A top executive from Donald Trump's real estate company emailed Vladimir Putin's personal spokesman during the U.S. presidential campaign last year to ask for help advancing a stalled Trump Tower development project in Moscow, according to documents submitted to Congress on Monday.
Michael Cohen, a Trump attorney and executive vice president for the Trump Organization, sent the email in January 2016 to Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's top press aide.
In a statement Cohen submitted to congressional investigators, he said he wrote the email at the recommendation of Felix Sater, a Russian-American businessman who was serving as a broker on the deal.
In that statement, obtained by The Washington Post, Cohen said Sater suggested the outreach because a Trump development in Moscow would require Russian government approval. He said he did not recall receiving a response from Peskov and the project was abandoned two weeks later. The email, addressed to Peskov, appeared to have been sent to a general Kremlin press account.
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"Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower - Moscow project in Moscow City," Cohen wrote Peskov, according to a person familiar with the email. "Without getting into lengthy specifics the communication between our two sides has stalled.
"As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon," Cohen wrote.
Cohen's email marks the most direct communication yet documented by a top Trump aide to a similarly senior member of Putin's government.
The email shows the Trump business official directly seeking Kremlin assistance in advancing Trump's business interests, in the same months when Trump was distinguishing himself on the campaign trail with his warm rhetoric about Putin.
White House special counsel Ty Cobb said Trump knew nothing about Cohen's effort to enlist Peskov's help.
"The mere fact that there was no apparent response suggests this is a non-collusion story," he said.
Cohen has been one of Trump's closest aides for more than a decade. He did not take a formal role in the campaign; however he sometimes spoke to reporters on Trump's behalf and appeared on television as a surrogate while Trump was running.
"It should come as no surprise that, over four decades, the Trump Organization has received and reviewed countless real estate development opportunities, both domestic and international," Cohen said in a statement to the Post. "The Trump Moscow proposal was simply one of many development opportunities that the Trump Organization considered and ultimately rejected."
He said he abandoned the project because he lost confidence the Moscow developer would be able to obtain land, financing and government approvals to complete the project. "It was a building proposal that did not succeed and nothing more," he said.
The Washington Post reported Sunday that Cohen had been in negotiations with Sater to attempt to build a Trump Tower in the Russian capital from September 2015 through the end of January 2016, as Trump was competing for the Republican nomination for president.
Cohen told congressional investigators that the deal was envisioned as a licensing project, in which Trump would have been paid for the use of his name by a Moscow-based developer called I.C. Expert Investment Co. Cohen said Trump signed a letter of intent with the company on Oct. 28, 2015, and began to solicit designs from architects and discuss financing.
However, he said government permission was not forthcoming and the project was abandoned "for business reasons."
"I did not ask or brief Mr. Trump, or any of his family, before I made the decision to terminate further work on the proposal. The Trump Tower Moscow proposal was not related in any way to Mr. Trump's presidential campaign," Cohen wrote in his statement to congressional investigators. "The decision to pursue the proposal initially, and later to abandon it were unrelated to the Donald J. Trump for President Campaign."
Cohen told congressional investigators that Sater "constantly" pushed him to travel to Moscow as part of the negotiations but that he declined to do so. He said Sater, who has attempted to broker Trump deals for more than a decade, was "prone to salesmanship." As a result, Cohen said, he did not routinely apprise others in the company about their interactions and never considered asking Trump to go to Moscow, as Sater had requested.
"To be clear, the Trump Organization has never had any real estate holdings or interests in Russia," the Trump Organization said Monday in a statement.
Sater said in a statement Monday that he brought the idea of the largest tower in Russia to Cohen, his longtime friend. Despite Sater's enthusiasm for the plan, he said, the Trump Organization abandoned it.
"Michael Cohen was the only member of the Trump Organization who I communicated with on this project," Sater said.
Wheeler-dealer Sater
Also among the documents the Trump Organization turned over on Monday to the House Intelligence Committee were a series of emails from Sater to Cohen.
Several congressional committees and special counsel Robert Mueller are investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia related to his successful run for the White House last year. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russian government interfered with the 2016 presidential election to try to help Trump. Investigators want to know whether anyone on Trump's team was part of that process.
In some of those messages obtained by The New York Times, Sater boasted about his ties to Putin and predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would highlight Trump's savvy negotiating skills and be a political boon to his candidacy.
"Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it," Sater wrote in an email. "I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process."
Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank that was under U.S. sanctions for involvement in Kremlin efforts to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow.
"I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected," Sater wrote.
Sater said he was eager to show video clips to his Russian contacts of instances of Trump speaking glowingly about Russia.
There is no evidence in the emails that Sater delivered on his promises, and one email suggests that Sater overstated his Russian ties.
None of the emails obtained by the Times include any responses from Cohen to Sater's messages.
The emails obtained by the Times make no mention of Russian efforts to damage Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign or the hacking of Democrats' emails. Trump has said there was no collusion with Russian officials. Previously released emails, however, revealed that his campaign was willing to receive damaging information about Clinton from Russian sources.
Sater was a broker for the Trump Organization at the time of his messages to Cohen, which means he was paid to deliver real estate deals. He presents himself in his emails as so influential in Russia that he helped arrange a 2006 trip that Trump's daughter Ivanka took to Moscow.
"I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin's private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin," he said.
Ivanka Trump said she had no involvement in the discussions about the Moscow deal. In a statement, she said that during the 2006 trip, she took "a brief tour of Red Square and the Kremlin" as a tourist. She said it is possible she sat in Putin's chair during that tour but she did not recall it. "I have never met President Vladimir Putin," she said.
Information for this article was contributed by Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger and Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington Post; by Matt Apuzzo and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times; and by David Voreacos of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 08/29/2017