Lost in the maelstrom of coverage of Sunday night’s bloodbath in Las Vegas was a new development in the investigation into Russia’s attempt to hack the presidential election. The Washington Post reported that special counsel Robert Mueller has documents that detail two previously undisclosed contacts between Trump associates and the Kremlin.
The Post has learned that the Trump Organization turned over documents revealing that Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had been in touch with Russians at least twice in the time since Trump jumped into the race. One of the reporters on this story, Rosalind Helderman, explained these new developments on The Post’s YouTube channel. Watch here.
In the first, Russian real estate mogul Sergei Gordeev approached Cohen about a Trump-branded residential project in November 2015. Gordeev had previously been a member of the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian legislature. Cohen and Giorgi Rtskhiladze, an international financier who had collaborated with Cohen on other projects, discussed the proposal with Gordeev over several months. Ultimately, Cohen told Rtskhiladze that the Trump Organization had opted to work with another real estate developer, Felix Sater–himself a longtime Trump associate–on building a Moscow Trump Tower. That project, however, stalled.
Sater figures prominently in the other newly disclosed contact. In June 2016–just weeks before the Republican National Convention–Sater tried to get Cohen to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. This gathering, which has taken place since 1997, brings together business leaders from Russia and other countries. However, American interests have kept their distance from the conference since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
Sater, an old high school friend of Cohen’s, sweetened the pot by promising that Cohen could potentially meet Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, and possibly president Vladimir Putin. He even included a letter from a conference official that would help Cohen get a visa. However, Cohen declined, saying it was too close for comfort to the convention.
When asked about the contacts, Trump Organization counsel Alan Garten said that they had to be put in “context.” He said that it was not unusual for developers to pitch real estate projects to their colleagues. But how many of those deals involve a candidate for president fielding proposals from developers who live in a hostile foreign power? Moreover, this once again proves the lie to Trump’s previous claim that he has no interests in Russia.
By itself, it looks like a nothing burger on the surface. But when you put it together with everything else we’ve learned about Trump’s interactions with the Kremlin, we find ourselves yet again asking questions about our president that no one in any self-respecting democracy should even have to ask.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
