When it comes to Donald Trump, it’s always about one thing: money.
So why, you might ask, didn’t the various investigations of Trump’s Russia connection — by special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, by several House committees, by the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) — tear apart the former president’s finances, his company’s cash flow from Russian oligarchs, and the origin of his massive support from Deutsche Bank, the go-to financial institution for Russian money launderers?
Part of the reason: Trump used the power of the presidency to threaten federal investigators that anything related to his finances was off limits, a “red line,” making it clear that he’d shut down the whole Mueller team if they peeked into his bank accounts, tax returns, cash flow, and the internal workings of the Trump Organization and the Kushner Companies.
Various congressional committees — made up of elected officials to whom Trump couldn’t say “you’re fired!” — lacked the army of investigators available to the FBI, weren’t armed with the vast subpoena powers that could be marshaled by the Department of Justice, and ran into a shutdown decision by the Trump-friendly U.S. Supreme Court when they tried to pry into Trump’s records. And what appears to have been an attempt by the chief of the SDNY, Preet Bharara, to dig into money laundering by Deutsche Bank ended unceremoniously when Trump fired Bharara in 2017 and replaced him at SDNY with Geoffrey Berman, an attorney who’d represented Deutsche Bank, and Robert Khuzami, his deputy, who’d been Deutsche Bank’s general counsel.
Mueller’s failure
Mueller’s inquiry, which began after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, confined its work to a search for prosecutable crimes linking Trump to Russia’s 2016 election involvement — and didn’t come up with any. (“No collusion!” Trump crowed, even though collusion per se probably isn’t a crime.) What Mueller didn’t do, under continual threats from the White House that he’d be fired and the whole enterprise shut down, was to try to unravel Trump Inc.’s money ties to Russian interests. And those ties go back decades, long before 2016. Whether or not Trump’s financial links to Russian oligarchs and Russian banks involve crimes, for any expert in counterintelligence they suggest (a) that the former president might have wrongly benefited from Russian largesse, (b) that he feels he is in debt to Russia, and/or ( c) that President Vladimir Putin has some sort of blackmail leverage over him.
Andrew Weissman, Mueller’s lead prosecutor and a former FBI general counsel, blames Mueller and his deputy, Aaron Zebley, for an overcautious, even fearful, approach related to anything involving Trump’s money. In his bombshell book, Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, Weissman writes, “Our office was put on notice, early on, that engaging in … a broad-based financial investigation might lead to our firing.” And that included issuing subpoenas to Deutsche Bank. A “Sword of Damocles,” he writes, hung over the Mueller team, which “led us to delay or ultimately forgo entire lines of inquiry, particularly regarding the president’s financial ties to Russia.” Describing one team meeting, Weissman says:
Mueller looked exasperated at our daily 5 pm meeting in his office that day, and commented that, if the president were in the tank with Putin, “It would be about money” — that is, that Trump was motivated by money and his fawning behavior toward Putin could be explained by his seeking to make a buck in Russia. We all knew we had to dig deeper to get to the truth — but Mueller’s comment did not result in our getting the green light to do a full-scale investigation of the president.
Trump’s seemingly obsequious relationship with Putin, even if ultimately not amounting to criminal behavior, “makes the president of the United States a counterintelligence threat,” writes Weissman. And as any counterintelligence (COIN) specialist knows, there are four primary motivations for someone to commit treason, as encapsulated by the well-known memory aid MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. And while Trump can’t be said to exhibit any coherent ideology, the other three motives certainly pertain here. Ego and money apply, obviously. And virtually every U.S. official who’s looked into the Trump-Russia connection has wondered about kompromat — that is, what does Putin have on him? How is Putin blackmailing Trump, or manipulating him?
After being fired by Trump, Comey indeed told ABC that Putin may have some sort of blackmail leverage over Trump. “I think it’s possible,” said the former director of the FBI. “I don’t know. These are … words I never thought I’d utter about a president of the United States. But it’s possible.”
A fascinating account of the Trump-Russia investigation is contained in Peter Strzok’s Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump. Strzok, a 22-year veteran of the FBI and former head of its COIN division, was a principal investigator in the Mueller saga, and he asks the question: why? Why was Trump so solicitous of Putin? “Throw in all the financial and intelligence links that showed close and pervasive connections among Trump, a host of his campaign members, and Russia, including Trump’s own business deals linked to Putin’s involvement, and it would be inconceivable or incompetent to suspect nothing,” he writes. “It begged the question: what is his motivation?”
Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press in 2020, Strzok said: “There is no president in modern history who has the same broad and deep connections to any foreign intel service, let alone a hostile government like Russia.”
Strzok, in his book, reminds us that Trump himself ridiculed the idea that Russia has anything on him, tweeting: “Russia has never tried to use leverage on me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA — NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” But, needless to say, there were deals. Trump, says Strzok, “had a host of questionable business dealings and thus far had refused to release his financial records. … A counterintelligence agent would have to have been incompetent not to have been worried that Russia might be exerting coercive influence over our new president,” and he argued that “tracing money — even more than proving contacts with Russia — was likely to be the most critical investigative effort for Mueller’s team.”
But, of course, that didn’t happen. Just as Trump fired Comey and then, in 2018, fired Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s deputy director, Strzok was fired, too. And Mueller got the message.
Indeed, always concerned about pushing Trump too far, Mueller and his team made the decision not to subpoena the president himself to answer questions by the Office of Special Counsel.
As Mueller released his anticlimactic report in 2019, a parallel, bipartisan inquiry was underway at the U.S Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). In 2020, SSCI released a massive, five-volume report of its findings — including Volume 5, a 952-page report whose subhead was “Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities.” Unlike Mueller, SSCI focused not on criminal behavior but on trying to unravel the story behind the story to explain the Trump-Putin bromance. And while the committee exhaustively sifted through the shenanigans of Paul Manafort and his Russian intelligence friends, the rumors that Trump engaged prostitutes during his 2013 Moscow trip, the decades-long quest by Trump to land a deal for “Trump Tower Moscow,” and the notorious June 2016 meeting in New York’s Trump Tower between Manafort, Don Trump Jr., and son-in-law Jared Kushner with a bevy of three Russian “spooks” and a top aide to a Russian oligarch offering dirt on Hillary Clinton, SSCI too failed to unearth anything of significance concerning Trump’s money and his financial dependence on Russia, the Russian mob, oligarchs, and banks such as Sberbank, VTB and VEB.
Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat and a member of SSCI, in an appendix to the 2020 report, bemoaned the fact that the committee didn’t uncover any details on these financial entanglements. Wyden acknowledges that Trump “poses a counterintelligence threat,” but adds that Trump “spent decades developing, maintaining, and relying on financial relationships with Russia.” SSCI, he says, didn’t get to the bottom of it, calling the committee “derelict.”
In fact, however, SSCI investigators did spend an enormous effort trying to unravel Trump’s financial ties to Russia, looking at Deutsche Bank, Moscow’s VTB and VEB banks, and various oligarchs from the Agalarovs to Roman Abramovich, even covering walls with paper and webs of connecting strings. Said one person close to the SSCI report: “We knew that with so much smoke, there’s got to be a fire. We didn’t find the fire.” And that’s largely because SSCI lacked the voluminous resources of the Justice Department and its unchecked subpoena powers.
Over at the House of Representatives, in 2019 the House Financial Services Committee, led by Rep. Maxine Waters, brought in Bob Roach, an experienced investigator, to scrutinize Deutsche Bank. Roach, whose past investigations included Goldman Sachs’ “big short” and Wall Street’s involvement with the Enron Corp. fraud, began planning a systematic examination of Deutsche Bank’s ties to Trump, centered on money laundering. But when the committee issued a subpoena for Deutsche Bank’s records on Trump, Trump sued the committee in an effort to quash the subpoena. Despite rulings in the District Court and 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in support of the subpoena and the right of Congress to investigate, in July 2020, by a vote of 7-2, the Trump-friendly Supreme Court shot down the subpoena, finding that investigations of a President were required to meet a higher standard.
Paul Pillar is a 28-year veteran of the CIA and a counterterrorism expert who led the Middle East division of the National Intelligence Council. “There’s no question that Donald Trump would never get a security clearance,” he said, in an interview with the Spectator. “There are certainly a host of security concerns, and I can think of a dozen reasons why he’d be denied a clearance.” Do Trump’s financial and business ties to Russia suggest some of those concerns? he was asked. “Beyond any reasonable doubt, there is something there.”
The Deutsche Bank connection
If there’s a master key that may explain Trump’s financial ties to Russia, it’s probably sitting in the vaults at Deutsche Bank.
For at least two decades, the go-to bank for both the Trump Organization and the Kushner Companies has been Germany’s mammoth Deutsche Bank. During the 1990s and into the 2000s, Trump’s empire of hotels, casinos, luxury condo towers, and golf courses wobbled precariously, and Trump found himself in and out of bankruptcy courts, often defaulting on loans, and as a result virtually every lender on Wall Street steered clear of anything to do with Trump. But starting around 1998, Trump coaxed Deutsche Bank to lend him $125 million to renovate 40 Wall Street, followed by a $300 million loan to build a luxury residential skyscraper across the street from the United Nations building. As David Enrich, the business investigations editor at the New York Times, writes in his book Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and An Epic Trail of Destruction: “More loans followed as Deutsche rushed headlong into a relationship that would have serious implications for the bank — and for the world.”
Over the next two decades, Deutsche Bank loaned Trump at least than $2 to $3 billion.
And throughout those years Trump, a notorious wheeler-dealer, was climbing into bed with a bank that itself repeatedly stretched, bent and broke the law. Caught red-handed again and again — for conspiring to rig commodity prices, for violating sanctions on Iran, for involvement in a massive mortgage fraud scandal, and for manipulating bank transaction margins — Deutsche Bank racked up a staggering record of more than $9 billion in fines and penalties. And then, in 2017, U.S. and U.K. authorities levied an additional $630 million fine against Deutsche Bank for laundering at least $10 billion out of Russia—the same Russia that was under scrutiny by Robert Mueller and Co. for helping to put Trump in the White House.
In addition, along with Deutsche Bank, the Trumps counted on Russian investors to support his failing ventures. As the Financial Times reported in 2016, Trump “worked diligently to forge alliances with Russian-connected businessmen that would position him to profit from capital pouring out of the former states of the Soviet Union.” Donald Trump, Jr., agreed. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets, say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo,” he said. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” According to some estimates, as many as one-third of the condos sold in Trump properties before 2016 were all-cash purchases by anonymous Russians.
It didn’t take a genius to make the connection. Did any of that Russian cash that passed through the “Troika Laundromat” (according to The Guardian, the name given to a collection of 70 offshore shell companies whose controllers used them to move billions of dollars of private wealth from Russia to the West) — and a succession of other laundromats operating out of Moscow — into and out of Deutsche Bank find its way into the hands of the Trump Organization? Did Deutsche Bank’s elite “private wealth management” division, which has a special relationship with Trump and which makes loans utilizing funds deposited by others, possibly including Russians, funnel Russian money to Trump? Did any of that laundered Russian cash end up financing the purchase of luxury condos in Trump properties? And did any of it help cement the Trump-Putin relationship in a way that left Trump indebted to Putin — or, worse, provide Putin with blackmail-style leverage over the U.S. president?
Speaking at a Brookings Institution conference, Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat and then chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said: “No one has investigated the issue of whether the Russians were laundering money through the Trump Organization and that this is the leverage that the Russians have over the president of the United States.”
Inside Deutsche Bank, and unbeknownst to investigators, compliance officers with the bank had started noticing suspicious transactions involving Trump, Jared Kushner, and the Russians. Tammy McFadden, a money-laundering watchdog in the bank’s Jacksonville office, started raising red flags and urged the bank to file suspicious activity reports (SARs) with the federal government, but McFadden was ignored and ultimately fired. Other, later efforts to file SARs, including at least one related to the Donald J. Trump Foundation, were identified, flagged, and then ignored by Deutsche Bank’s top officials. And McFadden had discovered that Deutsche Bank’s transactions for the Russians went both ways and that “money had moved from the Kushner Companies to Russian individuals,” according to a report in the New York Times. But, reported the Times, “Deutsche Bank ultimately chose not to file those suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department.” In his book Dark Towers, Enrich reports that “the Kushners … were moving money to Russians at the same time that Russia was interfering in the American presidential election,” but that the details have now “vanished inside Deutsche’s computer systems.”
Anticipating various subpoenas, Deutsche Bank reportedly did assemble bank records that it intended to release if ordered to do so. But, as noted above, the subpoenas were killed by the Supreme Court, and it isn’t clear if the records still exist.
Jack Blum, a veteran of decades on Capitol Hill as an expert on money laundering and tax evasion, and who’s worked on scandals from Lockheed to BCCI, doesn’t expect those records to surface anytime soon. Asked when we might see the Trump files at Deutsche Bank, Blum was blunt. “We won’t,” he said, in an interview with the Spectator. “It’s simply not gonna happen. Those records are probably unattainable by now, unless somebody from the inside pops up and says, ‘This is how it worked.’”
Deutsche Bank had long operated in Russia and the USSR, but in the 2000s, it absorbed an entity called the United Financial Group (UFG), a 1994 start-up founded by an American, Charlie Ryan. Ryan took over as Deutsche Bank’s CEO for Russia, and the bank started hobnobbing with dozens of Russian oligarchs — many of whom, of course, wanted to spirit their money out of Russia. One of its top executives forged close ties to a Russian banker, Andrei Kostin, the CEO of Russia’s state-owned VTB Bank, Russia’s second-largest, and Deutsche and VTB began an incestuous relationship: VTB hired away one hundred UFG employees, and Deutsche opened a $1 billion credit line to VTB. Kostin, who had earlier headed up another Russian mega-bank, VEB Bank, was appointed to head VTB by Vladimir Putin.
And in 2016, Putin appointed an old friend, Sergei Gorkov, as CEO of VEB Bank. Gorkov, a graduate of the Academy of the Federal Counterintelligence Service, is widely reported to have had close ties to Putin’s own alma mater, the FSB, the Russian intelligence service. Both VEB and VTB would come to be known as “Putin’s piggybanks,” and both banks would variously be implicated in Trump’s 2015-2016 effort to secure the rights to build a 120-story “Trump Tower Moscow” or some other grand project in the Russian capitol. In December 2016, while Trump was president-elect, Gorkov traveled to New York to hold a still-unexplained business meeting with Kushner.
The Trump Tower Moscow gambit
Whole forests have been sacrificed to support a huge array of books, reports, and newspaper and magazine articles about the 2015-2016 venture by Trump and a zoo-like array of shady characters to explore the rights to build a Trump-branded property in Moscow. The fact that this effort spanned nearly the entirety of Trump’s campaign for president since the moment he rode down the golden escalator in his Fifth Avenue skyscraper has been cited numerous times as a glaring, prima facie example of a conflict of interest.
Even while denying that he had anything at all going on in Russia, his emissaries were traveling back and forth in a scramble to get a deal done. Trump meanwhile was praising Putin, saying nice things about Russia, and refusing to acknowledge the fact that Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) had hacked into the Democratic Party’s computer systems and orchestrated a drip-drip-drip release of stolen emails to benefit his campaign. Plus his staff was meeting with that rogue’s gallery of FSB-connected operatives who were offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in that same Fifth Avenue tower.
But let’s follow the money.
Oh, wait — in the complex saga of Trump Tower Moscow (let’s call it the TTM), it’s not that easy to follow the money trail. The Mueller team tried; at least, some of them, until their investigation was essentially shut down. In what may have been the Mueller investigation’s biggest failure, when the team learned that despite his denials Trump had pursued the TTM until at least the summer of 2016, one of Mueller’s top sleuths went to Mueller and Zebley to get their agreement “to subpoena the Trump Organization’s emails” tied to the TTM project.
According to Weissman, however, Mueller and Zebley “had cold feet,” and told the investigator “to stand down in her pursuit of the Trump Tower Moscow emails.” Why? Again, because they feared blowback from the White House. Weissman writes “that the lack of follow-up here meant that any chance of ever performing a classic financial investigation to assess Trump’s ties to Russia and motive evidence was dead.”
Still, there are hints, and what is in fact known involves some of the characters we’ve already met, from VTB Bank to the Russian oligarchs who laundered billions of dollars through Deutsche Bank.
First, let us introduce perhaps the oddest of all the odd characters in the Trump orbit: Felix Sater. To call Sater colorful doesn’t begin to describe his bizarre life story: born in Moscow in 1966, Sater emigrated to Israel and then to the United States, while mixing it up with the Russian mob, slashing the throat of a man in a bar fight with a broken glass, becoming a CIA and FBI informant, launching a real estate company called Bayrock with another suspect character named Tevfik Arif, and ending up with an office in Trump’s Fifth Avenue building with business cards calling him “senior adviser to Donald Trump.”
It was Sater, working with Trump’s consigliere, Michael Cohen, who led the effort to find backers for TTM in Moscow. (Recall his email to Cohen in 2015: “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.”)
Among those backers, according to Sater, was Andrey Kostin’s VTB Bank. According to the Senate intelligence committee report: “On October 12, 2015, Sater emailed Cohen to inform him that Andrey Kostin, who Sater described as ‘Putin’s top finance guy and CEO of the 2nd largest bank in Russia,’ was ‘on board and has indicated that he would finance Trump Moscow.’” In an interview with the committee, Sater added that he “used Evgeny Shmykov, a former Russian intelligence officer, as a conduit to VTB.” Two weeks later, Trump himself signed a Letter of Intent to go ahead with TTM.
So, Trump’s emissary was working through an FSB-connected bank that had long-established ties to Trump’s favorite bank, Deutsche Bank.
But there’s more. According to the SSCI report, Sater also messaged Cohen that he was working with “Putin’s very very close people.” This was a reference, says the SSCI report, to “the Rotenbergs, a family extremely close to Putin.” Indeed, the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg were Russian billionaires — Arkady was worth $3.5 billion — who’d cashed in by undertaking a number of Putin’s pet projects, from contracts with Gazprom, the Sochi Winter Olympics, and the construction of a bridge from Russia into occupied Crimea. Arkady Rotenberg’s friendship with the KGB’s Putin dates back to 1990, when they trained together at a judo club in St. Petersburg.
And, according to reports in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and elsewhere, the Rotenberg brothers were beneficiaries of the Deutsche Bank “mirror trades” that laundered at least $10 billion from rubles into Western currencies, back in 2011-2015. Not all of that $10 billion came from the Rotenbergs, of course — and in fact the total may have been as much as $80 billion, rendered through a series of “laundromats” in Denmark, the Netherlands, Turkey, Austria, Cyprus, Switzerland and other countries, and not all through Deutsche Bank. Besides the Rotenbergs, few of the Russians who used the Troika Laundromat and its successors are known, except for one: Igor Putin, the president’s cousin. Still, it raises the question: did money laundered for the Rotenbergs find its way via Deutsche Bank into the Trump Organization?
Enter Lev Leviev
Trump is multiply connected to Russian oligarchs and, over the years, has had a range of business and financial entanglement with Russian interests. One of the most curious, and one little examined by the Mueller team and SSCI, ties Trump to a Russian-Israeli billionaire who called Vladimir Putin a “true friend”: Lev Leviev. And the story of Leviev’s connection to Trump and Kushner intersects directly with both Trump’s quest for a real estate foothold in Moscow — and, again, with Deutsche Bank.
In 2008, Trump visited a high-end jewelry emporium in New York City owned by Leviev where, according to the Washington Post, Leviev said that he “hoped to work with Trump on Moscow real estate deals.”
But Leviev was far more than a jewelry salesman. A Russian-Jewish billionaire with Israeli citizenship, Leviev had built a far-flung multinational corporation called Africa Israel Investments (AFI), with interests on at least four continents. Known as “the King of Diamonds” after getting his start in the diamond trade, Leviev expanded into real estate, chemicals, and construction. In the late 1990s, Leviev developed close ties to Putin and in 1999, Leviev and another ultra-wealthy oligarch, Roman Abramovich — whose current worth is somewhere north of $10 billion, and who helped catapult Putin into the presidency in 2000 — took Putin up on an offer create a new organization, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia. In doing so, the two oligarchs usurped the previous Russian Jewish association and set themselves up as the de facto leaders of the Jewish community in Russia. Haaretz, the Israeli daily, said that Leviev was “the most influential, most active, and most connected person in the Jewish community of Russia.” Haaretz added that Leviev, who had a worldwide presence, promised Putin that he would “open doors to the corridors of power in Washington.”
In 2007, Leviev’s AFI invested nearly half a billion dollars to purchase the old New York Times building, a 15-story edifice on Times Square. He redeveloped it, and in 2015 Leviev sold part of the building to his friends at the Kushner Companies for $295 million. A year later, Jared Kushner went to Deutsche Bank to refinance his loan, getting a $285 million package from the bank. Kushner and his mother also jointly had a $25 million revolving credit line at Deutsche Bank.
By early 2017, the Trump-Kushner relationship to Deutsche Bank would attract the attention of the House Committee on Financial Services. Five Democratic members of the committee wrote to the committee’s chairman:
The suspicious ties between President Trump’s inner circle and the Russian government … raise concerns that the [Justice] Department may fail to implicate those who benefited from Deutsche Bank’s trading scheme.
And in May, they wrote to John Cryan, Deutsche Bank’s CEO, seeking documents “regarding its 2011 Russian mirror trading scandal … and its review of the personal accounts of Donald Trump and his family members held at the Bank.”
No documents were forthcoming.
What the Democrats didn’t ask for, and what the Mueller team’s failure to issue subpoenas to Deutsche Bank left undiscovered, is information about the decade-long effort by Leviev; Rotem Rosen, the CEO of Leviev’s AFI; and a pair of New York-based real estate firms, Bayrock and the Sapir Organization, to dangle in front of Trump the vision of landmark Trump Tower in Moscow.
As established above, in the mid-2000s, perhaps Trump’s most important partners in the real estate world were two New York-based firms: Bayrock and the Sapir Organization. Bayrock was led by a pair of Russia-connected developers, Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater; and the Sapir Organization, also linked to the Kremlin, was led by Tamir Sapir, his son Alex Sapir, and its CEO, Rotem Rosen — the same Rotem Rosen who’d been running Leviev’s AFI. The Bayrock/Sapir team joined Trump in hotel and residential ventures from New York’s SoHo to central Asia and Central America. According to Fortune, Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with [Trump.]” And from about 2006 through 2016, it was this crew, led by Sater and Michael Cohen, Trump’s “fixer,” who shepherded the Trump clan in and out of Moscow.
The story of Trump’s repeated visits to Moscow, including in 2006 and in 2013 for the Miss Universe event and the saga of the Sater-Cohen effort in 2015-2016 has been told and retold countless times, including in Mueller’s report, the SSCI report, and numerous books.
But often left out of that narrative is the closeness of the Trump family, the Kushner family, and the network of businessmen, financiers, and oligarchs, including Leviev, Sapir, Sater, and Rosen et al. Indeed, when another family of oligarchs, the Agalarovs, hosted Trump in Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe contest, Sater, Sapir and Rosen all accompanied Trump and, once again, a Trump-branded real estate deal was bandied about.
That constellation of players was intimate enough that when Rosen married Sapir’s daughter, the wedding was held at Mar-a-Lago with Trump in attendance. And when the newlywed couple held a bris for their newborn son, both Trump and Jared Kushner were there. And both Jared and Ivanka Kushner, Trump’s daughter, developed a friendship with Roman Abramovich and his (third) wife, Dasha.
And bringing it all back to Deutsche Bank, among his real estate ventures Rotem Rosen would hook up with a businessman named Jerry Rotunda, the former CFO of Deutsche Bank’s Private Wealth Management group, the same unit that years earlier had stepped in to bail out Trump when he was teetering on the edge of default. Rosen and Rotunda created a firm called MRR Development, a Manhattan real estate firm. Conveniently, Rotunda lived in Trump World Tower, the building where Michael Cohen, then Trump’s attorney, also lived.
There’s a famous series of photographs taken in 2018, during court proceedings involving Cohen, whose home and office had been raided by the FBI on Mueller’s direction. A group of men are sitting on benches outside an Upper East Side hotel in New York, smoking cigars. At the center is Michael Cohen, and among the others who’ve been identified are Rotem Rosen, Leviev’s CEO and the ex-CEO of the Sapir Organization, and Jerry Rotunda. (Rosen had a well-publicized feud over real estate with his brother-in-law, Alex Sapir, that wasn’t settled until 2022.)
Cohen, of course, has long since broken with Trump, has cooperated — to a point — with the authorities, testified against Trump during congressional hearings, and written a pair of books, Disloyal (2020) and Revenge (2022), that describe in some detail the wrongs he committed while acting as Trump’s fixer. In Disloyal, Cohen says that Trump tasked him with being a “secret back channel” to Putin. “Putin is the richest man in the world, by a multiple,” Trump once told Cohen, adding that Putin is worth at least a trillion dollars. “He wanted to do all he could to enable him to borrow money from people in Putin’s circle,” according to Cohen.
Of course, Trump cashed in on Russia, Cohen says. “Trump had long experience benefitting from ill-gotten Russian largesse, selling luxury condos to many oligarchs and their minions,” Cohen writes. “For decades, Trump had been chasing his personal great white whale, a Trump hotel in the center of Moscow, with no success until an initiative was begun in the months leading up to the 2016 election.”
Half a decade after the conclusion of the Trump-Russia investigations, Donald Trump is once again chasing the presidency. And against the backdrop of renewed Russian interference in the election on Trump’s behalf, there’s still time for the mainstream media, members of Congress, and lawyers and researchers to put these questions to the Teflon candidate.
Bob Dreyfuss is an award-winning investigative journalist living in northern New Jersey.
Part of the reason: Trump used the power of the presidency to threaten federal investigators that anything related to his finances was off limits, a “red line,” making it clear that he’d shut down the whole Mueller team if they peeked into his bank accounts, tax returns, cash flow, and the internal workings of the Trump Organization and the Kushner Companies.