Want to support more reporting like this? Become a BuzzFeed News member today. All the oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin.” A second source confirmed the plan. “My idea was to give a $50 million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units. “In Russia, the oligarchs would bend over backwards to live in the same building as Vladimir Putin,” Sater told BuzzFeed News. Sater told BuzzFeed News today that he and Cohen thought giving the Trump Tower’s most luxurious apartment, a $50 million penthouse, to Putin would entice other wealthy buyers to purchase their own. The two men worked furiously behind the scenes into the summer of 2016 to get the Moscow deal finished - despite public claims that the development was canned in January, before Trump won the Republican nomination. But Cohen said in court documents that he regularly briefed Trump and his family on the Moscow negotiations.īuzzFeed News first reported in May on the secret dealings of Cohen and his business associate Felix Sater with political and business figures in Moscow. The plan never went anywhere because the tower deal ultimately fizzled, and it is not clear whether Trump knew of the intention to give away the penthouse. The revelation that representatives of the Trump Organization planned to forge direct financial links with the leader of a hostile nation at the height of the campaign raises fresh questions about President Trump's relationship with the Kremlin. Cohen acknowledged in court that he had lied to Congress about the plan in order to protect Trump and his presidential campaign. The Trump Tower Moscow plan is at the heart of a new plea agreement by Cohen, who led the negotiations to bring a gleaming, 100-story building to the Russian capital. Two US law enforcement officials told BuzzFeed News that Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, discussed the idea with a representative of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary. I was running my business while I was campaigning.President Donald Trump’s company planned to give a $50 million penthouse at Trump Tower Moscow to Russian President Vladimir Putin as the company negotiated the luxury real estate development during the 2016 campaign, according to four people, one of them the originator of the plan. “There would be nothing wrong if I did do it. “We had a position to possibly do a deal, to build a building of some kind in Moscow,” Trump told reporters prior to travelling to the G20 summit in Argentina last month. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. ….Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Against all odds, I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail… Oh, I get it! I am a very good developer, happily living my life, when I see our Country going in the wrong direction (to put it mildly). The same day that the memorandum was filed, Trump tweeted that he had, in fact, “lightly looked” at a building “somewhere in Russia” which was all “very legal & very cool.” On Sunday, Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, admitted that the letter existed, but firmly maintained that “no one signed it.” Mere days later, however, Giuliani backtracked, telling the Daily News that Trump had actually signed the letter, but that it didn’t matter because it was “bullshit” and the letter didn’t go anywhere.Ĭohen’s admissions, and the memorandum, have forced Trump to change tactics. It would also have yielded the Trump administration a $4 million upfront fee with no upfront costs. The deal, which was eventually scrapped, would have opened up negotiations over Trump properties in the heart of Moscow, and included a hotel spa named after the president’s daughter, Ivanka. The letter of intent, obtained by CNN, was signed by the then-presidential candidate on October 28, 2015, around the same time that Trump began to speak positively about Russian President Vladimir Putin. A leaked 2015 letter shows that Donald Trump signed off on the intent to begin negotiations over building a Trump Tower in Moscow, days after the president’s lawyer claimed on TV that no such signature exists.
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