An *active* FBI informant who conspired with Trump is telling his full story to clear his name. “I am being given no choice because of the ongoing Trump investigations,” he said.
One of the biggest stories in the Russia scandal has been seething under the surface with little public notice in the wake of other – possibly more entertaining – news stories.
Sadly, it seems that Americans are more concerned these days with being entertained by the news coverage than by being informed by it – educated.
BuzzFeed News blew the lid off the story today, reporting that, unbeknownst to him, Trump was conspiring with an “active” FBI source to set up business deals in Russia by leveraging his 2015 and 2016 presidential campaign.
However, our coverage of the story begins with a January 2018 mega-thread posted to Twitter by Trump critic and former criminal investigator and criminal defense attorney, Seth Abramson.
Abramson’s analysis of Trump’s business partnership with Felix Sater
Abramson started his massive thread tweeting: “The evidence that Trump business partner Felix Sater is a cooperating individual in the Mueller probe is now overwhelming—and if he is, he’s the most dangerous witness against Trump Mueller has (and that *includes* Flynn and Papadopoulos).”
While the massive amount of data analyzed by Abramson is overwhelming, the basic story – as related by Abramson – is as follows:
- First, understand that Sater is an ex-Russian mafia ex-con who has been working with Trump for 15 years. He has close enough ties to the Kremlin that in 2006 he arranged for Ivanka Trump to sit in Putin’s private desk chair.
- Sater’s role in the Trump-Russia story is *predominantly*—as far as we know—focused on his actions on Trump’s behalf *during* the campaign. Those actions involved the two ends of Trump-Russia collusion: Trump Tower Moscow and Russian sanctions.
- On November 3, 2015, Sater—claiming ties to Putin—wrote his pal [Michael] Cohen, Trump’s most loyal foot-soldier, “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.” He’s claiming Putin can help engineer a Trump win. [1]
- Sater makes this claim 30 days before Trump sends his second-most loyal foot soldier, top NatSec advisor Mike Flynn, to Russia to dine with Vladimir Putin at an RT gala—a seating arrangement the Kremlin coordinated as Sater was claiming to be working with Putin to help Trump.
- Sater lines up financing with VTB, a sanctioned Russian bank, and Cohen goes to Trump at least 3 times—that he admits to—to discuss what would be the biggest Russia deal of Trump’s life. Please remember—Trump has been a presidential candidate for *five months* at this point.
- But boyhood pals Cohen and Sater began negotiating the deal that *September*, according to The Washington Post. So Trump began trying to gain leverage in his Russian deals using his presidential run within 90 days—at the very *most*—of announcing it.
- But we have inadvertent confirmation of Trump’s close involvement in these negotiations not only from the fact that he signed a *letter-of-intent* to build Trump Tower Moscow in fall 2015—while running for president!—but from Michael Cohen’s obvious lies about the Sater deal.
- Trump illegally traded America’s Russia policy for clearance to build Trump Tower Moscow, continued Russian election assistance, and—per Steele’s dossier—possible Russian oil monies. Sater is the closest Mueller can get to all that—and the evidence suggests he has him.
BuzzFeed News blows the lid off the Trump, Sater, Putin story
BuzzFeed began their article, reporting that:
Felix Sater has been cast as a Russian mafioso, a career criminal, and a key business associate of President Donald Trump — but he spent more than two decades as an intelligence asset who helped the US government track terrorists and mobsters. “Greed is my go-to weapon.”
BuzzFeed goes on to detail Sater’s work as an FBI informant, puts an end to any doubt about Sater’s credibility, confirms key elements of Abramson’s analysis [2].
Discussing Sater’s work as a government asset, BuzzFeed reported that:
Effectively, he has been a spy — but for the United States. For the first time, BuzzFeed News has verified the surprising sweep of Sater’s undercover work and many of his specific exploits. He worked as an asset for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (or DIA) and tracked Osama bin Laden. Then he worked for more than a decade for the FBI, providing intel on everything from the mob to North Korea’s drive for nuclear weapons. He still operates as a source for the bureau, according to two current FBI agents.
As to Sater’s credibility, BuzzFeed reported that:
Fragments of Sater’s work for the government have leaked out, partly because Sater himself has bragged about “building Trump Towers by day and hunting Bin Laden by night.” But his “cloak-and-dagger claims of chasing down terrorists” were often dismissed as “wildly unlikely,” while Sater himself remained “an obsession of the many investigators — professional and amateur — searching for Trump’s Russia connection.”
Now BuzzFeed News has obtained the statement Sater gave under oath to House Intelligence Committee investigators at his attorney’s office in December, interviewed him extensively, and corroborated many details of his spy-thriller account through legal documents, emails, letters, and interviews with 10 current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with his undercover work.
Turning to Abramson’s allegations, BuzzFeed reported:
As the Trump campaign kicked into high gear in 2015, Sater saw an opportunity.
In emails initially revealed by the Washington Post, Sater wrote to Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, boasting about being able to finally line up a real estate development in Moscow — a deal the Trump Organization had long sought.
In one of the emails, Sater told Cohen that he could get buy-in from Putin himself and that “we will get Donald elected” in the process. Those emails have become a flashpoint in the Trump-Russia investigation.
BuzzFeed was able to confirm much of the details above, not only by the sources noted, but from Sater himself. As BuzzFeed reported:
Over the past month, two BuzzFeed News reporters met frequently with Sater in Los Angeles, where he’s been living since February and which seems to suit him. He’s tan. He had his Porsche shipped over from Long Island. He gets the good table at Delilah, a see-and-be-seen West Hollywood nightclub. He said he is telling his full story, long kept secret by the government, to clear his name. “I am being given no choice because of the ongoing Trump investigations,” he said. “The media lies about me.”
Conclusion
BuzzFeed concluded their article with the following stunning revelation regarding Sater’s future plans:
Trump has denied knowing the man [Sater] who had an office three doors down from his own and who helped his company explore deals across the globe. In a 2013 deposition, Trump said of Sater, “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”
Over dinner last week at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Sater was clearly hurt when he spoke about the president’s statement. “It’s very upsetting but, you know, what am I going to do?” Sater said. “Start calling him a liar?” Sater said he hasn’t talked with Trump in a couple of years, but he sees an angle to keeping in Trump’s good graces.
“First thing I plan to do when Trump leaves office, whether it’s next week, in 2020 or four years later, is march right into his office and say, ‘Let’s build Trump Moscow.’
“I’m serious.”
Abramson may have summarized today’s revelations best when he responded to a link to the BuzzFeed article:
“It turns out that Donald Trump was conspiring with an *active* FBI informant while he was secretly leveraging his presidential run in 2015 and 2016 to get a business deal with Russian nationals. Do I need to point out how *hard* that’s going to come back to bite him?”
FOOTNOTES
- FOOTNOTE 1: As Abramson explained in an earlier post: “Michael Cohen is Trump’s personal attorney—and a man who has publicly said that he will never say or do anything to hurt Trump and would hurt others *for* Trump. In other words, Trump’s most loyal soldier.”
- FOOTNOTE 2: Not directly addressing Abramson, but by a showing of evidence supporting their own complimentary analysis of his work.
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