Donald Trump Claims Everyone Knew About Secret Russian Deal No One Knew About

Michael Cohen’s secret negotiations with Russian officials and their proxies to arrange financing and permits for a Trump Tower in Moscow, conducted as Trump was publicly heaping lavish praise on President Vladimir Putin, had never been secret at all, the president told reporters outside the White House.

Asked to comment on his former lawyer’s confession in federal court on Thursday that the Trump Organization had secretly negotiated with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump attempted to sell the American people an outrageous lie.

“Everybody knew about it, it was written about in newspapers, it was a well-known project,” Trump claimed, falsely, about his company’s covert effort, “during the early part of ’16 and I guess even before that,” to develop a luxury skyscraper with help from Putin’s office and a former general in Russia’s military intelligence service.

In fact, the existence of such a project, which was being negotiated in secret during the entire span of the Republican primary campaign — from at least October 2015, when Trump signed a letter of intent with a Russian developer, through January 2016, when Cohen called an aide to Putin’s spokesman, until some time after Trump secured the nomination in June — was not known about or reported at the time. There was no indication in the outline of Cohen’s confession sketched out by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday as to why the proposed deal was dropped, but the timeline might offer a clue. Cohen suddenly backed out of a trip to Russia arranged by the Kremlin on the afternoon of June 14, 2016 — about three hours after the Washington Post revealed that Russian hackers had penetrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee and stolen documents related to the election.

The Moscow project only became public knowledge the following year, after Trump’s inauguration as president. It was briefly mentioned in a 2017 New York Times report about another covert scheme also involving Cohen and Felix Sater, a convicted felon, former F.B.I. informant and longtime fixer for the Trump Organization with deep ties in Russia.

More details about the Moscow tower project Trump’s company secretly pursued as he ran for president — including some of the same messages between Cohen and Sater used by Mueller to charge Cohen with lying to Congress about the deal in a 2017 statement — were revealed in subsequent reports from The Times and Buzzfeed News.

After Cohen’s confession during a surprise appearance in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold of Buzzfeed News published Sater’s screenshots of a 2016 text exchange with Cohen in which the two men agreed to accept an invitation from Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum that June for a possible meeting with the Russian president. Sater also told Buzzfeed that Cohen had offered to give Putin the $50 million penthouse apartment at the top of the Trump Tower Moscow as a gift during his telephone conversation with Peskov’s English-speaking assistant that January.

Trump’s effort to downplay the seriousness of these revelations could be helped by the fact that he did speak openly about a previous attempt to strike a deal for a Trump Tower Moscow, in 2013, when he visited the city for the Miss Universe pageant and talked about a partnership with the well-connected Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov, and his son Emin.