President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, will appear before Senate investigators Tuesday, as part of the ongoing investigation of the Russian meddling in the presidential election in 2016, where he is facing questions about a once-confidential proposition to construct Trump Tower Moscow, ABC News reports.
Trump has continuously been saying that his enterprise has “nothing to do with Russia,” but Cohen’s communication with Congress has presented a different image of the magnate and his interests in the region. Moreover, he has noted that the potentially fruitful deal with Russia in the midst of the presidential campaign has nothing to do with the president’s political ambitions.
“The Trump Tower Moscow proposal was not related in any way to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign,” Cohen said in a written statement to Congress made public last month. “Both I and the Trump Organization were evaluating this proposal and many others from solely a business standpoint, and rejected going forward on that basis.”
One of the few people trusted with the secrets of the President’s business and personal life, Cohen was deeply involved in negotiations over the tower project in late 2015 and early 2016. Documents obtained by ABC News show the plan involved building what was to be the tallest skyscraper in the world.
Trump personally signed a non-binding letter of intent with a Russian developer to build the tower, a deal that would have included a $4 million initial payment to Trump had it gone forward, and 5 percent of the initial sales. Cohen said he nixed the proposal in January 2016.
Cohen will meet behind closed doors with investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is one of at least four congressional committees looking into aspects of suspected Russian interference in the election. The committee has studied classified documents and quietly interviewed dozens of officials involved in the 2016 campaign, with the goal of documenting any foreign interference in order to prevent similar episodes from occurring.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the committee’s top Democrat, told ABC News he is concerned about the apparent discrepancy between Trump’s public statements about having never engaged in Russian business activity and the negotiations Cohen oversaw with a Russian developer.
“Clearly if you believe the reports about Mr. Cohen and the effort to try to create Trump Tower Moscow, to me, that’s a relevant piece of information,” Warner said. “It would contradict some of the statements that were made earlier, that there [was] no connection.”
Cohen used a Russian-born middleman with a criminal record, Felix Sater, to broker the deal. Email correspondence shared with congressional investigators suggests that, even if Cohen saw no link between the business dealings and Trump’s political ambitions, Sater had other ideas.
In one e-mail to Cohen, Sater wrote, “Buddy, our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.”
Cohen has said he briefed then-candidate Trump at least three times about the Moscow Tower deal but ultimately abandoned the project because of difficulties obtaining financing, a location, and the much-needed government approvals.
“Obviously he has been involved in so many areas of the president’s business. It’s not even clear to me … where the lines are drawn between one area or another,” Ron Wyden, D-Ore., another member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told ABC News. “It’s crucial that we get a chance to look at some of the issues.”
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