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| What are those parrots doing? |
Ivanka Trump says in a new interview that she knew "literally almost nothing" about the Trump Tower Moscow project that's become a central focus of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, adding that she has "zero concern" about the probe or the possibility that anyone close to her could be implicated.
"Are you concerned about anyone in your life that you love being involved?" ABC's Abby Huntsman asked the President's daughter and White House adviser in a taped interview that partially aired Friday on "Good Morning America."
"No. I'm not," Trump said. "I'm really not."
Donald Trump's real estate company was pursuing a proposed Trump Tower in Moscow while he was campaigning for the presidency, but Ivanka Trump said she knew "literally almost nothing" about it.
"There was never a binding contract. I never talked to the -- with a third party outside of the organization about it. It was one of -- I mean, we could have had 40 or 50 deals like that, that were floating around, that somebody was looking at. Nobody visited it to see if it was worth our time. So this was not exactly like an advanced project," Trump said.
"There's nothing there, yet it's created weeks and weeks and months of headlines," she said. "So no, I have zero concern."
She also downplayed doing business in Russia, arguing that it's "not like it's a strange thing" to have property in Russia.
"We're not talking about Iran. It was Russia," she said. "And we weren't even advanced enough that anyone had even visited the prospective project site. So it really was just a non-factor in our minds. I'm not sure that anyone would have thought of it."
Then-candidate Donald Trump signed a letter of intent in October 2015 to move forward with negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Russia, despite his attorney Rudy Giuliani's claims late last year that the document was never signed. The project and the length of discussions around it have been subject to a changing narrative and is a key part of the legal saga facing Michael Cohen, the President's former attorney. The project also came up in written questions that Trump answered for Mueller as a part of the broader investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.