Trump's buddy Sater in the news again

As The Washington Post reported on Sunday, the Trump Organization was actively pursuing real-estate opportunities in Russia in late 2015 and early 2016 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The project was spearheaded by Russian-born developer and longtime Trump associate Felix Sater (who helped build Trump SoHo) and Michael Cohen, an executive vice president at the Trump Organization and the president’s longtime personal attorney.

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On Monday, The New York Times followed up on the Post report, releasing portions of the e-mail exchanges between Sater and Cohen, which the Trump Organization turned over to Congressional investigators . “I arranged for Ivanka [Trump] to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater wrote in an e-mail to Cohen on November 3, 2015, the Times reports. “I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this,” he continued.

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There is no evidence that Sater fulfilled the promises he outlined in his correspondence. “He has sometimes used colorful language,” Cohen said in a statement to the Times, describing Sater as “prone to ‘salesmanship.’” Cohen added that he “ultimately determined that the proposal was not feasible and never agreed to make a trip to Russia.”

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Earlier this month, Sater confirmed the deal to Talking Points Memo, but said Trump’s candidacy derailed the Moscow plans. “Once the campaign was really going-going, it was obvious there were going to be no deals internationally,” Sater said. “We were still working on it, doing something with it, November-December.”

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In a subsequent article on Monday, the Post reported that Cohen e-mailed Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s personal assistant, in an attempt to reboot the stalled development deal, according to e-mails provided to congressional investigators.

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In a statement to the Post, Cohen downplayed the importance of the deal as “simply one of many development opportunities that the Trump Organization considered and ultimately rejected.” He also dismissed the idea that it was in any way tied to Trump’s presidential bid.

  Vanity Fair

As you would. And hope the FBI doesn't ask you directly. Never mind you're telling it to Congress. They're a bunch of worthless twits and can't hurt you. And won't even try as long as they're led by Republicans.

He added that he only sent the e-mail to Peskov at the urging of Sater and does not remember receiving a response.

I've got a feeling there's an agent in some FBI office who could tell him whether he did or not.

But he did also note that he discussed the Trump Tower Moscow deal with Trump on three occasions and said the president signed the letter of intent in 2015, according to an ABC News report.

The revelation that the Trump Organization reportedly sought a massive commercial real-estate deal in Moscow during the campaign may help explain why Trump was so passionate about thawing relations between the United States and Russia.

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The e-mails also belie repeated denials by both Trump and his legal team that he had any business interests in Russia.

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Cohen and Sater have been recurring figures in the Russian melodrama currently roiling Capitol Hill. In February, The New York Times reported that Cohen and Sater met with Andrii Artemenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, to discuss a proposal outlining how Trump could lift U.S. sanctions against Moscow. According to the Times, Cohen told the outlet that he hand-delivered the “peace plan” to then National Security Adviser Mike Flynn. (Cohen later denied that he delivered it to the former general.)

Has he talked to the special prosecutor's team yet?

Sater, who pleaded guilty for his involvement in a Mafia-related stock manipulation scheme in 1998, has also worked closely with Trump on a number of real-estate deals in the past, including the controversial Trump SoHo development.

And Sater won't be a bit shy about telling the FBI everything he knows. This is why, I believe, Trump was so "passionate" about keeping the FBI out of his real estate business.

“The next three years of hearings about Trump and Russia will yield absolutely nothing. I know the man, they didn’t collude,” he told New York magazine in an interview earlier this month. “Did a bunch of meetings happen? Absolutely. The people on the Trump team who had any access to the Russians wanted to be first in and be the guys that ran the whole détente thing. Michael Flynn wanted to be the détente guy, and then [Paul] Manafort, I’m sure, wanted to be the détente guy. Shit, I wanted to be the détente guy, why not? But was it really a conspiracy between Putin and Donald to get him elected? A little bit of a stretch.”

That was for public consumption. Has he talked to Mueller yet?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.