Slate "New Trump Tower Revelations Put T's Flattery of Putin in a Disturbing New Light

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/trump_s_long_campaign_to_make_trump_tower_moscow_happen.html

Trump’s Real Campaign

The latest Trump Tower Moscow revelations put Trump’s flattery of Putin in a disturbing new light.

By William Saletan

Every time President Trump and his aides deny secret transactions with Russians, we find out later that they were lying. First it was the December 2016 phone conversation about sanctions between Russia’s U.S. ambassador and Trump’s then–incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Then it was the June 2016 meeting, based on a promise of dirt that could be used against Hillary Clinton, between Russian government emissaries and Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trump’s then–campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Along the way, we discovered Manafort’s Putin-supporting work, additional Russian meetings with Kushner, and much more. We never know what the New York Times or the Washington Post will find next. All we know, from consistent experience, is that Trump’s people are lying.


The latest news, broken by reporters for the Post and Times, is that from September 2015 to January 2016, as Trump was running for president, he was also trying to get approval from the Russian government to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. This exposes one more lie: Trump’s routine declaration, made at least five times during his campaign, transition, and presidency, that he had “nothing to do with Russia” as a businessman. Now Trump and his company have retreated to a new alibi. They say Trump dropped the project because he didn’t get Russian approval, and that’s the end of the story. But it isn’t.

Trump has been trying to build a hotel in Moscow for decades. Until this week, the most recent attempt his company had acknowledged was in 2013. But now, thanks to pressure from congressional Russia investigators, the Trump Organization has coughed up emails and a statement about the project. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, confirms that he talked to Trump about the project three times and that in October 2015, Trump signed a letter of intent to move forward with it. Trump’s business team had an investor and a licensing plan. They talked to architects and sought financing.

But they needed one more thing: help from Vladimir Putin’s government. On Nov. 3, 2015, Cohen’s business associate, Felix Sater, told Cohen in an email: “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. … I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.” Two months later, ostensibly at Sater’s request, Cohen wrote to Putin’s aide, Dmitry Peskov, requesting “assistance” in “arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals” to facilitate the project. In a statement to congressional investigators, Cohen writes that he sent the email to Peskov because “the proposal would require approvals within the Russian government that had not been issued.”

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