A public appearance this week before the House Intelligence Committee by Felix Sater, a former business associate of President Trump’s, was postponed Monday.
Sater, a New York developer who was born in Russia, was set to meet with the panel Wednesday to discuss his business dealings with the Trump Organization and a Trump Tower project in Moscow. But that public hearing has been delayed, a House Intelligence Committee source told the Washington Examiner.
It’s uncertain why the hearing has been delayed, but it comes after Attorney General William Barr shared with Congress a summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation findings on Sunday afternoon. That four-page letter said Mueller’s investigation found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Barr also concluded there was no obstruction of justice after Mueller declined to make a final determination on that facet of the investigation.
The hearing’s postponement also came around the same time Bloomberg published a report saying a lawsuit was filed against Sater Monday that claimed he attempted to use money stolen from Kazakhstan for the Moscow Trump Tower project which never panned out.
Sater participated in hotel and condominium deals for the Trump Organization through 2010 in New York, Florida, Arizona, London, and Moscow after he met Trump in 2003.
Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who is scheduled to start a three-year prison sentence in May, claimed in a letter from August 2017 that, “I primarily communicated with the Moscow-based development company … through a U.S. citizen third-party intermediary, Mr. Felix Sater.”
Cohen, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations regarding hush-money payments, also said in November he lied to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in 2017 regarding the timeline of a potential Trump Tower project in Moscow.
Although Cohen initially said the Trump Organization discarded the project in January 2016, a court filing later revealed that Cohen and Sater were discussing the project “as late as approximately June 2016.”
