Who is Felix Sater? Meet the shady Russian investor who may be a centerpiece of the investigation
FRIDAY, JUN 23, 2017 05:00 AM EDT
Who is Felix Sater? Meet the shady Russian investor who may be a centerpiece of the investigation
Trump now claims he doesn't know this Russian-born money man linked to organized crime. Evidence suggests otherwise
BOB CESCA
This is what happens when candidates aren’t fully vetted during their campaigns. We end up with a president like Donald Trump, who admittedly might have won the election anyway, even if he’d spilled the beans about the myriad skeletons in his closet. Trump was somehow capable of surviving daily scandals that would have annihilated any other presidential contenders. Despite an exhausting election season that seemed to last for years, we’re only now, nearly 200 days into his presidency, learning more details about Trump’s duplicity, his ignorance and his dark secrets including, yes, his possible ties to both Russia and organized crime.
Back in late February, we first learned about a Trump-linked character named Felix Sater. (True scholars of Trumpology, to be fair, have known about Sater longer than that.) At the time, we discovered that Sater, along with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had approached short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn with what the New York Times has described as a peace plan designed to end the crisis in Ukraine. Flynn apparently rejected the plan, which would have significantly undermined Ukrainian sovereignty on terms highly favorable to the Russian government and Vladimir Putin. Cohen and Sater were joined in the deal by an ambitious politician named Andrii Artemenko, who apparently fancies himself as a Ukrainian version of Trump.
Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, confirmed to the Times that he did in fact deliver an envelope to Flynn’s office at the White House. But then, in keeping with the whiplash messaging of Trump and his team, Cohen denied to NBC News ever meeting with Flynn, though he did confirm that he met with Artemenko. Additionally, Cohen confirmed knowing Sater on a first-name basis, telling NBC, “I’ve known Felix for years.”
I’m not sure that’s something Cohen ought to be bragging about, especially given his close ties to the president.
According to a new bombshell article for Bloomberg by Trump biographer Timothy L. O’Brien, the Russian-born Sater — who came to the United States as a child in the 1970s — is a “career criminal” with ties to organized crime in both countries. O’Brien’s article hints that Sater could become a central figure in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into what the Washington Post has described as “suspicious financial activities” involving “Russian operatives” and Trump’s inner circle.
Sater, we learn, was involved in what’s called a “pump and dump” Wall Street scam, in which Russian and American mobsters artificially boosted the value of junk stocks and then sold the commodities at ridiculously inflated prices. In the end, it was a $40 million swindle, with unsuspecting investors being screwed out of piles of cash.
more
http://www.salon.com/2017/06/23/who-is-felix-sater-meet-the-shady-russian-investor-who-may-be-a-centerpiece-of-the-investigation/
