#9 The Deal: Trump Tower Moscow and the ‘Nothing to Do With Russia’ Denial

Before we go any further, let’s do a quick recap so we’re all on the same page.

According to former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, Trump was on the Soviets’ radar by 1977 - and author Craig Unger says his vanity and narcissism made him “a natural target to recruit” (Essay 1). They tested him by letting the Russian mob move into Trump Tower as soon as it opened. (Essay 2). Then they invited him to Moscow in 1987 and rolled out the red carpet (Essay 3). The Russian mob out of Brighton Beach set up shop inside his buildings (Essay 4). His Atlantic City casino kept breaking the money laundering rules (Essay 5). Once most American banks stopped lending to him after his bankruptcies, Deutsche Bank - the bank whose Russian arm got caught up in a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme - became his go-to lender (Essay 6). Bayrock - a firm founded by a former Soviet trade official, with Felix Sater, a convicted felon turned government informant, running its daily operations - worked out of an office two floors below Trump’s in Trump Tower (Essay 7). And then Trump’s brand went global - Toronto, where money from a steel-mill sale to buyers financed by Russia’s state bank VEB went into the tower, and Panama, where a broker said some of his clients had ties to the Russian mafia (Essay 8).

Forty years of slow, patient cultivation. A thousand small favors. A thousand small entanglements. By the time we get to 2013, Trump isn’t a target anymore. He’s an asset.

This is the essay where I show you when Russia made their move. It happened in November 2013, in Moscow. Trump walked into a room full of Russian oligarchs at the Miss Universe pageant and they knew they had picked the right guy. These folks had been playing footsie for years - but now it was time to start going steady.

Aras Agalarov is one of those oligarchs. He owns the Crocus Group, one of Russia’s biggest construction companies, and his son Emin is a pop star Trump had only started doing business with a few months earlier. That year, Agalarov agreed to pay $20 million to bring Miss Universe to Moscow [17]. Trump co-owned the pageant, and his own lawyers later said he took in $12.2 million from the Moscow show [18]. He spent the trip schmoozing - figuring out who had money and how to get close to them. The pageant wasn’t the point. The networking was.

Trump wanted to meet Putin while he was in Russia. He literally sent Putin an invitation to the pageant [19], and went on Twitter asking if Putin would become his “new best friend” [1].

Putin didn’t show.

But Putin made sure to reach Trump anyway. For a while it looked like Putin might show up, but a last-minute visit from the King of the Netherlands kept him away [1]. Instead, Agalarov says, Putin sent his apologies in a handwritten note, along with a gift - a Russian lacquered box [17].Show the receiptOther outlet’s reportingThe Guardian, September 18th, 2017The GuardianCloseOther outlet’s reportingThe Guardian: Trump in Moscow: what happened at Miss Universe in 2013, September 18th, 2017Close NPR reported that Putin’s gift reached Trump through Agalarov’s daughter [1]. So no, Putin didn’t appear in person. But he made sure Trump felt seen.

The Agalarovs walked away from that weekend as Trump’s permanent connection to Russian money and Russian power. Three years later, Aras Agalarov was the same guy whose people set up the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr. The trip was really about Russia handpicking the family that would be Trump’s permanent bridge into the Kremlin. They were placing their guy. He just didn’t know it.

Two years later, in November 2015, the operation finally made its move. Trump was officially running for president, and the Sater email I broke down in Essay 7 - the one where he tells Cohen “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, I will manage this process” [2] - wasn’t a fantasy anymore.Show the receiptPrimary recordU.S. Department of Justice, Vol. I, p. 71Vol. I, p. 71ClosePrimary recordOpen the page full sizeOn November 3, 2015, the day after the Trump Organization transmitted the LOI, Sater emailed Cohen suggesting that the Trump Moscow project could be used to increase candidate Trump's chances at being elected, writing: 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, I will manage this process ....U.S. Department of Justice: Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I, March 2019Vol. I, p. 71 · PDF page 81Close The Boston Globe found no evidence in the emails that Sater ever delivered on those promises - but the tower deal itself was real. It was a project, with deliverables and a timeline. Cohen was inside Trump Tower running the Moscow side of the deal. Sater told Cohen his next steps were “very sensitive with Putin’s very, very close people.” And Trump knew about the deal - he personally signed the letter of intent.Show the receiptPrimary recordU.S. Department of Justice, Vol. I, p. 5Vol. I, p. 5ClosePrimary recordOpen the page full sizeCandidate Trump signed a Letter of Intent for Trump Tower Moscow by November 2015, and in January 2016 Trump Organization executive Michael Cohen emailed and spoke about the project with the office of Russian government press secretary Dmitry Peskov. The Trump Organization pursued the project through at least June 2016, including by considering travel to Russia by Cohen and candidate Trump.U.S. Department of Justice: Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I, March 2019Vol. I, p. 5 · PDF page 15Close

I want to be careful with that last line, because it’s the kind of thing people throw around without proof.

So here’s the proof. In February 2019, Michael Cohen testified to Congress, under oath, that Trump knew about the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations and personally directed them throughout the entire campaign [4].Show the receiptPrimary recordU.S. House of Representatives, Hearing, p. 11Hearing, p. 11ClosePrimary recordSo to be clear, Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump-Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it because he never expected to win. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project.U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Reform: Hearing with Michael Cohen, Former Attorney to President Donald Trump, February 27th, 2019P. 11 · PDF page 15Close Cohen said Trump asked him at least a half-dozen times between the Iowa Caucus and the end of June 2016 some version of “How’s it going in Russia?” That isn’t Cohen speculating about Trump’s mood. That’s Cohen describing a boss who was actively managing a private business deal in Russia - one his lawyer was asking the Kremlin to help with - while running for President of the United States.

The negotiations went on well into 2016 [3]. Not just during Iowa. Not just during Super Tuesday. All the way through June 2016 [5]. Which means that by the time Trump was on every cable news show in America saying “I have nothing to do with Russia” [4], his people had spent months trying to lock down a licensing deal in Moscow that would have personally made him hundreds of millions of dollars if Putin’s government signed off.

Now, you don’t just go build a skyscraper in Moscow the way you’d build a Marriott in Dallas. In Russia, every major real estate deal of that size needs the personal blessing of the Kremlin. The land, the permits, the financing - it all runs through Putin’s people, and ultimately through Putin himself. Nothing this big moves in Russia unless he wants it to.

So the licensing deal Cohen and Sater were chasing wasn’t a normal business deal. It was Trump’s company asking the Russian government for help with a deal his own lawyer says stood to make him hundreds of millions of dollars. While he was running for President. While he was the Republican frontrunner. And just weeks before he’d become eligible for classified intelligence briefings as the nominee.

That is the most basic conflict of interest you can imagine. And it gets worse, because it doesn’t go in one direction. The minute Putin knows Trump wants the deal, Putin owns him. Putin doesn’t have to threaten anything. He doesn’t even have to pick up the phone. He just has to slow-walk the approvals and let Trump’s people figure out for themselves what they need to do to keep the conversation going. That’s the leverage. You don’t have to bribe a guy if you’ve made him desperate to please you.

And once you understand that’s the dynamic, the rest of 2016 stops looking like a bunch of unrelated weird events and starts looking like exactly what it was: a candidate quietly doing favors for a foreign government because that government was holding a payday worth hundreds of millions of dollars over his head.

Let’s walk through them.

On June 9, 2016 - the same exact month the Moscow Tower negotiations were still going - Trump’s campaign held the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting [6]. Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, sat down in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya. The meeting was set up by people who worked for - guess who - the Agalarovs. The same family from Miss Universe. Same network, three years later, now talking directly to the campaign.

The pitch was that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Don Jr.’s response when offered the meeting was, in writing, “if it’s what you say I love it.”Show the receiptPrimary recordU.S. Department of Justice, Vol. I, p. 110Vol. I, p. 110ClosePrimary recordOpen the page full sizeThe meeting was proposed to Donald Trump Jr. in an email from Robert Goldstone, at the request of his then-client Emin Agalarov, the son of Russian real-estate developer Aras Agalarov. Goldstone relayed to Trump Jr. that the "Crown prosecutor of Russia ... offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia" as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." Trump Jr. immediately responded that "if it's what you say I love it," and arranged the meeting through a series of emails and telephone calls.U.S. Department of Justice: Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I, March 2019Vol. I, p. 110 · PDF page 120Close Manafort, by the way, would later go to federal prison for, among other things, secretly working as an unregistered foreign agent for Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his party.

A lot of people treat that meeting as its own scandal that exists in a vacuum. It isn’t. It’s one data point inside a much bigger pattern, happening in the same building where Cohen was simultaneously negotiating the Moscow tower upstairs.

The next month, the Republican Party platform got rewritten on Ukraine [7]. A delegate named Diana Denman tried to add language calling for the United States to send Ukraine “lethal defensive weapons.” Why did Ukraine need them? Because Russia had invaded Crimea in 2014, was still occupying it, and was actively backing a separatist war in eastern Ukraine. Thousands of people had already died. Denman wasn’t proposing something radical. She was proposing standard Republican Cold War policy. Help the people getting invaded by Russia.

The Trump campaign pushed back hard. When Denman brought her amendment to a subcommittee meeting, two Trump campaign staffers came over and asked to set it aside for further review [7]. The final version got watered down to “appropriate assistance” - vague, toothless, exactly what Moscow wanted [7].Show the receiptMy readU.S. Department of Justice, Vol. I, p. 10Vol. I, p. 10CloseMy readOpen the page full sizeAnd the investigation did not establish that one Campaign official's efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican Party platform on providing assistance to Ukraine were undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia.U.S. Department of Justice: Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I, March 2019Vol. I, p. 10 · PDF page 20Close The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, the party that built its entire identity around standing up to Russia for forty years, suddenly went soft on Russian aggression in Ukraine because Trump campaign staffers asked it to. The one leading the push, J.D. Gordon, said he was going by what he had heard Trump say about Ukraine. Mueller’s investigation did not establish that Trump or Russia was behind the change [19].

So one Trump operation had spent months asking the Russian government for help building a tower in Moscow. Another Trump operation was in Cleveland, talking the Republican Party out of calling for weapons for the Ukrainians that Russia was killing. You don’t have to call that a quid pro quo. Call it whatever you want. But that’s what one looks like when nobody’s stupid enough to put it in writing.

Now remember Evgeny Buryakov. I introduced him in Essay 8. The SVR officer stationed at VEB - Russia’s state development bank, whose board Putin chaired as prime minister, the same bank that financed the steel-mill deal whose money went into Trump Toronto. The FBI arrested him in the Bronx in January 2015 [8]. His job: gathering intelligence on U.S. sanctions on Russia [9].

So this is a Russian state bank whose board Putin once chaired, with money that ended up in a Trump tower coming out of it in one direction. A Russian intelligence officer sitting inside that same bank, working sanctions intel out the other direction. And then in 2015 and 2016, the Trump campaign just happens to start taking positions favorable to lifting sanctions on Russia, and Trump’s personal lawyer is quietly negotiating a Russian tower with Sater that needs Russian state approval to move forward.

Are you connecting the dots?

Now fast forward to December 2016. Trump’s just won. Nobody saw it coming, including, by some accounts, the Russians themselves. Michael Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security advisor, gets on the phone with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador [10]. They talk about sanctions.

Hours before that call, the Obama administration imposed brand new sanctions on Russia, specifically as punishment for interfering in the 2016 election. Real sanctions. The intelligence community knew Russia ran an active campaign to help Trump win, and Obama, on his way out the door, was sanctioning them for it. Normally, when one country sanctions another, the sanctioned country retaliates. That’s how it works. Putin should have been hitting back hard.

Instead, Flynn called Kislyak and told him to “reciprocate moderately” [11]. In plain English: don’t hit back hard, hang tight, the new administration is about to come in and everything is about to change. And Putin listened. Russia did almost nothing in response. The retaliation everyone was bracing for didn’t come - not until the next summer, after Congress passed new sanctions. The transition team was coordinating with a foreign adversary before they were even sworn in. That’s a backchannel between business partners, not between governments.

When the FBI later asked Flynn what he and Kislyak talked about, he lied. He pled guilty to that lie in 2017. He didn’t lie about a phone call to a guy he barely knew. He lied about a coordinated sanctions strategy with the Russian ambassador, conducted while Obama was still President, on behalf of an incoming administration that was about to roll back the punishment Russia had earned for interfering in the election that put it in power.

Okay, now, back up a few weeks to October 2016. Things were getting messy for the campaign. The Access Hollywood tape dropped - the open-mic recording from 2005 where Trump bragged about grabbing women. The campaign nearly collapsed in the 48 hours after it leaked. Around that same time, a rumor about something else completely was making the rounds [12] - a tape Michael Cohen later told Congress he knew several people had tried to buy. And to be clear, this isn’t the Stormy Daniels payoff, and it isn’t the alleged pee tape from the Steele dossier. This was something different and more specific.

The rumor was that there was actual security camera footage from a Trump Tower elevator showing Trump physically striking Melania. The story went that the master copy was held by a former Trump Tower employee who’d quietly walked off with it years earlier, and that copies had been shopped around to tabloids, then bid on at a private auction, and were now floating somewhere in the kompromat ecosystem - meaning anyone with enough money and the right Russian connections could presumably get a copy.

Reporters from outlet after outlet would later go hunting for the footage [13]. Tom Arnold publicly went on a long crusade trying to find it. Cohen has, at various points, said he doesn’t believe the tape is real.Show the receiptUnresolved questionU.S. House of Representatives, Hearing, p. 132Hearing, p. 132CloseUnresolved questionMs. Speier. So you never saw this tape? Mr. Cohen. No, ma'am. And I know several people who went to go try to purchase it for catch and kill purpose. It doesn't exist.U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Reform: Hearing with Michael Cohen, Former Attorney to President Donald Trump, February 27th, 2019P. 132 · PDF page 136Close Trump’s people deny any of it. Nobody has ever produced the footage. So on the merits, it’s unconfirmed.

But here’s the thing about kompromat - that’s the Russian word for compromising material. Kompromat doesn’t have to be real to work. It just has to be plausible. And it has to be in the air around the target at the exact moment he can’t afford another scandal. They don’t actually have to show you the tape. They just have to make sure you can’t ever quite forget that it might exist. And that someone who isn’t on your side might get to it first.

Trump Tower is owned and managed by the Trump Organization. Who could get at its security camera footage over the years has never been made public - but the people inside it included, let’s not forget, the Russian-mob-adjacent Bayrock crew working two floors below Trump’s office (Essay 7), and the Russian mob figures who bought condos in the building (Essays 2 and 4). The idea that a tape from a Trump Tower elevator could end up in Russian hands isn’t a wild conspiracy. Russians had been moving in and out of that building for thirty years.

So the fact that a lawyer was offering TMZ an elevator tape in October 2016, less than a month before Election Day - and that Cohen later told Congress he knew several people who tried to buy it to bury it - is itself the receipt. It tells you what Trump’s inner circle believed they were exposed to. It tells you who they thought might have leverage. And it tells you they understood, even if they never said it out loud, that the operation they were running could get blown up at any moment by something they couldn’t control.

What we do know for sure is that just weeks before Election Day, Jared Kushner’s company quietly got a $285 million loan from Deutsche Bank [14]. He and his brother Joshua signed on as guarantors - a limited “bad boy” guarantee that only kicks in for things like fraud. This was the same Deutsche Bank from Essay 6 - Trump’s bank of last resort, the bank that was at that exact moment negotiating to settle a federal mortgage fraud case and New York charges over a scheme that laundered $10 billion out of Russia. So Trump’s son-in-law’s company got a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar lifeline from the same bank that was, at that very moment, negotiating with New York regulators over moving Russian dirty money. A month before Trump won the presidency.

Coincidence. Sure.

Spies have a name for what this all looks like. They call it cultivation. Cultivation isn’t recruitment. There’s no contract, no codename, no dead drop, no bag of cash in a parking garage. You find someone with ego and ambition and a constant need for money and approval. And then you spend years - decades, if you have to - feeding all three. By the time the asset is useful to you, he doesn’t think of himself as your asset. He thinks of himself as a successful guy who happens to have a lot of rich friends in Russia who keep doing him favors.

A retired Kazakh intelligence official named Alnur Mussayev claims that Trump was given a KGB codename - “Krasnov” - back in the 1980s [16]. That’s pretty specific - but he hasn’t backed it up with any documents.

Yuri Shvets, a former KGB officer, has said publicly that Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years [15] - starting years before the 1987 Moscow trip I covered in Essay 3. Shvets says the KGB spotted Trump back then as a textbook target - a guy with ego, vanity, financial pressure, and the kind of self-interest that made him exploitable. So they worked on him. Slowly. For decades.

If Shvets is right, by the time Trump walked into that Miss Universe pageant in 2013, he wasn’t somebody Russia was trying to win over. He was somebody Russia already counted as an asset - even if Trump didn’t realize it.

The Moscow Tower talks. The Ukraine platform. The Flynn-Kislyak sanctions backchannel. The Kushner Deutsche Bank loan. The elevator tape hunt. The Sater email saying we can engineer it. The Trump Tower meeting set up by Agalarov’s people. Don Jr. saying “if it’s what you say I love it.” Manafort sharing campaign polling data with a Russian intelligence asset. Cohen running the Moscow deal upstairs while the campaign ran downstairs.

That’s not a conspiracy. A conspiracy implies people sneaking around, hiding what they’re doing. What I see is coordinated action by people who all knew exactly what they were doing and why. They weren’t even hiding most of it. We just weren’t paying attention.

Felix Sater promised in November 2015 that “our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it.” A year later, Trump won.

Tomorrow, the bills come due.