The Trump Organization not only pursued this opportunity in secret, it - indeed, Trump himself - actively misled the public. The Post next reported that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen emailed Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in January 2016 in a bid to save the deal that Cohen discussed the project with Trump on three occasions and that the effort was dropped when Russian government permission was unforthcoming. It was possible, when The Washington Post first broke the news of the failed deal, to discount the proposal as braggadocio from Felix Sater, the Russian-born real estate developer pushing the deal.īut as it turned out, this was more than Sater freelancing in Trump’s name. It represented something much more disturbing, even unpatriotic. Trump Tower Moscow was not another instance of Trump as unabashed cross-promoter-in-chief, like using the campaign press corps to help tout the reopening of his Scottish golf course. You cannot - even if the prospect of winning seems remote - put yourself in a position of being financially beholden to a hostile foreign power. When you run for president, you cannot - you should not - put yourself in the position of using that candidacy as a door-opening business opportunity. And not just pursuing financial opportunities in Russia, but actively seeking the help of at least one senior Russian official to gain government approval for the project. While he ran for president, Trump was simultaneously - and secretly - pursuing financial opportunities with a foreign adversary. To recap, what we know now that we did not know until recently: The latest revelations feel, at least for now, like more of a political bombshell than a legal problem, but the two are closely related consider how many public officials have landed themselves in legal jeopardy trying to save their political hides. Harvey deluged the Gulf Coast, drowning out the news about Trump’s involvement with Russia. That is where we are now when it comes to the investigation of President Donald Trump and Russia. The lengthy cast of characters resembles a Russian novel. The facts dribble out, in ever more confusing increments. Email: comes a point in the unspooling of every complex political-financial-legal scandal when the story becomes so complicated that it’s easy to lose the thread of what matters. That was an apparent reversal from Wednesday’s television appearance in which he said, “I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign.” He had previously denied any collusion.Ruth Marcus is a columnist for The Washington Post. In the statement, he said “there was no collusion by President Trump in any way, shape or form” and that he had “no knowledge of any collusion by any of the thousands of people who worked on the campaign.” On Thursday, he issued a statement aimed at clarifying a TV interview from the night before in which he appeared to leave open the possibility of collusion between Russia and members of Trump’s presidential campaign. This was the second time within the past week that Giuliani has walked back comments from the previous day. He concluded by saying the Moscow project “was in the earliest stage and did not advance beyond a free non-binding letter of intent.” Giuliani said Monday in a three-sentence statement that his comments “did not represent the actual timing or circumstances of any discussions.” He said his comments were “hypothetical” and “not based on conversations” he had with the president. That extends the timeline for negotiations well beyond what the president has publicly acknowledged. Giuliani suggested in a TV interview Sunday that Trump remembers conversations with Cohen about the project “up to as far as October, November,” or right up until the 2016 presidential election. President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Monday clarified comments he made about discussions between Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen and then-candidate Trump about a real estate project in Moscow.Ĭohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress in 2017 by saying he had abandoned the Trump Tower project in January 2016 even though prosecutors say he actually pursued it into June.
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