Felix culpa

After reading Steven Harper’s timeline “Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump” last week, I wrote:

The figure who stands out to me in this timeline, again and again: Felix Sater, described by the BBC as “a Russian-American gangster.” He entered the Trump story in 2002. In 2013 and 2015, Trump denied being familiar with him.

Tonight The New York Times reports that

a business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.

The pronoun reference in that sentence is a little ambiguous, but “he” is the business associate, Felix Sater. The Times reports that Sater thought a Trump Tower in Moscow “would highlight Mr. Trump’s savvy negotiating skills and be a political boon to his candidacy.” Here is some of what Sater wrote in a November 2015 e-mail to Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen:

Michael I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it.

Святая корова! According to Google Translate, that’s Russian for “Holy cow!”

[Ivanka Trump sitting in Putin’s “private chair”? The ick factor is high. All mistakes in the text of the e-mail are Felix Sater’s.]