Swamp Diary Week 15: A Hard Rain Falls on Trump Tower

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Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Swamp Diary
Week 15: A Hard Rain Falls on Trump Tower
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/02/trump-tower-moscow-scandal-swamp-diary-215571



The scandal's floodwaters rise with news of an aborted Moscow project during the campaign.

By JACK SHAFER

September 02, 2017


The rain started falling on Trump Tower on January 12, 2017, the day Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that a top aide to President-elect Donald Trump had spoken about sanctions relief with Russia's ambassador to the United States.

The rain has never stopped since, coming in sprinkles, sometimes in sheets, other times in icy soakers. But instead of washing Trump Tower spring-shower clean, the rain has coated Trump's proudest creation in the grime of scandal. The president’s showcase skyscraper in midtown Manhattan has now taken its place in U.S. history with Watergate, Whitewater, Teapot Dome and Chappaquiddick to serve as a synonym for something politically shady. For reasons indecipherable, attachment of a place name to a scandal lends it a physicality that helps us grasp it in its totality. The unimaginative have appended the -gate suffix to scandals, giving us “Koreagate,” “Debategate,” “Chinagate,” “Irangate,” “Nannygate,” “Travelgate,” “Troopergate” and other gates. Some would have us call our current scandal “Russiagate,” but for reason of self-respect we must reject it because a better place moniker exists to describe all the Trump improprieties orbiting around Russia. Location being everything, let’s agree to ditch the puns and wordplay and dub this scandal and all its heirs and forebears for the man and his signature moment in steel and glass: Trump Tower.

Trump Tower was, of course, the scene of the still mysterious June 2016 meeting Trump's son, son-in-law and campaign director took with a bevy of Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. It's the place where convicted felon, Trump business associate and Russian-American Felix Sater "frequently" popped into Trump's office to talk real estate and Russia deals. The building's namesake, Trump Tower Moscow, which the president first started talking about constructing with Azerbaijani-Russian real estate developer Araz Agalarov, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in 2013 has further besmirched the original's reputation: This week we learned that despite Trump's continued denials that he had any business commitments in Russia, he was plotting a Trump Tower Moscow while running for president.

Sater was close enough to Trump to have escorted Trump offspring Donald Jr. and Ivanka on a 2006 Moscow trip. "I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins [sic] private chair at his desk in the Kremlin," he said in an email to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that has been turned over to the House Intelligence Committee. He bragged to Cohen about how he could obtain a Russian partner for the new tower. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in a November 2015 message. “I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.” In a press statement this week, Sater was still laying it on thick about the development, saying the plan was to build "the world's tallest building in Moscow" when a simple "tallest building in Moscow" would have sufficed.

Cohen now concedes that he discussed Trump Tower Moscow with Trump at least three times between September 2015 and January 2016, roughly the period between the beginning of debate season and the landing of campaign troops in Iowa. In January 2016, Cohen sent an email to a top aide to Putin asking for help on the project. This concession comes after repeated assertions by Cohen that Trump had no Russia connections. Trump once told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that his businesses had “no relationship to Russia whatsoever.” It's a tune that Trump and his associates have sung repeatedly.......................

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