According to The New York Times, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is interested in a $150,000 donation Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk made to the Donald J. Trump Foundation in September 2015 in exchange for a 20-minute video appearance still available on YouTube.
Donald Trump was running to become the Republican nominee for president at the time. Mueller obtained the documents about Pinchuk's donation though a Trump Organization subpoena in mid-March.
Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer whose office and hotel room were raided on Monday in an apparently unrelated case, solicited the donation. The contribution from Mr. Pinchuk, who has sought closer ties for Ukraine to the West, was the largest the foundation received in 2015 from anyone besides Mr. Trump himself.
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The payment from Mr. Pinchuk “is curious because it comes during a campaign and is from a foreigner and looks like an effort to buy influence,” said Marcus S. Owens, a former head of the Internal Revenue Service division that oversees tax-exempt organizations. He called the donation “an unusual amount of money for such a short speech.”
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...[T]he special counsel’s investigators have questioned witnesses about whether money from the Persian Gulf had been used to finance Mr. Trump’s political efforts and asked for information on Mr. Pinchuk.
The inquiry into the Trump Organization’s payments from foreign nationals underscores how diffuse Mr. Trump’s sources of income have been over many years. And the destination of Mr. Pinchuk’s donation — the Trump Foundation instead of the president’s personal coffers — raised fresh questions about how the president handled the entity he set up to deal with charitable giving.
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Mr. Pinchuk is the son-in-law of a former president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, who from 1994 to 2005 led a government criticized for corruption, nepotism and the murder of dissident journalists. Mr. Pinchuk, who has been accused by steel makers in the United States of illegally dumping steel on the American market at artificially low prices, drew more scrutiny during the campaign for his ties to Hillary Clinton and her family foundation. He has donated more than $13 million to that organization since 2006.
Mr. Trump’s appearance was broadcast at the Yalta European Strategy conference, which promotes pro-European Union policies for Ukraine. Through his own foundation, Mr. Pinchuk sponsors the affair, which typically attracts well-known former Western leaders like former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and former President Bill Clinton. It was moved to Kiev after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
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The event, [Trump's] first foray into global politics during the campaign, was set up by Doug Schoen, a veteran political consultant and pollster who works with Mr. Pinchuk, according to a person familiar with how the speech was arranged. Mr. Schoen, a frequent Fox News guest, has known Mr. Trump for years and contacted him personally to set it up at the end of August 2015, according to the person.
Mr. Trump did not raise the prospect of any payment. But the next day, Mr. Cohen called Mr. Schoen to solicit the $150,000 as an honorarium, the person briefed on the matter said. Mr. Schoen, who had gotten to know Mr. Cohen by running into him in the green room at Fox News, dealt with him and not Mr. Trump directly, according to another person briefed on the exchange.
Read more: Mueller Investigating Ukrainian’s $150,000 Payment for a Trump Appearance (NYT)