Mueller Wants Trump’s Business Records. What’s the Russia Connection?

The investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election has expanded to include President Donald Trump’s family business, with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, subpoenaing the Trump Organization for documents related to Russia.

For more than 30 years, Trump has repeatedly sought to conduct business in Russia. He traveled to Moscow in 1987 to explore building a hotel. He applied for his trademark in the country as early as 1996. And his children and associates have met with Russian developers and government officials on multiple occasions in search of joint ventures.

But the company says nothing has come of it. Trump tweeted in January last year, shortly before his inauguration: “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA — NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

So what about the Trump Organization’s Russian connections might be of interest to Mueller?

Perhaps the closest Trump came to launching a real estate project in Russia was during the presidential campaign, when he signed a letter of intent in late 2015 for a Trump hotel to be built in Moscow. Ultimately, the deal never materialized.

In email exchanges with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, a Russian émigré who had previously helped develop Trump SoHo in New York, talked about securing financing for the Moscow project from VTB, a major state-owned Russian bank under U.S. sanctions. He also mused about how the deal, if supported by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, would “fix relations between the countries by showing everyone that commerce & business are much better and more practical than politics.”

“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater wrote in one of the emails.

Trump signed the letter of intent with Andrey Rozov, a developer of retail and residential projects in the Moscow region. If the deal went through, Trump would receive a $4 million upfront fee in exchange for licensing his name, and his company would manage the completed hotel.

By January 2016, the project seemed to have stalled. At one point, without success, Cohen emailed an aide to Putin seeking help jump-starting it. There is no evidence the Kremlin provided any assistance for the project.

The Trump Organization has said it received no government approvals or financing and the effort was abandoned in early 2016.

Trump’s business opportunities in Russia got little traction until he took the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013.

A father-son pair of real estate developers, Aras and Emin Agalarov, paid nearly $20 million to license the Miss Universe name, bringing the contest to their Crocus City Hall in Moscow. As an owner of the pageant, Trump flew to Russia in November 2013 to participate. He became friendly with his partners, who were known to have been helpful to the Kremlin.

The visit left an impression on Trump and had him contemplating future endeavors with the Agalarovs.

“I had a great weekend with you and your family,” Trump posted on Twitter in a message to Aras Agalarov. “You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next,” he wrote, before referring to Agalarov’s son, a pop star: “EMIN was WOW!”

While the plans for the tower were apparently shelved during the campaign, Trump and the Agalarovs maintained their friendship.

In June 2016, a publicist for Emin Agalarov requested that Donald Trump Jr. meet with a Kremlin-connected lawyer. That meeting, at Trump Tower in New York, first reported by The New York Times in July, included other campaign officials and has been the subject of considerable scrutiny.

After the disclosure of the meeting, the president downplayed his ties to the Agalarovs in an interview with The Times. But in a September 2015 interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” he had made the Miss Universe pageant seem far more important.

“I called it my weekend in Moscow,” Trump said. “I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people. I can’t go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary.”

Two decades ago, Trump was a persona non grata on Wall Street. His casino and hotel businesses had suffered some bankruptcies, and his lenders were grumbling he had stiffed them.

But one giant German bank stepped up as a willing partner.

Over the years, that institution, Deutsche Bank, offered Trump more than $4 billion in loan commitments and potential bond offerings, a majority of which were completed, The Times reported last year.

There is no indication of a Russian connection to Trump’s loans or accounts at Deutsche Bank, and there is no public evidence Mueller has subpoenaed the bank for records about Trump.

But the bank last year landed in legal trouble over Russian money-laundering — paying more than $600 million in penalties to U.S. and British regulators.

Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian billionaire oligarch, paid $95 million for Trump’s oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, one of two sources of income from Russians that Trump’s lawyers have said were reflected in his income tax returns. (The other was $12.2 million in payments in connection with holding the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.)

The Palm Beach deal was unusual for several reasons.

Trump sold the house less than four years after buying it for about $41 million. Rybolovlev paid the markup despite buying the property in 2008, at the height of the housing crisis. And Trump had made few improvements to the mansion, which reportedly had a mold problem.

Rybolovlev, moreover, never lived in the property.

At the time of the sale, Trump was facing financial pressure. He potentially owed Deutsche Bank $40 million after not paying off a loan for his Chicago hotel and tower.

The Florida property later featured prominently in Rybolovlev’s divorce.

Rybolovlev’s wife sought control of the mansion, saying he had bought it partly to hide money from her in the divorce, a claim he denied.

He has since demolished the mansion and divided the property into parcels he is selling. The new owners are hidden behind murky layers of trusts and other legal entities.

In the past decade, the Trump Organization has bought and refurbished several golf courses around the world, but the financing behind those deals remains something of a mystery. A respected golf writer says Eric Trump, a son of Trump’s who is helping to run the Trump Organization, told him the money came from Russia.

Last year, during an interview on Boston public radio, golf journalist James Dodson recounted a conversation he had had with Eric Trump in 2013 on a newly opened Trump golf course in Charlotte, North Carolina. Dodson said he had asked Trump about the company’s sources of funds, and Eric Trump told him, “We have pretty much all the money we need from investors in Russia.”

Eric Trump has denied making the comment about Russia, but several of Dodson’s friends and colleagues confirmed that Dodson relayed the anecdote to them shortly after the conversation took place.

It was not the first time that one of Trump’s sons made a similar claim. In 2008, at a real estate conference in New York, Donald Trump Jr. said: “In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets, say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”