I told you last night’s Trump Tower Moscow bombshell was merely a teaser. It just got much, much bigger.
Last night the Washington Post reported that Donald Trump was trying to build Trump Tower Moscow during the election. The story stood out, not only because it’s a major bombshell, but because it had been rushed out in seemingly in half finished fashion – and published while the public was instead focused on Hurricane Harvey flooding. I pointed out last night that this had to be nothing more than a teaser, with more to come. And sure enough, the story got much bigger today.
Now we know why the WaPo was in such a hurry to publish what it had last night: it was racing the New York Times, which was working on a much bigger version of the same story. Now the Times has published its own version today, and it’s nothing short of stunning. Not only were Donald Trump and convicted Russian mafia figure Felix Sater trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, they’d been trying to pull it off dating back to 2006, when Sater took Ivanka Trump to the Kremlin. But that’s just the beginning.
During the 2016 election cycle Sater sent an email to Donald Trump’s longtime attorney Michael Cohen, stating “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it” and “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process” (NY Times). This may help explain why Cohen has since hired an attorney of his own. The infamous Trump-Russia dossier has asserted that Cohen played a key role in negotiating the terms of the Kremlin’s blackmail over Trump, though Cohen has long denied this. Now he’s allegedly right back to being in the thick of it. But there’s more.
Sater also says that “I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin.” Ivanka has responded by admitting she toured the Kremlin but insisting that she never met Putin. This is getting deeper by the minute. Remarkably, this is probably still just the warmup act. It’s clear the Washington Post and New York Times are racing each other to unearth the details of this story in real time.
