Russian Intelligence, Eurasian Organized Crime, and the Trump Tower Moscow Project
This article covers Donald Trump’s quest to build Trump Tower Moscow, which took place prior to, and during, the 2016 presidential election.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
Trump, the Agalarovs, and the First Proposed Trump Tower Moscow Project
Between the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant and his unlikely rise to the presidency, Donald Trump pursued several opportunities to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
While Trump had dreamed since the late 1980s of scoring a major development in the Russian capital, the prospect of a presidential contender negotiating a major real estate deal with a foreign adversary during the heart of the campaign was unprecedented in American history.
Trump and his negotiators well understood that a deal of this magnitude needed the blessing of Putin. Furthermore, by publicly denying that he had any business interests in Russia while they were secretly underway, Trump provided the Kremlin with leverage it could use against him.
Trump’s actions vis-a-vis the proposed Trump Tower Moscow project seem to be those of a man who did not plan on winning the election, but rather using the limelight to reignite his flagging business career.
While Trump’s previous efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow have been chronicled a previous article, a new opportunity arose through his business partnership with Aras Agalarov.
According to to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Agalarovs are closely connected to Eurasian organized crime.
Esteemed author and journalist Catherine Belton has written that Aras Agalarov worked with the KGB on international money laundering operations.
Read my description of Trump’s activities during the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, as well as the Agalarovs’ relationship with the Russian power structure and Eurasian organized crime, here.
Paula Shugart, the President of The Miss Universe Organization, recalled Trump and Emin Agalarov discussing partnering for a Trump Tower Moscow project during a tour of Crocus Hall in Moscow on November 8th, 2013, the day before the facility hosted the Miss Universe Pageant.
On the day of the Pageant, Trump told RT, “I have plans for the establishment of business in Russia. Now, I am in talks with several Russian companies to establish this skyscraper.”
The same article quoted Aras Agalarov as telling a separate Russian news outlet that, “We started talking about joint work in the field of real estate a few days ago.”
A day after the Pageant, Emin Agalarov exchanged emails with the architect William McGee and alluded to the project, writing “We may do a tower with [Trump] now.”
Trump thanked Emin and his father on Twitter and referred to the project, writing, “I had a great weekend with you and your family. You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP-TOWER MOSCOW is next. Emin was WOW!”
Thus began yet another major Trump Organization push to score a Moscow development, a campaign that consisted of multiparty, clandestine negotiations that extended into the 2016 Presidential campaign. Throughout, Trump lavished Vladimir Putin with praise, as it was he who would ultimately determine whether the project moved forward.
Donald Trump, Jr. introduced himself to Emin Agalarov via email on November 19th, 2013, writing that his father had asked him to reach out to discuss next steps on moving forward with a Trump Tower or hotel in Moscow. Emin replied within hours, enthusiastically agreeing to speak and to see if they could shepherd the project forward.
“I’ve spoken to my Father about our conversation and all looks very positive,” Emin wrote to Trump, Jr. the next day. “[G]eneral terms are suitable for a negotiation, let’s identify the land and building (we have a few options) and get the ball rolling contractually.”
On November 25th, 2013, The Moscow Times wrote that Trump had made an appearance in one of Emin Agalarov’s music videos.
At Trump’s request, one of his employees printed out a copy of the article. Trump scribbled a note onto the printout and sent it to Emin. It read: “Emin, You Are The Greatest! Trump Tower Moscow?”
On December 5th, Donald Trump, Jr. and Emin Agalarov signed a preliminary but formal agreement.
The next day, Emin sent the signed agreement to Donald Trump, Jr. and introduced him, via email, to Irakli Kaveladze.
Irakli Kaveladze, Crocus, and Money Laundering for Eurasian Organized Crime and Russian Intelligence
Kaveladze was born in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia in 1960 and immigrated to the United States in 1991 after the collapse of the USSR. Two years earlier, in 1989, Kaveladze had been hired by Aras Agalarov and the Crocus Group where he eventually became a Vice President. His work at Crocus led him to spend extended periods of time in Moscow.
The same year Kaveladze moved to the United States, he incorporated International Business Creations (IBC) in Delaware, a State noted for the ease with which foreign entities can establish U.S. shell corporations.
IBC, along with another company Kaveladze established called Euro-American, established nearly 2,000 US shell companies for 30–50 Moscow-based brokers. As Delaware law did not require due diligence on who was opening up these corporations, none was performed.
American authorities later came to believe that Kaveladze was engaging in money laundering activities for his clients, which included his boss at Crocus, Aras Agalarov.
Certain of these Moscow-based brokers specifically requested that IBC/Euro-American open bank accounts with wire transfer capabilities for the Delaware-registered corporations they had established.
IBC/Euro-American set up 100 such accounts at Citibank between 1991 and 2000, during which time nearly $800 million was deposited into the accounts before being taken out of the country again, a tell-tale sign of money laundering.
In addition to this, $600 million was moved through 100 accounts set up at the Commercial Bank of San Francisco between 1996 and 1999. A total of $1.4 billion of money suspected to have been laundered out of Russia and the former Soviet Union traveled through the accounts Kaveladze established.
In 1994, just under 10% of the Commercial Bank of San Francisco had been purchased by a Latvian computer science mathematician named Boris Avramovich Goldstein and his Bulgarian partner Peter Nenkov. Goldstein was put on the banks board and made its international director, where he used his connections to the former Soviet Union to double the privately held bank’s asset base from $81 to $167 million.
Kaveladze claims he was introduced to Goldstein by a Russian third party in 1996. Goldstein suggested that Kaveladze open up accounts for his Russian clients at Commercial Bank and they formalized the agreement in April. 40% of the total deposits into Commercial Bank of San Francisco came from IBC/Euro-American.
Goldstein’s and Nenkov’s pasts were colorful to say the least.
After earning a fortune through an early software company, Goldstein founded Dalderis Bank in Latvia. In 1991 Dalderis merged with another Latvian financial institution, Sakaru Bank. Following the merger Goldstein’s shell company HL Trading became Sakaru’s largest shareholder.
Other shareholders included Mabatex, the Swiss construction firm at the heart of a KGB-manufactured bribery scandal involving Bori Yelstin, and Pattyranie, another Swiss-based firm operated by a close associate Latvia’s then most powerful gangster, Vladimir Ivanovich Leskov.
The Business Manager of Sakaru Bank was Edmund Johanson, the final chairman of the Latvian KGB before the dissolution of the USSR.
According to US intelligence, Goldstein’s companies employed up to five former Latvian KGB-members.
While it was doing business with Kaveladze, Commercial Bank of San Francisco was also servicing an account linked to Semyon Mogilevich that was involved in the Bank of New York money laundering scandal.
Read my in-depth description of the Bank of New York global laundromat and its connections to Eurasian organized crime and global intelligence agencies, here.
Kaveladze, who vigorously denies being involved in money laundering activities despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, avoided being indicted for the simple reason that Delaware did not legally require due diligence on the corporations established there.
The First Trump Tower Moscow Project, Contd.
After the introduction, Trump, Jr. and Kaveladze came to an agreement whereby the Trump Organization would receive a flat 3.5% fee on sales on any future Trump Tower Moscow project. Over the course of January and February 2014, the two parties negotiated a letter of intent.
On January 13th, 2014, Trump, Jr. and Emin Agalarov dined together at Nobu in New York City, where Emin’s British publicist Rob Goldstone recalled that the two discussed Trump Tower Moscow. Ultimately, a proposal for an 800-unit, 194-meter skyscraper to be erected on the Agalarov-owned “Crocus City” was drawn up and submitted to the Trump Organization.
Shortly thereafter, Ivanka Trump travelled to Moscow. Irakli Kaveladze met Ivanka at the Crocus Group office in Moscow prior to her visit to the proposed building site.
After the visit, Ivanka wrote to thank Emin, “I am very excited about our collaboration and am confident that our families will enjoy great success together. We look forward to meeting with you again in the US in March to review the details of the proposed Trump Tower with your architects.”
“When I went to Russia with the Miss Universe Pageant,” Trump told Fox and Friends on February 10th, 2014, a week after Ivanka’s trip to Moscow, “[Putin] contacted me and was so nice. I mean, the Russian people were so fantastic to us.”
Trump continued, “I’ll just say this, they are doing — they’re outsmarting us at many turns, as we all understand. I mean, their leaders are, whether you call them smarter or more cunning or whatever, but they’re outsmarting us. If you look at Syria or other places, they’re outsmarting us.”
While Trump engaged in a media blitz flattering Putin, which continued throughout his presidential campaign, negotiations between the Trump Organization and the Crocus Group continued over the course of 2014.
Shortly after the Russian invasion of Crimea in late February of 2014, Emin Agalarov performed at Trump’s Doral Golf Resort.
By the late summer and into the early fall, however, discussions between the two parties seemed to stall and the project never developed past the planning stages. Trump’s last known in-person meeting with Emin Agalarov prior to running for president took place on May 20th, 2015, at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
According to Agalarov, Trump informed him that he would be running for President approximately six weeks before his public announcement.
Rob Goldstone, who was present at the meeting, recalled Trump saying, “I’m going to be running for President, you know; so next time you won’t be coming here; you’ll be coming to see me at the White House.”
After Trump announced his candidacy on June 16th, 2015, Goldstone emailed Trump’s longtime assistant Rhona Graff, “Please pass on mine and Emin’s best wishes and congratulations to Mr. Trump.”
Goldstone reached out to Graff again on July 22nd with an invitation for Trump to travel to Moscow on November 8th, the day of the 2016 election, to attend Aras Agalarov’s birthday party. Graff promised to pass the invitation on to Trump with the caveat that it was “highly unlikely” he would have time to attend a party on election day.
Goldstone replied that he understood but offered “unless maybe he [Trump] would welcome a meeting with President Putin which Emin would set up.”
Multiple discussions regarding a meeting with Putin took place within the Trump Organization and Campaign.
On September 10th, a reporter for The New York Times contacted Hope Hicks, the 26-year-old press secretary of the Trump Campaign and inquired whether Trump would be meeting Putin during his visit to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly.
Hicks forwarded the email to Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen. Five days later, while speaking with Sean Hannity on his radio show, Cohen said that there was “a better than likely chance” that Putin would meet with Trump during his stay in New York.
Prior to the interview with Hannity, Cohen dialed a number that he found online for the Kremlin and spoke to a multilingual woman, asking her if there was “[a]ny chance when President Putin is in New York at the General Assembly he’d like to come by and have a burger with Mr. Trump at the [G]rill?”
The woman replied that it was likely against “protocol” but that she would pass on the request.
“Putin is the richest man in the world by a multiple,” Cohen later claimed Trump often told him. According to Cohen, Trump was obsessed and in awe of Putin’s wealth and power.
“In fact, if you think about it,” Trump told Cohen, “Putin controls twenty-five percent of the Russian economy, including every major business, like Gazprom. Imagine controlling twenty-five percent of the wealth of a country. Wouldn’t that be fucking amazing?”
Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, and the Second Proposed Trump Tower Moscow Project
By September 2015, Michael Cohen was running point on another potential Trump Tower Moscow project that was brought to him by Felix Sater.
Read my description of the remarkable life of Felix Sater, his relationship with Donald Trump, and his connections to organized crime, here.
Later that month, Sater reached out to a Russian contact of his, Andrey Rozov, to discuss the potential project. Rozov was the head of a Russian real estate firm I.C. Expert.
While Rozov served as the head of I.C. Expert, its actual ownership was opaque. The reporting of Scott Stedman of Forensic News provides insight into Rozov’s background and the ownership structure of the company.
Sater met Rozov through a Russian real estate firm called Mirax. After a 2007 article in The New York Times had outed Sater’s past involvement in a joint Italian and Russian mafia-backed pump-and-dump stock fraud scheme, he moved to Moscow and joined the board of Mirax.
Mirax worked on projects in Russia, the US, Turkey, and Ukraine. The firm was headed by a flamboyant billionaire named Sergey Polonsky, who was convicted of fraud by a Russian court in 2017.
Prior to the Trump Tower Moscow proposal, I.C. Expert’s largest real estate project was a suburban housing development built in Reutov, a suburb outside Moscow, called Novokosino-2. The project was plagued by lawsuits and delays, with the owners of 5000 units often resorting to protests over the developers’ failure to complete projects on time.
These problems were not secret but were actively being reported on during the time the Trump Organization was negotiating with I.C. Expert. Nor was this the only red flag any company that performed due diligence would have noticed.
In 2011, Rozov was charged with negligent homicide after causing a boat crash that led to the death of a nineteen-year-old boy and badly injured his girlfriend. In the spring of 2015, the Russian government granted Rozov amnesty for unknown reasons.
Rozov was a close associate and business partner with Stalbek Mishakov, a man with significant ties to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska, a onetime client of Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort, has been involved in several Kremlin-backed influence operations, including the one targeting the 2016 US presidential election.
See my article on the Oleg Deripaska’s rise in the Russian aluminum industry and connection to the Izmailovskaya Bratva criminal syndicate here.
From 2012–2014, Mishakov had served as the CEO of Expert Development LLC, which was part of Rozov’s Expert Group of companies. During his tenure, Mishakov developed a large shopping mall in Reutov at the same time Rozov was working on Novokosino-2.
In addition to his real estate ventures, Mishakov was a close associate of Oleg Deripaska’s, serving as his personal attorney and advisor, as well as serving in management positions at Deripaska’s holding company En+ Group Plc and United Rusal.
After Mishakov left, his position at Expert Development was filled by another Deripaska-linked businessman named Pavel Lebedev. Both Mishakov and Lebedev had worked at the Deripaska-owned company Altrius Development, which worked on construction related to the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
While Rozov served as the head of I.C. Expert, the actual ownership of the organization is obscured by a complex constellation of Russian and offshore corporate entities.
As of early 2016, its shareholders included the Cyprus-based Colinsen Trading Limited LLC, which owned 60% of the company. Known as “Moscow on the Mediterranean,” Cyprus has long been used by Russians as a “backdoor” to gain access to the European Union’s financial system.
Colinsen Trading Limited for a time listed its legal address at a location in Nicosia, Cyprus that was the exact same address used by shell companies belonging to Sergei Pugachev, a Russian oligarch accused of using a Cypriot corporate vehicle to launder over $200 million. In 2016, investigators in Geneva opened a money laundering probe into Pugachev, who was then known as “Putin’s Banker.”
Cypriot shell companies often list lawyers as their owners in order to obscure their true ownership. The owner listed for Colinsen Trading Limited was a Cypriot-lawyer named Christodoulos Vassiliades.
Vassiliades’ clients have included the ex-wife of Semyon Mogilevich, whom he has used to obscure his ownership stakes in various companies. Other Vassiliades clients include the Russian billionaires Vladimir Lisin, Sulieman Kerimov and Alisher Usmanov, among others.
Vladimir Lisin was involved with Oleg Deripaska in the violent privatization of the Russian aluminum industry and was a business partner of Trump’s friend Sam Kislin, an allegedly organized crime and KGB-linked Ukrainian born commodities trader.
Alisher Usmanov is an alleged associate of the Solntsevskaya Bratva criminal syndicate.
Both Mogilevich and Kerimov are alleged to have been involved in massive money laundering operations using Cypriot offshore vehicles among other secrecy jurisdictions.
After the 2012–2013 Cypriot financial crisis, which resulted in a €10 billion international bail out, the Russian VTB bank nominated Vassiliades to become a shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus. VTB was allowed to do this as a way to “bail out” Russian investors by offering them shares in the bank.
Initially, Vassiliades owned a 8.37% share worth an estimated $350 million. In 2014, Vassiliades share was reduced to 5.77%. Vassiliades law firm was then appointed by the Bank of Cyprus to assess the legality and validity of foreign client operations, a process which included helping foreigners pass compliance procedures.
Sitting alongside Vassiliades on the Bank of Cyprus board was a former member of the KGB, Vladimir Strzhalkovsky. Strzhalkovsky was removed from the board along with six other Russians when Wilbur Ross, who would later become Donald Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, purchased enough shares to become the Vice Chairman of the Bank of Cyprus.
Ross later sold the Bank of Cyprus’s Russian-based businesses to Artem Avetisyan, a Russian banker and consultant with ties to Putin and the Russian Sberbank. Avetisyan’s business partner is Oleg Gref, the son of Sberbank’s CEO Herman Gref.
Trump met with Herman Gref during the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, writing to him in a signed, personal letter afterward, “Whenever you are in New York, please feel free to call and we will have lunch or dinner.”
Investigative reporter Scott Stedman uncovered links between Vassiliades and the Trump Ocean Club in Panama. The Panamanian law firm that advised the Trump Organization on the project, Alemán, Cordero, Galindo & Lee (ALCOGAL), has a Cypriot branch that shares the same office as Christodoulos G. Vassiliades & Co LLC.
ALCOGAL’s financial trust is managed by Vassiliades through yet another Cypriot shell company, Apex International. The Vassiliades-owned entity listed as director and secretary of Apex International was a shell company called Ionic Nominees. In May of 2015, mere days after Rozov was granted amnesty by the Russian government, ownership of Colinsen Trading Limited LLC was transferred to Ionic Nominees, thus granting it 60% ownership over I.C. Expert.
ALCOGAL is at the center of a vast leak of secret financial documents known as the Pandora Papers. The leak established that ALCOGAL has handled transactions for a company linked to a sanctioned childhood friend of Putin’s who is suspected of holding hundreds of millions of dollars in assets for the Russian president.
Scott Stedman also uncovered additional potential links between I.C. Expert and Oleg Deripaska.
Just months before I.C. Expert engaged with the Trump Organization, it was majority owned by Capilana Trading Limited, a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands. The sole shareholder listed as owning Capilana was a Cypriot national named Ioanna Theofilou.
While there is no direct evidence that Theofilou was representing Deripaska’s ownership interests in Capilana, numerous offshore subsidiaries of Deripaska’s companies En+ and RUSAL list Theofilou as director and secretary.
Mere weeks after Rozov was granted amnesty by the Russian government, Capilana’s ownership stake in I.C. Expert was transferred to the Vassiliades “owned” subsidiary Ionic Nominees.
Andrey Rozov’s relationship with Deripaska associates Stalbek Mishakov and Pavel Lebedev, and the Theofilou connection via Capilana Trading, all point towards Deripaska’s involvement with, and potential ownership stake in, I.C. Trading.
Further, Deripaska was known to have done business with Mirax, the Russian real estate firm whose board members included Felix Sater and Andrey Rozov. Mirax was also involved in building a hotel and luxury villas for executives from Gazprom, Lukoil and VTB Bank on the Bay of Kotor, an area of Montenegro heavily invested in by Deripaska and his financial partner Nat Rothschild.
See my article on Oleg Deripaska’s and Paul Manafort’s several intrigues in Montenegro here.
In September of 2015, Michael Cohen received permission from Trump to enter negotiations with Andrey Rozov and I.C. Expert via Felix Sater. Throughout the heart of the presidential campaign, Cohen repeatedly briefed Trump on the progress of the negotiations.
On September 25th, Cohen, Sater, and Rozov held a conference call with Sater translating. Following the call, Cohen forwarded Rozov an email that contained architectural renderings for the proposed Tower.
Four days later, Rozov’s “right-hand man” sent Cohen a letter which described I.C. Expert and stated that “the tallest building in Europe should be in Moscow, and I am prepared to build it.” The letter suggested that the partnership between the Trump Organization and I.C. Expert would be “a shining example of business creating opportunities and significant good will between Russia and the U.S.”
Rozov’s letter to Cohen further alluded to a Manhattan building located on 22 West 38th Street that I.C. Expert purchased in December of 2014.
Independent journalist Wendy Siegelman uncovered that Felix Sater represented Andrey Rozov in the resale of the building a year later in December 2015, in the midst of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations. The accountant involved with the sale was a Russian-born, New York-based Ilya Bykov.
Bykov shared an office with Parason Inc, a Delaware LLC involved in a large-scale Russian money laundering scandal. Bykov’s clientele included Aras Agalarov and Igor Krutoy, the latter of whom was a Russian composer noted for his vocal support of Vladimir Putin who had written music for Emin Agalarov.
In 2011, Krutoy had entered into negotiations with the Trump Organization over building a Trump Tower in Riga, Latvia. Three years later, Latvian authorities contacted the FBI and asked that they investigate Krutoy and his partners for corruption related to the Trump Project.
On October 5th, Cohen forwarded Sater a Letter of Intent (LOI), which set out the terms of a licensing agreement between the Trump Organization and I.C. Expert. The proposed tower was to be 120-stories and consist of “first class, luxury residential condominiums with related amenities.”
The license fee structure included a $4 million fee, to be paid in installments, as well as a percentage of fees from gross sales fees, rental fees, and revenue fees.
Three days later, Sater sent Cohen a revised version of the LOI, which designated the tower as “mixed-use” as opposed to just condos and had it located in Moscow City, an industrial zone housing some of Europe’s tallest buildings located roughly three miles from the Kremlin.
On October 9th, Sater emailed Cohen that he would be meeting with a real estate developer named Andrey Molchanov to discuss building Trump Tower Moscow “on his site.”
Molchanov was a billionaire who founded one of the leading real estate development companies of Russia.
Sater claims to have met Molchanov via Maxim Temnikov, whom Sater sat alongside on the board of Mirax. Temnikov was accused in Russian court alongside Mirax Group head Sergey Polonsky of involvement in a 2.7 billion ruble embezzlement scheme. Temnikov’s first wife later remarried Andrey Molchanov, which is how Sater claims he was introduced to Molchanov.
Temnikov and his second wife co-own a piece of real estate with Sater on Fisher Island, a 216-acre members-only island off the coast of Miami and one of the wealthiest zip codes in America. Aras Agalarov also owned a condo on Fisher Island, which mysteriously went into foreclosure in 2019.
Temnikov and Sater purchased the $5.1 million property via Fisher MB LLC, which was established by a Miami-based, Russian lawyer named Michael Keifitz. Keifitz has over 100 companies registered under the name Keyfitz, most of which are associated with Russian businesses. One company registered to “Keyfitz” purchased a $1,170,000 unit from Trump Towers II in Miami for the daughter of a well-known member of the Russian Rostov-on-Don criminal organization, Vladimir Popovyan.
Sater described Molchanov as a “friend.” He told Cohen that Molchanov’s “stepfather was Gov of St. Petersburg and Putin worked for him.”
Sater is referring to Molchanov’s adopted father, Yuriy Molchanov, who was Putin’s first boss at Leningrad University, where Putin worked following his stint in East Germany and where he continued to work for the KGB recruiting and spying on students.
As Deputy Director of Leningrad University, Yuriy Molchanov used his connections with city authorities to help Procter & Gamble (P&G) establish operations in the Soviet Union. Upon his return to St. Petersburg from Dresden, immediately prior to the collapse of the USSR, Putin helped Molchanov establish a joint venture between the university and the American multinational consumer goods corporation. P&G’s first office in Russia was located at Leningrad University’s rector’s mansion, where Putin and Molchanov helped with staff recruitment, advertising and land acquisition.
According to Russian press reports from 2010, Yuriy Molchanov was a KGB rezident at Leningrad University and was potentially even Putin’s KGB superior, though these claims cannot be independently verified.
In 2004, Yuriy Malchonov became the deputy governor of St. Petersburg, where he oversaw numerous public-private projects that included the restoration of Putin’s palace in Strelna, located near St. Petersburg. He later became a Vice President at VTB Bank.
Sater believed that Andrey Molchanov, who once served in the Russian government, was “a phone call away from anyone he need[ed] to be in contact with.”
While they hadn’t previously worked together on a project, the two had often discussed Russian real estate. Sater met with Molchanov to discuss the possibility of constructing Trump Tower Moscow on the location of the ZiL factory, an out-of-use automobile and heavy equipment manufacturing facility.
While they had several conversations and Molchanov was warm to the idea of Trump Tower Moscow, Sater later claimed they never arrived at a complete agreement before the project was put on hold after Trump won the Republican nomination.
On October 12th, 2015, Sater informed Cohen that Andrey L. Kostin, the CEO of VTB bank, whom he described as “Putins [sic] top finance guy,” was “on board” and willing to finance the project. Sater attached a Wikipedia bio of Kostin to the email.
“This is major for us,” Sater wrote Cohen, “not only the financing but Kostin’s position in Russia, extremely powerful and respected. Now all we need is Putin on board and we are golden, meeting with Putin and top deputy is tentatively set for the 14th. See buddy I can not only get Ivanka to spin in Putins [sic] Kremlin office chair on 30 minutes notice, I can also get a full meeting.”
Kostin was a former Soviet diplomat who was once stationed in London. According to investigative reporter Luke Harding, intelligence sources believed Kostin was a spy.
In 2002, Kostin was made the President and Chairman of VTB, Russia’s second largest bank. At the time Sater claims to have been in contact with Kostin, VTB was under US Sanctions. The state-owned VTB is known to have financed intelligence operations in the past and is suspected of using its international offices to engage in espionage.
One of the members of VTB’s board, which was chaired by Kostin, was Denis Bortnikov, whose father Alexander Bortnikov was the head of the FSB.
The Russian Bank Commercial Bank of Cyprus, a subsidiary of VTB, provided a $650 million unsecured loan to a corporate entity belonging to Sergei Roldugin, the cello player and childhood friend of Putin’s who was revealed by the Panama Papers to likely be a financial front for Putin vast illicit fortune.
The Swedish economist and esteemed Russia expert Anders Åslund would later tell The New York Times that, “VTB is really a slush fund for Putin.”
VTB has a close relationship to Deutsche bank, which has loaned over $2 billion to Donald Trump. Andrey Kostin’s son had worked at Deutsche Bank from 2000 until 2011, when he died in a motorcycle accident. In 2007, Deutsche Bank issued a $1 billion long-term loan to VTB, allowing the Russian state bank to use the money as it pleased.
Deutsche Bank’s CEO at the time Josef Ackerman then convinced Kostin to set up an investment banking division. After receiving the go ahead from Putin, Kostin established VTB Capital. In 2008, Kostin hired over 100 bankers from Deutsche to operate the new investment bank.
At the time Sater claims to have been in contact with Kostin, VTB was under US Sanctions.
Despite Sater’s private emails to Cohen describing their interactions, Kostin has denied that he or VTB ever engaged in negotiations with Sater.
The state-owned VTB is known to have financed intelligence operations and has been described as “a slush fund for Putin.”
One of the individuals Sater tapped to contact Kostin was a former Russian intelligence officer in the GRU, Evgeny Shmykov.
Shmykov told The Washington Post that he worked “in a private capacity” for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan throughout the 1990s. He may have served as an information conduit for Sater in his work for American intelligence. Shmykov connected Sater with sources on the ground in Afghanistan and the two traveled the country together.
“Lets [sic] make this happen and build a Trump Moscow,” Sater wrote to Cohen in an October 13th email that contained the Trump Tower Moscow LOI signed by Rozov.
“And possibly fix relations between the countries by showing everyone that commerce & business are much better and more practical than politics. That should be Putins [sic] message as well, and we will help him agree on that message. Help world peace and make a lot of money. I would say that’s a great lifetime goal for us to go after.”
“You know, I’ve made a lot of money,” Trump boasted at a political rally in Norfolk, Virginia. At that precise moment, Sater emailed Michael Cohen asking for him to send the LOI with Trump’s signature.
“Deals are people, deals are people,” Trump continued. “And you have got to analyze people, and I can look at people. I can tell you; I’ll get along with Putin. I was on 60 Minutes with Putin. He was my stablemate three weeks ago. We got the highest ratings in a long time on 60 Minutes. You saw that, right? He was my stablemate. I believe I’ll get along with him. It was Trump and Putin, Putin and Trump. I’d even let him go first if it makes us friendly. I’ll give up the name. I’ll give up that place. But I was on 60 Minutes three weeks ago. I’ll get along with him.” Three days later, Cohen sent Sater the LOI signed by Trump.
“I think our relationship with Russia will be very good,” Trump exclaimed at a press conference one day after Cohen sent the signed LOI to Sater. “Vladimir Putin was on 60 Minutes with me three weeks ago, right? Putin. And they have one of the highest ratings they had in a long time. So I’m going to give him total credit. But we will have a very good relationship, I think, with Russia. Now maybe we won’t, but I believe we will have a very good relationship with Russia. I believe that I will have a very good relationship with Putin.”
“Loved Putin/Russia reference,” Sater wrote to Cohen after Trump’s comments. “I need that part of the press conference cut into a short clip to be played for Putin. Please get it done… [Andrey] wants to send it to the Kremlin… I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected… our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it.”
“I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this,” Sater continued. “Get me that clip I will get it to Putin and his people quickly and it will help our cause and process.” Sater sent a second message minutes later, “2 boys from Brooklyn getting a USA president elected. This is good really good.”
Cohen later wrote that Trump saw Putin as a valuable ally, not for the United States but for himself personally. Trump believed that he could manipulate Putin’s hatred of Hillary Clinton to his own advantage.
Cohen further maintains that neither he nor Trump ever expected to win the election, and that Trump’s sycophantic praise of the Russian leader was designed to secretly push the Trump Tower Moscow deal along and “to enable him to be able to borrow money from people in Putin’s circle, and that meant sucking up to the Russians.”
To sweeten the deal for Putin, Sater suggested to Cohen that they give him a $50 million dollar penthouse. “In Russia, the oligarchs would bend over backwards to live in the same building as Vladimir Putin,” Sater later told BuzzFeed News. Cohen thought it was a great idea. It also would have been a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Sater added to his November 3rd message to Cohen, “[A] very close person & partner to Putins [sic] closest friend, partner and advisor who has been with Putin ever since teenage years his friend and partner (on the largest shopping center in Moscow) is flying in to the private island in the Bahamas Andrey [Rozov] rented next week. Everything will be negotiated and discussed not with flunkies but with people who will have dinner with Putin and discuss the issues and get a go ahead.”
Roughly a week after Trump signed the LOI, Sater traveled with Andrey Rozov to Little Whale Cay, a private island in the Bahamas that Rozov had rented for $175,000.
Between bouts of diving and spearfishing, they met with Mikhail Zayats, an individual with close links to Boris and Arkady Rotenberg, two billionaire brothers with deep personal connections to Putin.
Arkady Rotenberg had first met Putin as far back as the 1960s when the two young men joined the same Sambo club. Over the years, the Rotenbergs have amassed a vast fortune in industries ranging from banking to construction, winning public contracts worth billions for construction projects for the Sochi Olympics, the World Cup, and building a bridge from Russia to recently-occupied Crimea. Both were under U.S. sanctions.
Sater saw Zayats, who was friends with Rozov, as his “ace in the hole” and a potential pathway to the Rotenbergs. Ultimately, Sater hoped that the billionaire brothers would put up $400 to $500 million into Trump Tower Moscow, which he believed would lead to Putin green-lighting the development.
According to Sater, Zayats was enthusiastic about the tower, particularly because he would have received a cut from the deal and agreed to bring it to the Rotenbergs’ attention when the project was more advanced.
Sater hoped that Michael Cohen would travel to Moscow to further push the deal, and on December 1st he requested a scanned copy of Cohen’s passport “for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” Cohen sent a picture of his passport to Sater the next day.
That same day, Donald Trump was speaking to Associate Press reporter Jeff Horvitz over the phone. Horvitz asked Trump about his relationship with Sater. “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it,” Trump replied. Then he lied. “I’m not that familiar with him.”
On December 17th, Putin praised Trump during an interview with ABC News. “He’s a very colorful person. Talented, without any doubt.” Putin described Trump as “absolutely the leader in the American presidential race.”
He continued by saying he believed Trump wanted to “move to a more solid, deeper level of relations” between Russia and the United States. “How can Russia not welcome that? We welcome that.”
“Now is the time,” Cohen wrote to Sater in an email which contained a google alert showing the news of Putin’s comments. “Call me.”
Two days later, Sater emailed and texted Cohen requesting scanned copies of both his and Donald Trump’s passports. He explained that VTB Bank would issue them visas so they could discuss financing for the project and that Andrey Kostin would be present at the meetings. Sater also asked that Cohen call him because he had “Evgeny” on the other line.
While Sater would later try to mislead investigators and say he was referring to the GRU officer Evgeny Shmykov, in fact he was referring to Evgeny Dvoskin.
Evgeny Dvoskin: The King of Russian Black Cash
Like Sater, Dvoskin was a Russian Jewish émigré who grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. The two were close friends from childhood.
After being imprisoned for his role in a daisy chain fuel scam, Dvoskin had shared a prison cell with the infamous vor y zakone Vyacheslav Ivankov. Prior to his arrest in the United States, Ivankov had lived in Trump Tower and had been a high roller at the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City.
Dvoskin returned to Moscow in 2004 and became an associate of Ivan Myazin, who stands at the center of joint Russian intelligence and Eurasian organized crime money laundering efforts.
Dvoskin received protection from the FSB General Ivan Tkachev, the head of the Directorate K, which was charged with investigating financial crimes but in fact masterminded and executed Russia’s largest money laundering operations funneling black cash into the West.
After Semyon Mogilevich had been publicly tied to the Bank of New York scandal, Dvoskin played a key role in the next generation of Russian money laundering operations, with particular involvement in the Moldovan Laundromat and the Deutsche Bank mirror-trading scandal.
In 2006, a group of investigators from the Russian Ministry of Interior launched an investigation into a group of Russian banks involved in large scale money laundering activities that exceeded one trillion roubles. The investigation, one of the largest of its kind in Russian history, found Dvoskin and his partner Ivan Myazin, along with their partners in organized crime, were found to have controlled dozens of small Russian banks through front men.
Examples of banks they owned included Migros Bank, Siberian Bank of Development and Falcon bank, all of which had their licenses revoked between 2006–2007 for money laundering.
Kirill Kabanov, a former member of the FSB who now operates an anti-corruption watchdog group, has stated that Dvoskin “was involved in organizing serious schemes for obnalichka.”
Obnalichka consists of billions of dollars in off-the-books cash that sloshes through the Russian underground economy, which Putin sits atop.
Following the illegal Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, most of the Ukrainian banking sector left the region. On April 4th, 2014, two weeks after Russia took control, the first Russian bank to open its doors in Sevastopol was Genbank.
Dvoskin owns 4.8% of Genbanks share capital and his wife sits atop its board. The bank has grown enormously since it opened, with it’s now over 175 branches making it the second largest bank in the region.
Genbank is known for being under the protection of the FSB and is believed to be involved in funneling illicit cash to state officials and corporations. The US government listed Genbank among the financial institutions it has chosen to sanction.
Catherine Belton has described Dvoskin as “the king of Russian black cash.” She has further argued that Russian intelligence may have been attempting to compromise Trump by involving him with criminal elements.
Regardless of the intent of either party, the Republican candidate for the President was, through his personal attorney, using a convicted felon to pursue a real estate deal with a former GRU-officer, FSB-linked criminal elements and oligarchs situated around Putin.
Cohen sent Sater another copy of his passport but told him that it was “premature” to send along Trump’s.
Over a week later, on December 29th, Cohen texted Sater asking if there was any response from Russia, thus beginning a terse back and forth in which Cohen lost patience at the lack of progress. Sater told Cohen that he was waiting to receive their official invitations to visit Russia sometime after New Year’s.
“I have never steered you wrong,” Cohen angrily texted Sater. “Or not been 100% up front. When I return to the office, I am contacting my alternate and setting up the meeting myself.” Cohen went further, stating “Not you or anyone you know will embarrass me in front of Mr. T when he asks me what is happening.”
Cohen Contacts Dmitry Peskov, and the Third Trump Tower Moscow Project
The alternative Trump Tower Moscow project Cohen was referring to had been proposed by Giorgi Rtskhiladze. Cohen and Rtskhiladze had worked together previously on potential Trump Towers in Georgia and Kazakhstan. Rtskhiladze reached out to Cohen in late September of 2015 on behalf of a business associate of his who wanted to connect the Trump Organization with a Russian real estate developer to potentially partner on a project.
On September 22nd, Cohen received architectural renderings from John Fotiadis, the same architect who had drawn up plans for the proposed “Trump Diamond” Tower in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Two days later Rtskhiladze emailed Cohen a draft letter written in Russian to Moscow’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin, whom Rtskhiladze described as the “second guy in Russia.” Rtskhiladze further stated that Sobyanin was “aware of the potential project and will pledge his support.” The project was to be built in Moscow city and be of “monumental proportions.”
After inviting Sobyanin to New York, Rtskhiladze’s letter further stated that Trump Tower Moscow could “act as a symbol of stronger economic, business and cultural relationships between New York and Moscow and therefore the United States and the Russian Federation.”
While Rtskhiladze and Cohen communicated several more times in late 2015 over the proposed Tower, and despite Cohen’s threats to Sater that he would pursue the project, it never came to fruition.
“I have invested a lot of personal political capital, time and energy into getting this done,” Sater texted to Cohen, replying to his threat to pursue an “alternate” project. The two then engaged in a tense back and forth, with Cohen angry over their lack of progress and Sater complaining that Trump’s public denial of knowing him had hurt his reputation.
To troubleshoot the situation, Sater reached out to his GRU contact Evgeny Shmykov, explaining that Cohen was “freaking out” and that he needed an invitation quickly.
Despite it being a holiday in Russia, Shmykov produced what he described as a “placeholder” letter from Genbank. The next day, Sater texted Cohen a picture of the Genbank letter, falsely telling Cohen that he had received it three days earlier but that it had gone into his spam folder.
“Michael,” Sater wrote, “this is thru Putins [sic] administration, and nothing gets done there without approval from the top.”
“Who is Gen Bank?” Cohen asked. “I thought you were speaking to VTB?”
Sater replied that Genbank was 50% owned by the Russian government, “is run like a junior for VTB,” and that VTB’s chairman was away until January 11th and the Russians didn’t want to wait that long to issue the invitation.
Cohen exploded, referring to Genbank as “3rd tier” and telling Sater that he would “take it from here.”
Sater attempted to explain that a lot of work had been put into the effort so far and that Cohen would be meeting with VTB’s Chairman and that, if he wanted to wait until the 12th, he could arrange for an invitation to come from VTB. Cohen was unmoved.
“Do you think I’m a moron?” Cohen asked. “Do not call or speak to another person regarding MY project.”
At this point, Cohen briefly struck out on his own. On January 11th, 2016, Cohen emailed the office of Vladimir Putin’s Press Secretary, Dmitry Peskov, asking to speak with Putin’s then chief of staff Sergei Ivanov.
Ivanov was a former KGB agent who had met Putin while both had studied at the Red Banner Institute.
It remains unclear how Cohen got the email address, but he misspelled it, writing to pr_peskova@prpress.gof.ru as opposed to the correct gov.ru. The error caused the email not to be sent.
The next day a media contact sent Cohen a phone number for Peskov’s office, and he sent another email to yet another address, info@prpress.gov.ru.
By the 15th, Cohen realized his initial error and sent the email to the correct address. It contained the following letter: “Dear Mr. Peskov, 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. 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.”
According to the Russian publication The New Times, Dmitry Peskov’s father was a KGB officer responsible for conducting communist propaganda in the third world. Peskov himself has been suspected of at one time working for Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the SVR.
On January 20th, Cohen received an email from Peskov’s Chief of Staff and personal assistant, Elena Poliakova. Poliakova enjoyed exceptional access within the Kremlin. Writing from a personal email account, Poliakova informed Cohen that she had been trying to get in touch with him. She provided him with a personal phone number, which Cohen dialed, and he and Poliakova proceeded to speak for twenty minutes.
Cohen described himself and his position within the Trump Organization to Poliakova and they discussed the Trump Tower Moscow project. Poliakova was aware of the project and knew about the Trump Organization’s partnership with I.C. Expert.
Cohen later described her as “extremely professional,” and “very detailed in her questions regarding the project.”
Poliakova ended the conversation by saying she would assemble notes of what she had learned from Cohen and “pass them along,” by which he assumed she meant to Peskov.
Cohen informed Trump of his conversation with Poliakova, remarking that she had comported herself professionally. They also discussed the potential for the presidential candidate to visit Moscow, which Trump did not seem to see as problematic if it could help further the potential Trump Tower Moscow project.
Trump instructed Cohen to speak with his then campaign manager Corey Lewandowksi about potential dates for a visit to Russia. Cohen went as far as requesting a copy of Trump’s passport from his assistant, Rhona Graff, though there is no evidence that Trump’s passport was ever passed to Sater.
On January 25th, 2016, Sater sent Cohen a letter signed by a Russian boxing and real estate magnate printed beneath the letterhead of a Russian company called MHG.
“In furtherance of our previous conversations regarding the development of the Trump Tower Moscow project,” the letter read, “we would like to respectfully invite you to Moscow for a working visit.” It further called for Cohen to attend “round table discussions” and later arrange for dates for Trump to visit Moscow.
Sater sent a follow-up email to Cohen requesting dates for when he and Trump would travel to Moscow, claiming that he had received “another call this morning asking for it.”
Cohen replied, “Will do.”
“I need to speak to you very urgent [sic],” Sater texted Cohen the next day. “Can I put you on the phone with the guy coordinating to arrange all the calls so you can speak first person to everyone.”
Cohen replied “Now,” to which Sater replied, “Ok 2 minutes.”
The “guy” Sater was referring to was the former GRU officer Evgeny Shmykov. It’s unknown what Cohen, Sater, and Shmykov discussed during the call.
Sater texted Cohen later that day, “it’s set, they are waiting and will walk you into every office you need to make sure you are comfortable for [Donald Trump] trip.”
The following day, January 27th, communications via text and email between Cohen and Sater mysteriously ceased. At Cohen’s suggestion, they continued to discuss the Trump Tower Moscow project over Dust, an encrypted app that automatically and permanently deletes its users’ messages. As a result, the communication between Cohen and Sater between the crucial period of January 27th and early May appears to be lost to the historical record.
In April of 2016, the Trump Organization sought extensions for six of its trademarks in Russia from Rospatent, the Russian government agency that oversees intellectual property. All of them were granted.
“Should I dial you now?” Sater texted Cohen on May 3rd, resuming their non-encrypted communications.
The next day, Sater wrote to Cohen, “I had a chat with Moscow. ASSUMING the trip does happen, the question is before or after the convention. I said I believe, but don’t know for sure, that it’s probably after the convention.”
“Obviously, the pre-meeting trip (you only) can happen anytime you want but the 2 big guys where [sic] the question. I said I would confirm and revert. I explained that ONLY you will be negotiating all the details. I want to make sure no one tries to go around u, that’s why I said that.”
“Michael it’s completely in your hands, probably a quick trip by you would be the perfect move, that locks it in and no one else can elbow in at that point. Let me know about If I was right by saying I believe after Cleveland and also when you want to speak to them and possibly fly over.”
“My trip before Cleveland,” Cohen replied, referring to the Republican Convention. “Trump once he becomes the nominee after Cleveland.”
“Peskov would like to invite you as his guest to the St. Petersburg Forum which is Russia’s Davos,” Sater wrote to Cohen the next day, “it’s June 16–19. He wants to meet there with you and possibly introduce you to either Putin or Medvedev, as they are not sure if 1 or both will be there. This is perfect. The entire business class of Russia will be there as well. He said anything you want to discuss including dates and subjects are on the table to discuss.”
Sater later testified that he had spoken with “Evgeny” (it remains unclear whether he meant Evgeny Shmykov or Dvoskin) and they had decided it would be better to portray Cohen’s upcoming visit to Moscow more as a business trip than political.
“Works for me,” Cohen replied.
“Not only will you probably sit with #1 or #2 but the whole biz community is there,” Sater explained to Cohen. “I’ll be running around setting nice $100 mill deals. And you will come back and the whole campaign team can kiss your ass. Keep this very very close to the vest, otherwise half a dozen idiots will try to jump on your coat tails.”
“If it goes great, you are a hero, if it doesn’t all you did was go to an economic forum to check out the business. Bro this is why you got me working in the shadows. I will make sure you are clean as a whistle either way. For you 0 downside. But I know this is going to turn into 1. A major win for Trump, makes you the hero who bagged the elephant and 2. Sets up a stream of business opportunities that will be mind-blowing. All from 1 short trip. I couldn’t have dreamed of a better situation with no downside.”
On May 26th, Donald Trump won enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination.
On June 9th, Sater informed Cohen that he was securing badges for the St. Petersburg forum and that “Putin is there on the 17th very strong chance you will meet him as well.”
Four days later he forwarded Cohen an invitation to the forum signed by the Director of Roscongress, the organizer of the event, and again asked Cohen for his passport photos to arrange for a visa.
Despite these preparations, Sater and Cohen met the next day, June 14th, in the atrium of Trump Tower. Cohen backed out of the Moscow trip at the last minute. Cohen had spoken with Trump ten or twelve times about the project, which the candidate considered an “active project,” but the effort ground to a halt in June.
Sater later said that there was “just no way that a presidential candidate could build a tower in a foreign country.”
Pursuing the project during the general election was deemed impossible. However, as Cohen maintains that Trump fully expected to lose the race, the opportunity to build Trump Tower Moscow would become viable after the Presidential election.
Additional Russian Outreach to the Trump Campaign to Arrange a Meeting with Putin
Aside from the Agalarov, Rtzkhiladze and Sater Trump Tower projects, several other Russians reached out to discuss similar matters with members of the Trump Organization and Trump family.
On November 16th, 2015, Ivanka Trump received an email from Lana Erchova, who was married at the time to a Russian national named Dmitry Klokov. Klokov was the director of communications at a large Russian energy company and had at one time been an assistant to a Russian energy minister. Erchova offered Klokov’s assistance to the campaign.
“If you ask anyone who knows Russian to google my husband Dmitry Klokov,” Ecrchova wrote to Ivanka, “you’ll see who he is close to and that he has done Putin’s political campaigns.”
The next day, Klokov sent a follow-up email to Michael Cohen in which he described himself as a “trusted person” who was focused on “political synergy.” Klokov further wrote that “our person of interest,” who Cohen then assumed and Erchova later confirmed was in reference to Vladimir Putin, was “ready to meet your candidate.”
In order to facilitate a meeting between Trump and Putin, Klokov told Cohen he would introduce him to a “close person” who, Klokov said, had spoken to Putin about meeting with Trump. The identity of this “close person” intermediary remains unknown.
“Now, your client is a candidate and hardly any other political move could be compared to a tete-a-tete meeting between them, Klokov wrote to Cohen in reference to Trump and Putin. “If publicized correctly the impact of it could be phenomenal, of course not only in political but in a business dimension as well. I don’t have to tell you that there is no bigger warranty in any project than consent of the person of interest [Putin].”
“[C]urrently our LOI developer is in talks with VP’s [Vladimir Putin’s] Chief of Staff and arranging a formal invite for the two to meet,” Cohen replied to Klokov in an email copied to Ivanka. Cohen told Klokov that he would be “honored” to meet with him while in Moscow “to discuss any thoughts you might have that could enhance the project.”
This appears to be the last communication between the two and there is no evidence that Cohen brought his interactions with Klokov to the attention of anyone in the Trump Organization or Campaign beyond Ivanka.
The Special Counsel’s office later received an email from someone claiming to be Lana Erchova claiming that she had been instructed by her husband to reach out to Ivanka Trump to “offer cooperation to Trump’s team on behalf of the Russian officials.”
The email further claimed that these officials wanted to offer Trump “land in Crimea among other things and unofficial meeting [sic] with Putin.”
Mueller’s investigators were never able to determine the validity of the email or its claims.
Yet another Trump Tower Moscow project was pitched to Trump’s son Eric. In the spring of 2016, a Soviet-born Trump Campaign surrogate and later employee named Boris Epshteyn was provided by his contacts in Moscow’s city government with a proposal for a hotel in the city.
On October 28th, 2013, Epshteyn had moderated a panel entitled “Invest in Moscow!” which featured, among others, Sergey Cheremin, the Minister of the Moscow City Government and Head of Moscow’s Department for Foreign Economic and International Relations. The blueprints of a proposed Trump Hotel in Moscow, that had originated from Cheremin, were shared with Epshteyn.
Epshteyn, who had been friends with Eric Trump since both had attended Georgetown, passed the plans over to Eric who said he would “take a look” and that the proposed Moscow deal “could be interesting.” The proposal appeared to go no further.
Epshteyn was a regular surrogate for Trump during the campaign, routinely appearing on television to praise and defend his campaign.
In September of 2016, MediaMatters wrote an article criticizing outlets for failing “to disclose during discussions about Russia that Epshteyn has financial ties to the former Soviet Union, which include consulting for “entities doing business in Eastern Europe” and moderating a Russian-sponsored conference on “investment opportunities in Moscow.”
The section of the Senate Intelligence Committees mammoth Counterintelligence Report regarding Epshteyn relaying the Cheremin-backed Trump hotel plan is heavily redacted.
Two names, “Tarazov and Standik” stick out from an otherwise almost entirely redacted section. The name of the Russian organization Rossotrudnichestvo is mentioned in the footnotes.
“Standik” appears to be a misspelled reference to Alexander Stadnik, Moscow’s Trade Representative to the United States who was expelled from the country after the 2018 attempted assassination of the Russian Military Intelligence defector Sergei Skirpal using a Novichok nerve agent.
Rossotrudnichestvo is a Russian government-run exchange program whose US Director, Yury Zaytsev, was investigated by the FBI in 2013 for being a Russian spy.
The section is far too redacted to make sense of and it is unclear what Alexander Stadnik or Rossotrudnichestvo have to do with Boris Epshteyn or the Trump Moscow hotel deal he passed along to Eric Trump.
In September of 2016 Epshteyn received an email from Trump Campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadapoulos, saying that he wanted to connect him with his friend Sergei Millian.
Millian, a former Soviet émigré, had come to the attention of the FBI in 2011 after participating in a 2011 trip to Moscow organized by the aforementioned Yury Zaytsev of Rossotrudnichestvo that counterintelligence officials suspected had been used by Russian intelligence to recruit potential assets.
Epshteyn denies having met with Millian.
Yet another approach candidate Trump from Russia took place in December of 2015, when an acquaintance of Ivanka Trump’s from the fashion industry, Miroslava “Mira” Duma, passed along invitations on behalf of Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Sergei Prikhodko, for Ivanka and Donald Trump to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the same event Felix Sater attempted to get Michael Cohen to attend.
Ivanka had traveled to Moscow to visit Duma in the past. Duma’s family had political connections, her father was a former Russian Senator and her husband works at the Russian Ministry of Trade and Industry.
On January 14th, 2016, Trump’s assistant Rhona Graff emailed Duma and explained that while Trump was “honored to be asked to participate in the highly prestigious” Forum, he would “have to decline” the invitation due to his “very grueling and full travel schedule.”
Graff asked Duma if she should send a formal note to Prikhodko, the Deputy Prime Minister, to which Duma responded in the affirmative.
Graff appears to have not sent the formal note as on March 17th, 2016, she received an email from Prikhodko himself inviting Trump to the Forum.
Two weeks later, Graff drafted a two-paragraph letter for Trump to sign stating that schedule has become extremely demanding” because of the presidential campaign, that he “already ha[d] several commitments in the United States” but “would have gladly given every consideration to attending such an important event.”
Graff sent the draft letter to another assistant at the Trump Organization for them to print out on paper with Trump letterhead for him to sign.
As this letter was being prepared Graff was contacted by Robert Foresman, the vice chairman of UBS Investment Bank in New York, about securing an in-person meeting with Trump.
Foresman maintains that he was asked by Anton Kobyakov, an advisor to Putin involved with the Roscongress Foundation, to invite Trump to speak at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
After a phone introduction to Graff via Mark Burnett, the producer of The Apprentice, Foresman emailed her on March 31st, writing that had deep experience in Russia and was involved in establishing an early “private channel” between Putin and George W. Bush.
Foresman had headed Dresdener Bank’s investment banking operations in Russia during the early 2000s. From 2001 to 2006, Foresman worked alongside Mattias Warnig, Dresdener Bank’s president for Russia. Warnig was a former member of the Stasi, East Germany’s intelligence agency and had been a friend of Putin’s while he served in the KGB in Dresden.
Prior to joining Dresdener, Warning had spied on it for the Stasi. From 2006 to 2009, Foresman served as the vice chairman of the powerful Moscow investment bank Renaissance Capital. Internal Renaissance emails reveal that in 2007, Foresman was among several Renaissance executives who secretly drew up an agreement that awarded an unspecified share of Renaissance to Warnig without him having to pay a dime for it.
Foresman told Graff that he had received an “approach” from “senior Kremlin officials” about candidate Trump. He asked her to arrange for him to meet with Trump, campaign chairman Corey Lewandowski, or “another relevant person” to discuss this “approach” as well as other “concrete things” that he didn’t want to communicate over “unsecure email.”
Graff forwarded Foresman’s meeting request to another Trump Organization assistant on April 4th. Foresman sent reminder emails to Graff on April 26th and 30th, forwarding his April 26th email to Lewandowski. In his April 30th email, Foresman suggested that he could meet with Donald Trump Jr. or Eric Trump that they could convey the information he possessed “to [the candidate] personally or [to] someone [the candidate] absolutely trusts.”
Graff forwarded the email to Trump advisor Stephen Miller on May 2nd. It is unclear what happened next and it remains unknown whether then-candidate Trump was made aware of Foresman’s approaches.