trumps’ golf courses are all financed by Russian banks—and that the Trump Organization has “all the money we need from Russia.” Dodson will report the quote in 2017, after Trump’s election; Eric will contend that Dodson “completely fabricated” it.

As recounted by Vanity Fair in May 2017, while speaking to Golf journalist James Dodson in 2014, Trump’s second son blurted out, apropos of nothing, that the Trump Organization had access to “$100 million” for golf courses. When Dodson pressed Eric to explain the comment—in light of the difficulty most developers had in finding golf course funding from banks during the Great Recession—Eric replied, “[W]e don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. . . . We’ve got some [Russian] guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.”

Though Dodson—whose beat is golf, not politics—had no reason to lie about Trump Organization financing, Eric responded on Twitter to Dodson’s claim by saying that Dodson had “completely fabricated” the conversation. Eric later told the New York Post that Dodson’s account was “a recollection from some guy three years ago through a third person. . . . We own our courses free and clear.” Vanity Fair observed at the time that Dodson fabricating a conversation with Trump was unlikely, in part because the substance of the conversation, as reported by Dodson, was extremely likely: “It wouldn’t be the first time that the Trumps have been connected to Russian money”, wrote the magazine. “A number of reports have indicated the Trump Organization received substantial funding from Russia when the business was struggling in the mid-1990s and again during the Great Recession, since major U.S. banks had refused to loan money to [Trump].”

The article added that, according to Reuters, a group of sixty-three Russian billionaires had invested nearly $100 million—an average of $1.6 million per Russian—in Trump’s Florida properties alone.

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