A violent fraudster told one of Donald Trump’s closest confidants he could get Vladimir Putin’s support for the 2016 presidential campaign. But questions remain about whether Felix Sater would be in a position to do so.
Sater, whose late 2015 emails to Trump attorney Michael Cohen were reported Monday, long has been viewed as a potential link between Trump and Russians suspected of releasing Democratic emails last year.
“Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this,” Sater wrote to Cohen in November 2015.
This isn’t Sater’s first time in the limelight, however, and detractors doubt he is a missing link that will prove the Trump campaign’s wrongdoing.
Born in Russia and raised in Brooklyn, Sater was jailed in the early 1990s for stabbing a fellow Wall Street trader in the face with a broken margarita glass. He became an FBI informant in the late ’90s to avoid prison for a “pump and dump” stock fraud scheme.
While a government informant, Sater worked in the 2000s for the Trump Tower-based Bayrock Group, which partnered with the future president on several development projects. By 2010, Sater had a Trump Organization business card calling himself a “senior adviser to Donald Trump,” though Trump said in a 2013 deposition he wouldn’t be able to recognize Sater.
Authorities described Sater’s 11-year stint as an informant as immensely valuable in relation to organized crime, foreign governments and Islamic terrorists.
“[Sater’s] cooperation was of an extraordinary depth and breadth, almost unseen, at least in this United States Attorney’s Office,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Kaminsky testified at a 2011 appeals court hearing.
“[Sater’s] cooperation runs a gamut that is seldom seen. It involves violent organizations such as Al Qaeda, it involves foreign governments, it involves Russian organized crime,” he said. “And, most particularly, it involves various families of La Cosa Nostra.”
In 2009, Sater was sentenced to a $25,000 fine for defrauding investors of $40 million, without probation or restitution. (He had, however, previously given up a house in the Hamptons.)
“There was nothing he wouldn’t do. No task was too big,” Kaminsky testified about his work as an informant.
Kaminsky, elected a Democratic state senator in New York last year, did not respond to a request for comment. Former FBI agent Leo Taddeo, who also attested to Sater’s work, declined to comment.
Sater’s superlative achievements are doubted by adversaries.
Richard Lerner, an attorney fighting to unseal records for years as part of a RICO lawsuit, said he doesn’t make much of the newly reported Sater emails to Cohen.
“My guess is that this is another instance of Sater trumpeting his own horn and saying he could accomplish things that he couldn’t,” Lerner told the Washington Examiner.
Lerner said he believes the government is resisting further release of documents about Sater because they would show he delivered little value.
Lerner said he has reviewed most documents that are part of an ongoing fight that could be adjudicated with additional releases as early as November.
Sater’s attorney Robert Wolf has said he assisted numerous U.S. government agencies. This purportedly involved buying antiaircraft weapons for the CIA.
“In my opinion, he was a big bullshitter and the government got caught with their pants down,” Lerner said. “I think he strung the government along. He’s a great bullshit artist. And I think they believed him and he never delivered. I think the reason for all the secrecy is that they’re embarrassed that they let the guy keep all the money he stole.”
Sater — who reportedly lives in luxury — declined to comment, referring questions to Wolf, who did not respond to several emails.
Sater has more than one connection to the investigation into Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 election. Andrew Weissman, a former federal prosecutor who is now working on Robert Mueller’s special investigation team, signed the 1998 cooperation agreement in Sater’s stock fraud case.
The New York Times, which reported Sater’s emails to Cohen Monday, said it was not given any Cohen responses. Sater was working on plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow at the time. The Washington Post reported Monday that Cohen emailed Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov through a general email account seeking help with the project, but no response was described.
Cohen told the Examiner he had “no idea who is leaking the information” about his email contacts with Sater and Putin’s spokesman. He avoided offering an opinion on Sater, whom he has known since childhood.
