Trump's business sought deal on a Trump Tower in Moscow, while he ran for President

[Jacque67 7,328]

 

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

10 minutes ago, Jacque67 said:

 

Just because you are coked up does not mean they are not out to get you

[Jacque67 7,328]

17 minutes ago, Il Mango Dulce said:

Just because you are coked up does not mean they are not out to get you

Word! Mikey ain't too bright!

Since the publication of an unverified 35-page dossier alleging that President Donald Trump’s associates conspired with foreign agents to help influence November’s election, one mystery has endured:

Did Trump’s longtime personal lawyer travel to Prague for a secret meeting with Russians?

Michael Cohen has repeatedly denied it. But one of his first responses in the wake of the allegations — tweeting a photograph of his passport cover — was widely criticized for failing to prove anything since it didn’t reveal the stamps inside.

So BuzzFeed News asked to see the inside pages. He said yes. We have pictures.

The passport shows Cohen has traveled the globe since 2009, the year the document was issued. There is no stamp showing Cohen visited the Czech Republic.

“Nope. Never been,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal reported in January that he had visited Prague once before, in 2001.

The stamps indicate he traveled abroad at least four times in 2016: twice to London, once to St. Maarten, and once to Italy in July. The Italian trip is the most intriguing, because it places Cohen in what’s known as the Schengen Area: a group of 26 European countries, including the Czech Republic, that allows visitors to travel freely among them without getting any additional passport stamps.

Upon entering the Schengen Area, visitors get a rectangular stamp with the date, a country code, their port of entry, and a symbol showing how they entered — such as an airplane or a train. In Cohen’s passport, that mark appears on page 17, with a date of July 9. The mark is too faint to be fully legible. The exit stamp, similar but with rounded edges, is also light, but the letters “cino” are legible, indicating he flew out of Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport in Rome. That stamp is dated July 17.

 

Into Italy

3/23/13, St. Barthelemy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out of Italy

6/5/13, St. Maarten

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cohen, 50, said he understands the scrutiny this will bring. He said credit card receipts would prove he stayed in Capri, an island off the Italian coast, but he declined to make those receipts available. Cohen was with family and friends, he said, including the musician and actor Steve Van Zandt. Van Zandt did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

The dossier claims that Cohen was dispatched to Prague to "clean up the mess" left behind by two revelations: that Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort had a financial relationship with a politically toxic Ukrainian president and that campaign adviser Carter Page visited top Russian officials. Cohen’s meeting with "Kremlin representatives" was alleged to have taken place in "August/September 2016" — not quite the same time frame as those passport stamps.

Many news organizations attempted to verify or debunk claims in the dossier, including that Cohen was in Prague around that time. A BuzzFeed News reporter spent three days visiting about 45 hotels in the city and found no evidence Cohen had stayed in any of them during that period.

Cohen has said that he couldn’t have been in Prague because he was visiting the University of Southern California with his son on a college baseball recruiting trip. He posted a photograph from his daughter’s social media account showing the two of them together in Los Angeles on the final week of August.

Further complicating matters is the fact that there is no way to prove, just by looking at someone’s passport, that the person does not also have a second passport, with a different set of stamps. The State Department allows second passports in some circumstances, such as when a stamp from one country would prevent a traveler from entering another. Those records are not public, a State Department official said.

Cohen denied having a second passport.

"This is my only one," he said.

Cohen, a Trump confidant for the past decade, says the dossier’s claims about him are bogus and that he has never met with Russian agents. “I have yet to see a single piece of evidence or a single document corroborating anything about me from that dossier other than wild speculation and conspiracy theories,” he said.

[Jacque67 7,328]

https://www.buzzfeed.com/anthonycormier/trumps-lawyer-showed-you-the-cover-of-his-passport-heres

 

only one passport ? Says who? 

[Jacque67 7,328]

The project that failed in 2016 is further proof that Trump's name did not carry the cachet he expected. By 2015, Moscow was run by a Kremlin-picked mayor, and major projects were going to people with Kremlin ties. These were billionaires who helped President Vladimir Putin stage the $50 billion winter Olympics in Sochi, as well as some Luzhkov-era holdovers who managed to build relationships with the new authorities. Felix Sater, the Trump associate who promised to get Putin on board for a major real estate project in Moscow, wasn't among them. He'd never built anything in Moscow. That Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen was desperate enough to send an email to a general Kremlin address, seeking help from Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov -- a man far removed from the Moscow real estate market -- shows that neither Sater nor people in the Trump organization had the right contacts to compete or cooperate with the big local players.  

Trump may admire Putin as a firmer hand than Gorbachev or Yeltsin, but it's even harder for someone like him to do business in, or with, Putin's Russia. It's a country where the state runs deeper than during the chaos that began in the late 1980s, where money and power are entrenched, transparency is a sign of weakness, and foreigners are distrusted until they prove their loyalty. 

Trump never had what it took to be a player in Russia -- not when it was a land of limitless opportunity as it began its flirtation with capitalism, and not today. This may not be comforting to Americans. To have a leader incapable of negotiating with Russians is probably worse than having a president with business ties to the Kremlin-connected elite.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-29/trump-s-business-record-in-russia-just-got-more-humiliating