BuzzFeed News has published documents showing plans for Trump Tower Moscow were more than fleeting and that discussions between Michael Cohen and Felix Sater involved ways to help Donald Trump curry favor with Vladimir Putin to get the deal done.
By creating a timeline, BuzzFeed is able to show what Trump was saying about Putin in public while Cohen and Sater were maneuvering in private.
Cohen is scheduled to testify before the House Intelligence Committee behind closed doors Friday.
The documents, many of which have been exclusively obtained by BuzzFeed News, reveal that — despite Trump’s claim that the development was never more than a passing notion — the effort to get the tower built was long-running, detail-oriented, and directly entwined with the ups and downs of his campaign.
As Trump went from rally to rally, vociferously denying any dealings in Russia, his representatives, Michael Cohen and his associate Felix Sater, worked with Trump Organization lawyers and even Ivanka Trump to push forward negotiations to build a 100-story edifice just miles from the Kremlin. The fixers believed they needed Putin’s support to pull off the lucrative deal, and they planned to use Trump’s public praise for him to help secure it. At the same time, they plotted to persuade Putin to openly declare his support for Trump’s candidacy. “If he says it we own this election,” Sater wrote to Cohen.
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This large trove of nonbinding business agreements, architectural renderings, texts, emails, and plans for Trump to travel to Russia to meet Putin offer an unprecedented glimpse inside the negotiations to build the tallest tower in Europe — a deal Trump’s fixers hoped would "help world peace and make a lot of money."
Here's an email from Sater to Cohen on November 3, 2015 (p. 202) asking Cohen to pull a specific clip of Trump praising Putin during a press conference so Sater can get it to the Kremlin:
These Secret Files Show How The Trump Moscow Talks Unfolded While Trump Heaped Praise On Putin (BuzzFeed News)