There Are Still So Many Russian Secrets Waiting to Leak

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

30 August 17

h, Felix Sater. Summon for us all The Volga Bagmen.

Sit down now, all of you, because this news may be coming as something of a shock. A few weeks back, the gang at Josh's joint went long on a profile of the Trump Organization's dealings with Sater, whom the president* claimed he barely knew. Sater is a Russian-American from Brooklyn who once stabbed a dude in the eye with a margarita glass. He has been careful to keep the record clear on what happened there.

"Yes, I got into a bar fight. Yes, the instance at which I hit the man with the margarita glass…" he broke off. "I didn't break it and try to carve my initials into his face. It was a bar fight. That's all it was. I made the mistake of going to court, lost, went to jail over it, got involved in a dirty, scammy Wall Street deal [with former Gruntal colleague Salvatore Lauria]. I did."

He's spent his entire career in the shadowy netherworld of politics and money, with an occasional sidetrip into the shadowy netherworld of the international intelligence trade. Trump continued to have a relationship with this guy, and now The Washington Post has brought Sater back to center stage and, here's where you may have to sit down again, the story indicates that the president* may not be an entirely honest fellow.

As part of the discussions, a Russian-born real estate developer urged Trump to come to Moscow to tout the proposal and suggested that he could get President Vladimir Putin to say "great things" about Trump, according to several people who have been briefed on his correspondence. The developer, Felix Sater, predicted in a November 2015 email that he and Trump Organization leaders would soon be celebrating — both one of the biggest residential projects in real estate history and Donald Trump's election as president, according to two of the people with knowledge of the exchange. Sater wrote to Trump Organization Executive Vice President Michael Cohen "something to the effect of, 'Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?'" said one person briefed on the email exchange. Sater emigrated from what was then the Soviet Union when he was 6 and grew up in Brooklyn.

Nevertheless, the details of the deal, which have not previously been disclosed, provide evidence that Trump's business was actively pursuing significant commercial interests in Russia at the same time he was campaigning to be president — and in a position to determine U.S.-Russia relations. The new details from the emails, which are scheduled to be turned over to congressional investigators soon, also point to the likelihood of additional contacts between Russia-connected individuals and Trump associates during his presidential bid.

And, on Monday, The New York Times added another detail that is…how you say?...tres piquant.

"I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected," Sater wrote on Nov. 3, 2015, almost exactly a year before Election Day. "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, I will manage this process."

So much of what the president* has said about his relationship with this guy has been a lie because everything the president* has said about his business dealings in Russia has been a lie. There's so much of it now, and we're only seeing the drip-drip-drip details that are leaking out piecemeal. This is where I become almost convinced that the key to this presidency* is that nobody, including the president* himself, ever thought he'd win. He could continue to do business with shady characters because, after November, who really would care? Now, he knows what's out there and he's really stuck. At this point, the biggest threat to Robert Mueller's investigation is not that Mueller might get fired, but that all his support staff will die crippled with carpal tunnel syndrome.