Trump Tower Moscow? Never heard of it.
by digby
Last night Don Jr was on Laura Ingraham's show. He said this about the Trump Tower Moscow deal:
"But the reality is this wasn't a deal — we don't know the developer. We don't know the site. We don't know anything about it.
Ultimately, it was Michael Cohen essentially trying to get a deal done. You know, he was there for a long time. He wasn't exactly a deal guy. He didn’t bring too many to the table. So, I don't think anyone took it all that seriously."
Giuliani as wellt:
On Monday, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said “the proposal was in the earliest stage,” and he went on to tell the New Yorker that “no plans were ever made. There were no drafts. Nothing in the file.”
This is not true:
The plan was dazzling: a glass skyscraper that would stretch higher than any other building in Europe, offering ultra-luxury residences and hotel rooms and bearing a famous name. Trump Tower Moscow, conceived as a partnership between Donald Trump’s company and a Russian real estate developer, looked likely to yield profits in excess of $300 million.
[H]undreds of pages of business documents, emails, text messages, and architectural plans, obtained by BuzzFeed News over a year of reporting, tell a very different story. Trump Tower Moscow was a richly imagined vision of upscale splendor on the banks of the Moscow River. Two years later, a vision had emerged.
Trump Tower Moscow was to be much more than just another upscale apartment building. It was to be a vast — and vastly lucrative — undertaking that would elevate the Russian capital’s skyline and extend the perimeter of the New York developer’s influence.
By September 2015, a New York architect had completed plans for a bold glass obelisk 100 stories high, to be topped by a gleaming, cut-diamond–like shape emblazoned on multiple sides with the Trump logo.
“The building design you sent over is very interesting,” the Russian real estate developer Andrey Rozov wrote to Cohen in September 2015, “and will be an architectural and luxury triumph. I believe the tallest building in Europe should be in Moscow, and I am prepared to build it.”
[...]
The top residence of the Moscow tower, enjoying a view without equal in all the continent, was to be a gleaming penthouse, the most luxurious property in a seriously luxurious building.
A show-stopping apartment like that could have been marketed for $50 million. But as BuzzFeed News reported in November, Trump’s fixers planned not to sell it — but to give it away free, to none other than Vladimir Putin himself. Two US law enforcement officials confirmed that Cohen discussed the idea with an aide to Putin’s press secretary.
The hope was that the lavish gift would help grease the wheels, and in the process entice more Russian elites to move in. “My idea was to give a $50 million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units,” Felix Sater told BuzzFeed News in November. “All the oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin.”
The idea that Michael Cohen not only did the deal on his own, but actually drew up architectural plans without Trump's input --- while Trump was inexplicably licking Putin's boots with energetic gusto --- just doesn't seem realistic, does it?
In fact, it's utterly ridiculous. The Moscow Tower was Trump's holy grail for decades. And he's a control freak who didn't even allow anyone but himself to sign checks in the Trump Organization. Please.
*I would love to know someday just what Felix Sater meant when he said this deal could "get our boy elected president." Maybe that 50 million dollar "gift" ?.
