A lawyer for President Trump and top executive at the Trump Organization emailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman last year to ask for assistance in jump-starting a project for a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to a report Monday.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney and an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, sent the email to Dmitry Peskov, a top press side at the Kremlin, in January 2016, as Trump was running for president.
“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 said in his email to Peskov, according to the Washington Post. “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,” Cohen wrote. “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 told congressional investigators in a statement he sent the email to Peskov at the urging of Felix Sater, a Russian immigrant who was serving as a broker for the Trump Organization.
Sater recommended Cohen reach out to Putin’s top spokesman because a real estate deal in Moscow would require approval from the Russian government. Cohen said in his statement, which was obtained by the Washington Post, that he didn’t recall hearing back from Peskov.
The project was abandoned two weeks later.
“It should come as no surprise that, over four decades, the Trump Organization has received countless real estate development opportunities, both domestic and international,” Cohen said in a statement to the Washington Post. “The Trump Moscow proposal was simply one of many development opportunities that the Trump Organization considered and ultimately rejected.”
Cohen said the project was a “building proposal that did not succeed and nothing more.”
Cohen and Sater had been in contact about building a Trump Tower in Moscow from September 2015 to January 2016, during which Trump was running for president.
In one email, reported by the New York Times earlier Monday, Sater told Cohen he believed building a Trump Tower in the Russian capital would be beneficial to Trump’s candidacy for president.
“Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in a Nov. 3, 2015 email to Cohen. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
But in his statement to congressional investigators, Cohen said the real estate proposal in Moscow was not tied to Trump’s campaign.
“The Trump Tower Moscow proposal was not related in any way to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign,” he wrote. “The decision to pursue the proposal initially, and later to abandon it were unrelated to the Donald J. Trump for President campaign.”
Numerous congressional committees, as well as the Justice Department, are investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, as well as potential ties between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department to oversee the investigation.
