The lawyer who questioned Donald Trump under oath in a civil deposition says it is now clear Trump lied about his relationship with Felix Sater, a convicted felon once connected to the Russian mafia.
“If somebody tells a flat untruth under oath then that’s the very definition of perjury,” Jared Beck said in an interview on the Law&Crime Network program
Brian Ross Investigates.
Law & Crime
Yes, and I wonder how many times he perjured himself in his written statements to Mueller.
In his testimony, Trump said he barely knew Sater and stated, “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”
Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified last week before Congress that at the time of the deposition, in 2013, Trump did know Sater, who Cohen said had an office in the Trump organization on the same floor as Trump, the 26th floor.
ABC News reported that the Trump Organization had even printed business cards for Sater, identifying him as a “senior adviser” to Donald Trump.
Hardly knew him.
A series of emails have established that Sater was deeply involved with Cohen in trying to help Trump negotiate a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow even as Trump was campaigning for President and denying he had any business deals with Russians.
Trump was being questioned in the 2013 deposition about Sater because of questions being raised about who was financing a Trump condo development in Florida.
“Sater had been convicted in a money pump and dump stock scheme that was connected to the Mafia,” said attorney Beck. “I just think Trump did not want anything on the record of associating himself or is organization specifically with someone who had such a known shady past and a connection to the criminal underworld.”
It's on the record.
Also, back when, Felix Sater
threatened to spill some beans that would not be favorable to Trump if another sleaze partner, Tevfik Arif, forced a lawsuit into the public:
Sater’s account, which came during a deposition in a libel case Trump brought against a book author, offers new insights into Trump’s relationship with a complicated figure.
Sater has both been accused by former business associates of threatening to kill them and praised by top government officials for information that has led to numerous mob convictions and national security gains.
His relationship with Trump has created unwanted attention for the real-estate-mogul-turned-presidential-candidate as Sater and his onetime company have endured legal disputes with former business associates and investors who lost money in failed Trump-branded projects.
[...]
Sater said he popped into Trump’s office frequently over a six-year period to talk business. He recalled flying to Colorado with Trump and said that Trump once asked him to escort his children Donald Jr. and Ivanka around Moscow.
WaPo
Hardly knew him.
Trump’s lawyer, said that Trump’s adult children and Sater happened to be there at the same time. “There was no accompanying them to Moscow,” Garten said.
[...]
Trump and his lawyers have said that he was not aware of Sater’s criminal past when he first signed on to do business with Sater’s firm, Bayrock Group. Sater’s involvement in the stock fraud was kept secret for years by federal prosecutors because of his role as an informant.
Well, sure. Hardly knew him.
Documents show that Trump in 2005 extended Bayrock a one-year deal to develop a project in the Russian capital.
[...]
“I handled all of the negotiations,” Sater said of the Russia deal, which did not come to fruition. Asked whether there was paperwork drawn up on the deal, he responded: “It was more of verbal updates when I’d come back, pop my head into Mr. Trump’s office and tell him, you know, ‘Moving forward on the Moscow deal.’ And he would say, ‘All right.’ ”
“I showed him photos, I showed him the site, showed him the view from the site. It’s pretty spectacular,” Sater said.
Hardly knew him.
One former Bayrock employee alleged in a lawsuit that Sater once told him during a dispute to “shut up or risk being killed.” Another lawsuit filed in Arizona in 2007 alleged that Sater had threatened a local project partner named Ernest Mennes.
According to the lawsuit, Sater called Mennes in 2006 and threatened that his cousin “would electrically shock Mr. Mennes’ testicles, cut off Mr. Mennes’ legs, and leave Mr. Mennes dead in the trunk of his car” if Mennes revealed his criminal past.
Mennes said he was barred by a legal settlement from discussing the matter. “I wish Mr. Sater well,” he said, adding that he is now supporting Trump for president.
He'd like to keep his balls.
As Sater became a more controversial figure, Trump did not cut ties.
In 2008, Trump’s lawyers asked Sater to testify in Trump’s libel suit against journalist Tim O’Brien, arguing that O’Brien’s book, “Trump Nation,” damaged his reputation and cost him projects that Bayrock and others had been pursuing. The suit was dismissed.
[...]
According to his website, Sater has continued to work in real estate and finance for a number of international companies. His site touts his work on Trump projects and his extensive philanthropy. He is an active member of Chabad, an Orthodox Jewish sect, and, in 2014, was named Man of the Year by Chabad of Port Washington, N.Y.
As Judge Ellis
might say, an "otherwise blameless life."
Sater has generally declined to comment about his relationship with Trump. But earlier this month, he tweeted his support for Trump’s presidential run, congratulating Trump on appearing to clinch the GOP nomination. “He will make the greatest President of our century,” Sater wrote.
Translation: I'll be needing a pardon.
More from those days of Trump campaigning:
Felix Sater is an immigrant who did prison time for stabbing a man in the face with the broken stem of a margarita glass, and he would surely qualify for the label “bad hombre” were he from Mexico instead of Russia.
It was only by becoming a federal informant that Sater avoided a possible 20-year term for a $40 million fraud in which the feds figure many of the victims were elderly.
Sater’s father also became an informant after being convicted of joining a Mafia soldier shaking down small businesses in Brooklyn for nearly a decade.
None of that stopped Donald Trump from having extensive business dealings with Sater that included the high-rise Trump SoHo New York hotels and condos.
[...]
[T]he president’s longtime personal attorney sat down for coffee in a Manhattan hotel with this Russian immigrant.
According to
The New York Times, Trump attorney Michael Cohen and Sater were party to some amateur diplomacy aimed at settling the Russian war on Ukraine with a plan to push Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko out of office.
Cohen insisted to The Daily Beast that the
Times account was wrong and that he had not been involved in the peace plan.
Cohen did acknowledge sitting down briefly with Sater at a Manhattan hotel last month.
[...]
[Also in the meeting] was Andrii Artemenko, a rich Ukrainian member of parliament of dubious reputation in his home country. Artemenko claims to have material evidence of Poroshenko’s corruption so compelling as to force the Ukrainian president from office.
Daily Beast
The story just gets better and better, doesn't it? You think Cohen hasn't discussed this with Mueller's team?
The Times stands by its account, saying that Cohen had told the paper that he delivered a copy of the plan to the office of then-National Security Adviser Mike Flynn shortly before Flynn was fired. [...] Artemenko reportedly insists that their peace proposal was met with approval among senior aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
[...]
Much about Trump’s presidency, and the cast of characters it has assembled, challenges even the most imaginative Hollywood screenwriting, but Sater’s backstory is an especially remarkable example.
[...]
In his early twenties, Sater had a three-year stint as a successful broker on Wall Street before he slashed that man’s face open in El Rio Grande, a Manhattan bar, causing the victim a wound which required 110 stitches.
[...]
Sater mostly escaped public notice until 1998, when the manager at a Manhattan Mini Storage in SoHo opened a cubicle Sater had rented under a false female name (the account was in arrears) and made an interesting discovery. In addition to a 12-gauge shotgun and two 9-millimeter pistols were a box and gym bag containing documents that led the FBI to a massive “pump-and-dump” stock fraud, racketeering, and international money laundering scheme, the architects of which were later shown to be Sater and two of his longtime business colleagues, Gennady “Gene” Klotsman and Salvatore Lauria.
[...]
As Sater and his co-defendants would later admit when pleading guilty, [Sater companies] White Rock and State Street made money by lying about the worth and ownership of securities, encouraging brokerage firms to peddle the artificially inflated stocks, then laundering the proceeds through various off-shore accounts. All told, they stole about $40 million, much of it from elderly investors.
[...]
Moreover, their illicit activities involved four different Italian mafia crime families, as a subsequent grand jury indictment in 2000 stated.
[...]
U.S. Attorney Lynch seemed to make ample use of the Saters, who were a unique father and son team, both working as informants with the same Mafia henchmen, but different FBI handlers on different cases. In a letter addressed to U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch during her confirmation hearing to become Barack Obama’s attorney general, she wrote that as a decade-long informant Felix Sater provided “information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra.”
A "rat" the man who hardly knew him might say.
[F]or five years, Sater [through company Bayrock whose offices were in Trump Tower] did deal after licensing deal with the Trump Organization, all over the country. [...] Email correspondence obtained by Forbes showed direct contact between Donald, Jr. and Sater in discussions about a Florida high-rise.
Poor Junior is very close to being thrown under the bus by Dear Old Dad. Could Mueller flip Junior? Perhaps. Perhaps.
In 2007, the Charles Bagli of The New York Times profiled Sater owing to Bayrock’s involvement in developing the Trump SoHo. Sater, Trump and three of the latter’s children—Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka—attended the unveiling ceremony for the 46-story luxury condo-hotel in the chic Manhattan neighborhood. Trump, Arif, and Sater were photographed standing next to one another at that event.
That picture above. But, Trump wouldn't know him if he was standing next to him.
[I]n a 2013 deposition related to a separate libel case, Trump claimed that Sater “may” have directly brought a Fort Lauderdale project to him years earlier, while denying any knowledge of his ties to organized crime. “I don’t think he was connected to the Mafia. He got into a barroom fight.”
Never questioned it. Hardly knew him.
In October 2009, 11 years after his indictment, Sater finally faced sentencing for his financial crime in a closed Brooklyn courtroom. He addressed the judge.
“Yes, I am guilty of the things that I have done,” he said. “The worst thing that could happen, your honor, despite whatever sentence you impose on me… I went into real estate development and I built a very successful real estate company… a Trump project. I built the whole thing. Years ago, they wrote an article in the newspaper, ‘Executive With Ties to Donald Trump Has Criminal Past.’ The next month, I had to leave my company, the company I had built with my own hands.”
He spoke of his parents and his sincerity was somewhat undercut by those who knew of his father’s conviction for years of racketeering.
“I hated myself, despised myself for doing the things that I was doing while I was doing them, because my parents did not sacrifice what they sacrificed to have me come to this country and become a criminal,” he said.
Too bad he didn't draw Judge Ellis for that case. Or maybe he did.
Sater was ordered to pay a $25,000 fine rather than the $40 million in restitution he might have been required to pay and to serve no jail time rather than as many as 20 years.
Or, it could be that he was just too valuable an informant and CIA asset.
In 2013, Sater’s connection to Trump, who was still two years shy of running for national office, caused the mogul one of his many moments of pique with a member of the international press. Trump stormed out of a BBC Panorama interview when asked by John Sweeney, “Shouldn’t you have said, Felix Sater, you’re connected with the Mafia and you’re fired.” Trump replied by suggesting Sweeney might be “thick” and that he could not break a contract with Bayrock even if Sater’s mob ties were established to his satisfaction.
Hardly knew him.
By 2010, Sater was out at Bayrock—but in at the Trump Organization. He reportedly brandished a business card naming him as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.” He also had a valid email address at the organization, a phone number that had previously belonged to one of Trump’s general counsels, and his own office in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
Hardly knew him.
Jody Kriss, the former finance director of Bayrock, alleged that he was entitled to a share of the $227 million profits in the Trump SoHo project. As reported by The Daily Beast in August 2016, Kriss claimed, in a court case filed in Delaware, that he was owed $7 million for his work on the project but offered a settlement of only half a million dollars. His principal antagonist in recouping his investment, he said, was Felix Sater.
In sworn testimony, Kriss stated that his money had become entangled with an Icelandic financial company known as FL Group, which seemed to draw Russian investors “in favor” with Vladimir Putin. (Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif was also part of this deal.) According to Kriss:
“Felix Satter [sic] told me that the deal with FL prohibited me from getting the rest in that I could either take the money and shut up or risk being killed if I made trouble.
[...]
In a separate and still-pending suit to which Kriss is a plaintiff, this one filed in New York’s Southern District, he has alleged that “tax evasion and money-laundering are the core of Bayrock’s business model.”
[...]
As for Sater, he had coffee the other day with the president's personal lawyer and discussed a peace plan for Ukraine. He was apparently not among the immigrants Trump had in mind when he spoke to a gathering of CEOs on Thursday about his deportation efforts.
“We’re getting really bad dudes out of this country at a rate no one has seen before,” Trump said.
The case
was settled in February last year. Terms are unknown.
More evidence of Sater’s connections to Trump could emerge next week when Sater is scheduled to testify before Congress in an open session.
Law & Crime
That's not to be missed. Currently scheduled for March 14, I believe.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
