New Trove of Documents Suggests Trump Tower Moscow Negotiations Went Beyond Letter of Intent

A large collection of newly-released documents are shedding some new light on the preparations Donald Trump‘s associates made to get the green light for a Trump Tower Moscow in the middle of the 2016 election.

Buzzfeed News picked up on nearly 300 internal Trump Organization documents that purportedly show how Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, and other Trump representatives tried to advance negotiations for the tower’s construction process in Moscow. The collection includes non-binding business agreements, internal communications, building design prototypes, and plans for Trump to eventually travel to Russia, all of which were crafted while Trump was running for president.

From the article.

The fixers believed they needed Putin’s support to pull off the lucrative deal, and they planned to use Trump’s public praise for him to help secure it. At the same time, they plotted to persuade Putin to openly declare his support for Trump’s candidacy. “If he says it we own this election,” Sater wrote to Cohen.

The general defense among the president’s supporters is that Trump Tower Moscow only went as far as a letter of intent, and the real estate project was never actually commenced. Even so, the project has been a major subject of intrigue ever since it was revealed Cohen lied to Congress about the timeline of business dealings for the proposed endeavor.

This presents numerous questions for the nature of Trump’s connection to Russia, and Cohen will almost certainly be asked about this in his upcoming testimony before the House Intel Committee.

It should be noted that Buzzfeed’s report came out while they still might be trying to recover from the recent setbacks to their news division. The outlet laid off 15 percent of its staff last month, plus they took a lot of heat after Robert Mueller disputed their bombshell report claiming Trump ordered Cohen to lie about the Moscow Project.

Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier were the co-authors of that report, and they’re both on the byline for Buzzfeed’s write-up of these new documents.

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