Assessment of the Moscow Project revelation

Trump withheld material information about his business interests in Russia from the American people at a critical time during the campaign.

As questions swirled around candidate Trump, his campaign associates and their potential connections to the Russian government, the Trump Organization concealed its outreach to the Kremlin on the Moscow Project. In July 2016, Trump told CBS News, “I have nothing to do with Russia. I don’t have any jobs in Russia. I’m all over the world but we’re not involved in Russia.” In January 2017, Trump said at his first major press conference as president-elect, “I have no dealings with Russia … I have no deals that could happen in Russia because we’ve stayed away.” He added, “We could make deals in Russia very easily if we wanted to, I just don’t want to because I think that would be a conflict.”

  Just Security

And today he says otherwise...



Trump's greatest enemy is his own mouth.

In addition to the enormous leverage Putin could hold over Trump by way of a carrot (the plan was to build the tallest building on the continent) and a stick (public disclosure of a secret deal), it is important to put these new revelations in context of other information about Russian election interference and ties to the Trump campaign.

First, Russian emigre and longtime Trump business associate, Felix Sater (“Individual 2” in the plea documents who negotiated the deal with Cohen), reportedly emailed Cohen on Nov. 3, 2015 to say, “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. … 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 Putins [sic] team to buy in on this.” In short, the statement directly and explicitly connected the deal to Russian efforts to help Trump win the White House.

In moving the Moscow Project deal forward, Sater put Cohen directly in communication with a former member of Russian military intelligence (Sater also reportedly told Congress, “No such thing as a former Russian spy.”). And, according to the most in-depth investigative report on the Moscow deal, some of the very same Russians with whom Cohen was interacting on the Russia deal were also involved in the election interference operation.

[...]

We now know, thanks to Cohen’s plea, that the Moscow Project was discussed multiple times within the Trump Organization. This includes with Trump himself and his family members who worked there. The court documents read:

COHEN discussed the status and progress of the Moscow Project with Individual 1 on more than the three occasions COHEN claimed to the Committee, and he briefed family members of Individual 1 within the Company about the project.

Of course, it’s impossible to discern from this alone which family members were included in these discussions. Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka and Eric all worked for the Trump Organization at this time. Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, never held a position at the Trump Organization, but it’s possible he was included in these discussions or was made aware of them as he was a senior adviser on Trump’s campaign. Of Trump’s three children who worked for him, only Donald Trump Jr. has testified before Congress on this matter. In his testimony to Congress, Trump Jr. downplayed his knowledge of the Moscow Project, saying he was “peripherally aware” that something was being pursued, that he knew “very little” about the deal Cohen was pursuing, and that he “wasn’t involved” in it.

[...]

However, he and Ivanka had been very involved in previous attempts to get a project in Moscow off the ground, and have traveled to Russia for it.

[...]

“It’s obviously significant that Trump and Cohen pursued a business deal with the Russian government well into his campaign, and lied about it, but it may be even more important why the deal stopped precisely when it did,” notes Just Security’s Julian Sanchez.

Here are the relevant dates to track: In early May, Cohen emailed Sater about a possible trip to Russia to discuss the Moscow Project. He told Sater that he could travel to Russia “before Cleveland,” a reference to the Republican National Convention taking place that summer in Ohio, and that Trump could make such a trip “once he becomes the nominee after the convention.” On May 6, 2016, Cohen confirmed with Sater that a June 16-19 trip to Russia would work for Cohen.

On June 9, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met with suspected Russian agents who promised to deliver “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. On that same day, Sater started sending Cohen “numerous messages,” about the upcoming Moscow trip “including forms for Cohen to complete.” Then, on June 14, the first public report is made of suspected Russian government hackers penetrating the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. That same day, Cohen met Sater in the lobby of Trump Tower to tell Sater that “he would not be traveling at that time.”

[...]

It is also worth noting that the court documents include the detail that Cohen “asked a senior campaign official about potential business travel to Russia.” This further connects Cohen’s business dealings with the Kremlin with Trump’s presidential campaign.

[...]

“These are all details that didn’t strictly need to be in the plea, and they prompt the obvious question: What changed between early May and June 14?” asks Sanchez. “Did something cause Trump to abruptly become concerned about being overtly tied to the Russian government, long before anyone was publicly talking about ‘collusion’? To suddenly abandon a potentially lucrative deal after pursuing it for months is a fairly dramatic step that might imply an uncannily prescient understanding of how serious a liability such public entanglement might become.”

Just Security’s Laura Rozen also identified the conspicuous timing of these events and, in particular, that Mueller chose to reference these specific dates: “I am struck by the specific timing Mueller included in the statement of information for Cohen canceling plans for the Russia trip…I expect Mueller’s inclusion of those dates is not random.”

[...]

Just Security’s Alex Whiting said: “The Cohen plea marks yet another instance of a person selected by Trump who committed federal crimes while working for him. The accumulation of criminality surrounding Trump is frankly staggering..”Speaking of which, did Cohen act alone in deciding to lie to Congress? How did he expect to get away with it unless he thought Trump and others in the Trump Organization would not tell the truth either? In other words, is this yet again, a pattern of lying that suggests an organized effort to mislead federal authorities, and, if so, who was involved in that potential criminal conspiracy?

[...]

“The Cohen plea and cooperation agreement is another reminder that it is difficult to assess the state of the Mueller investigation on a day to day basis. When the Manafort plea and cooperation agreement fell apart, and Corsi announced that he was rejecting a plea deal, it seemed to some that the Mueller investigation was perhaps stumbling. Now today’s Cohen news indicates that it is piling up more successful prosecutions. These ups and downs should remind us that the investigation is a complex one, appears to have many threads, is moving in a number of directions at once, and most importantly that there is a lot, a lot, that we do not yet know.”

Here's to eventually finding out.