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LICENSE

In March 2011, Donald and Ivanka Trump descended the golden escalator in the Trump Tower atrium, joining with Trump Organization executive vice president and special counsel Michael Cohen, to a crowd of waiting reporters. The press release for the event had touted the announcement of a new corporate licensing deal in the country of Georgia, but the throng of journalists was there for another reason: days earlier, Cohen had returned from the state of Iowa, where he’d flown on Trump’s jet, to meet with Republican officials, including the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, whom Cohen treated to a meeting aboard Trump’s gilded aircraft.¹

A website called ShouldTrumpRun.com had appeared in the late fall of 2010. It was organized by Cohen, whose trip to Iowa was funded with a $125,000 contribution by Stewart Rahr, a billionaire friend of Trump’s with an office on the floor below the Trump Organization in Trump Tower.² Yet ShouldTrumpRun.com billed itself as “independent” of Trump.

Few people outside of his own or Trump’s circle had heard of Michael Cohen before that Iowa trip, but there he was, in early March 2011, being interviewed by Jonathan Karl and Amy Walter of ABC News, speaking via satellite, telling them about what he described as a hoped-for presidential bid by Donald Trump. “I met with eighteen G.O.P. operatives, grassroots organizers, finance people,” a pink-tied, brown-haired Michael Cohen told the anchors that morning. “Every one of them expressed not just an interest but a fervent desire to see somebody like Donald Trump join the race in hopes that we can turn this country around.”³

At Trump Tower, Cohen stood before a thrumming crowd of reporters, lured there by the whiff of a presidential campaign. “Okay, Michael,” Donald Trump prompted Cohen.

“Good afternoon everybody. My name is Michael Cohen. I’m an executive at the Trump organization,” Cohen said, his Long Island accent dominant. “Seven months ago at the request of a dear friend of mine from Georgia, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, I traveled to the Republic of Georgia to explore several real estate opportunities on behalf of Mr. Trump.” Cohen had gone to look into the idea of a development on the Black Sea, a resort, possibly a casino. Mikheil Saakashvili, then the president of Georgia, joined Trump and Cohen at the press conference, posing before giant mock-ups of the proposed tower and flags from the United States and the country of Georgia.⁴

Prior to working at Trump Tower, Cohen, with his long face, prominent jowls, and downturned mouth, had an office inside a taxi dispatcher’s garage in an industrial neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens, practically under the highway, handling auto insurance claims. He helped set up medical offices and represented more than a hundred car-crash victims in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn—also known as “Little Odessa” for its Russian émigré population—at a time when local prosecutors were investigating a criminal network in what they called “Operation BORIS,” which stands for Big Organized Russian Insurance Scam. Cohen was never implicated; indeed, until 2018 he had never been arrested or charged with any crimes, even though almost all of his business partners had been arrested, investigated, convicted, or lost their professional licenses as a result of various infractions, criminal and otherwise.⁵

With help from his father-in-law, Fima Shusterman, a Ukrainian émigré and taxi entrepreneur who himself had once been convicted of conspiracy to defraud the IRS, Cohen began investing in New York City taxi medallions, then a coveted permit that allowed a limited number of drivers to pick up riders on the streets of New York City. Because the medallions were believed to be the entrée to a guaranteed pool of income, and because the number of them was limited, they were valuable. Cohen started investing in them in the 1990s, as New York’s population and property values were rising in lockstep. Soon, Cohen drove a Bentley, and worked, he told associates, as general counsel for the Harry Winston diamond company, of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” fame. (The company said Cohen was never employed there.) Cohen was wealthy enough to join the finance committee for Dennis Vacco, the New York attorney general in the mid-1990s, to whom Trump was a donor. Cohen met Donald Trump at his apartment during a Vacco fundraiser.⁶

Cohen grew his operations until he declared, at the apex, that he possessed a net worth of almost eighty million dollars.⁷ On his way up, he and his family members began to buy Trump properties: Trump World Tower, Trump Grande, Trump Palace, Trump Park Avenue, Trump Place, and Trump Plaza Jersey City. It was an attention-getting series of purchases in the buildings of a man who appreciated financial tithes. And then Cohen did something that cemented his relationship with Donald Trump: he took Trump’s side in a property dispute.⁸

Early in the millennium, Cohen had started purchasing apartments in Trump World Tower, the building near the United Nations that was at the time particularly popular among Russians. Soon Cohen, his in-laws, and his taxi company partner (who had been convicted of assault), all bought units in the building, “for investment,” as Cohen described it in congressional testimony many years later. Cohen and his associates bought a big block of units from a brokerage company, eventually taking over the condominium board, where a faction had come into conflict with the Trumps. Cohen’s side won, and Donald Trump noticed. He gave Cohen another task: helping Donald Trump Jr. in a business license dispute. And then, as if in a fairy tale, Michael Cohen was given the third test: reading through the bankruptcy statements for Trump’s Atlantic City casino company. Sitting in Trump’s office, Trump, Cohen said, “asked me if I was happy at the sleepy old firm that I was with. I said ‘Yes.’ He said ‘Would you rather work for me?’ ”⁹

After that day, Cohen said, he never returned to his own office. He came to view Donald Trump as a second father, and Ivanka, and especially Don Jr., as siblings.¹⁰ As the years went on, Cohen was subjected to a kind of Trump Organization hazing. Trump would ask him to cross a line. If Cohen would do it, Trump would push him to cross another one. And the more willing he was to break rules on Trump’s behalf, the more trust Trump placed in him. “It’s like Ramses from the Ten Commandments: so it has been said, so it shall be done,” Cohen said. “That is how The Trump Organization works.” He said this included telling outright lies.

“Michael, go take him into another room and make a good deal,” Trump would say of business associates. Cohen said he knew “exactly what he was talking about. It wasn’t about making a good deal; it was really lowballing it, and he wanted to almost technically get it for free.” When Trump stiffed vendors, it was Cohen’s job to “basically tell them that we just weren’t paying at all, or make them offers of, say, 20 cents on the dollar.” Cohen added, “Many of these folks, you know, lost everything.”¹¹

By 2011, four years into his stint at the Trump Organization, Michael Cohen had banked a lot of trust with Trump. He was Trump’s fixer. He became the behind-the-scenes agitator of Trump’s toe-in-the-water presidential bid as well as its public face. He was running international deals. He was describing businessmen from the country of Georgia as his “dear friends.”

“In front of you . . . you have President Saakashvili and George Ramishvili of the Silk Road Group,” Michael Cohen told the press that day in March 2011, the zenith of his career. “And, of course, Mr. Donald J. Trump. They will be signing an unprecedented license agreement today for the development of a Trump Tower in Batumi and soon in Tbilisi.”

Batumi, as described at the press conference, would soon have a luxury hotel and marina, with a casino and a convention center to follow. It was to be a beacon of transparency and the auspicious advent of capitalism in a corner of the world beset by corruption and economic decline. “I think the world will see that Georgia is a great place to invest,” Cohen said, already sounding like Donald Trump, “as more Western companies will follow Mr. Trump—as they usually do—to this amazing spectacular destination location.”¹²

The project was a disaster; as the New Yorker’s Adam Davidson reported, “virtually none of the things that Saakashvili and Trump said about the deal were true.” The planned development site, Batumi, was a run-down Georgian port with no discernable market for luxury housing. The project’s budget was announced at $250 million, but, even in the planning stages, it was only $110 million. The developer, the Silk Road Group, was not a real estate development firm, but a company that shipped oil products by rail from the notoriously corrupt state of Kazakhstan. And BTA, the bank that was financing the developer, was at the very time of the Trump deal enmeshed in a sprawling and well-publicized international money-laundering scandal.

The Trump Organization was ignorant of all this, Cohen said, when he was still toeing the party line. “Remember, this was a licensing deal,” he told the New Yorker. “The financing of the project was the responsibility of the licensee.” Experts on international money-laundering laws disagreed, telling the New Yorker that the Trump Organization, even if only selling its name, should nevertheless have vetted its corporate associates.

But for Donald Trump, the project was a success. To earn his licensing fee, he had few requirements beyond making a trip to Georgia and appearing at the press conference at the Trump Tower atrium with Michael Cohen and President Mikheil Saakhasvilli.¹³ “Ivanka is over here someplace and I just want to thank her for showing up,” Donald Trump said early in his remarks. “She’s going to be spending a lot of time—she’s now seven months pregnant. But as soon as she has the baby she’s going to be going over to the Republic of Georgia.”

Then he took questions. The first question, naturally, was about Trump’s plans to run for president. He would decide, he promised, by June. The ensuing softball: Do deals like these count as experience? “Oh, I think so,” Trump said. “I have a lot of relationships with many of the leaders of the world. We’re doing a lot of projects all over the world. This is one that’s very exciting to us but we are doing other projects and I understand how the world works. I deal with the world.”

So, was he criticizing President Obama’s leadership?

“We’re being very very badly decimated by other countries, taking advantage of us,” came the response, “and we’re like a whipping post. And we could be great and we could be great again. But right now this country is doing very, very poorly.”

Did he have anything to say about Michael Cohen’s Iowa trip?

“No. You could ask Mr. Cohen,” Trump said. But, he couldn’t help himself. “Well I certainly was—I mean the response has been amazing actually.”¹⁴

 

Immediately after Michael Cohen’s Iowa trip and the attendant news conferences, Donald Trump began to promote claims nurtured by Roger Stone and a conspiracy theorist, Jerome Corsi, that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Trump was everywhere on television in the latter half of March 2011, fueling the racist belief that Obama was an illegitimate president. “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” he asked on ABC’s The View. “All of a sudden a lot of facts are emerging and I’m starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country,” he said to Fox News, a few days later. Two days after that, he appeared on the Laura Ingraham Show: “He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him. Now, somebody told me—and I have no idea whether this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be—that where it says ‘religion,’ it might have ‘Muslim.’ And if you’re a Muslim, you don’t change your religion, by the way.” And on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in early April: “His grandmother in Kenya said, ‘Oh, no, he was born in Kenya and I was there and I witnessed the birth.’ Now she’s on tape and I think that tape’s going to be produced fairly soon.”¹⁵

When Obama finally, at the end of April, released his Hawaiian birth certificate, Trump claimed credit: “I’m very proud of myself, because I’ve accomplished something that nobody has been able to accomplish,” he told a bank of television cameras at a news conference at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, airport.¹⁶

At the White House Correspondents Association gala dinner days later, Obama skewered a simmering Trump, who sat with a tight smile pulled across his face as the crowd laughed and applauded Obama’s jokes. “You fired Gary Busey!” Obama mocked, referring to an episode of Celebrity Apprentice. “These are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.” As the laughing and cheering became more uproarious, Trump’s smile pulled tighter and tighter and he began to rock in his seat. Obama added, “Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he certainly would bring some change to the White House,” before flashing an image of the executive mansion, hastily photoshopped with two women in bikinis plastered in the foreground and “Hotel-Casino-Golf Course” above the columns.¹⁷

 

The day of the press conference announcing the Georgia deal, a supporter of a potential rival candidate signed a complaint addressed to the Federal Election Commission, charging that Trump, in violation of election laws, had used his corporate resources, including his jet and Michael Cohen, an executive vice president of his company, to “test the waters” for a potential campaign. The complaint also charged that Trump’s friend Stewart Rahr had breached campaign contribution limits by paying for the flight, and that Cohen had done the same by working for a potential campaign as Trump’s employee.

After FEC lawyers reviewed the evidence, they found “reason to believe that the flight to Iowa may have resulted in an in-kind disbursement accepted by Trump.” Michael Cohen, the lawyers argued, had worked with Rahr, the outside businessman, to pay for the use of Trump’s jet to fly to Iowa. Trump, Cohen, and Rahr argued that the complaint should be dismissed because there was no candidate involved. “We disagree,” the commission lawyers wrote, “because the available information suggests that Trump was involved in the activity.” If you’re testing the waters, the commission lawyers were saying, you have to file papers saying so. You can’t simply ignore the rules. The contribution of $125,000 by Rahr was $122,500 over the legal limit.

The FEC attorneys also suspected that Cohen’s trip was “at the direction of Trump,” adding, “If Cohen was conducting these activities as Trump’s employee, the Trump Organization would have made an in-kind disbursement to Trump using federally impermissible funds.” In other words, if Trump had directed the ShouldTrumpRun efforts, the Trump Organization had illegally donated to the candidate, himself.

“Therefore, we recommend that the Commission find reason to believe that Rahr, Trump LLC, Cohen, and ShouldTrumpRun violated 11 C.F.R. §100.131(a), and that Donald J. Trump violated 11 C.F.R. §100.72(a),” the FEC staff report concluded.¹⁸

For the first thirty years of the FEC’s existence, this ruling would have been enough to trigger subpoenas, further investigation, and perhaps produced a finding of wrongdoing and a fine, of the kind Charles Kushner once received. But in 2008, at the behest of Mitch McConnell, Donald McGahn, a conservative lawyer with roots in the Federalist Society (an organization funded by ultra-conservative foundations¹⁹) had been named the chairman of the FEC. McGahn, a lawyer who played in a 1980s cover band and wore his hair a bit long for Washington, grew up in Atlantic City, the nephew of Paddy McGahn, the local power broker who had, in the early eighties helped Donald Trump hide some of his more unsavory business associates.²⁰

As a lawyer, Don McGahn hired himself out to fight the enforcement of election laws. As a commissioner of the FEC, he was determined to permanently block them. Under commission rules, there are six commissioners, of whom at most three can be from any one political party. In practice, this means that to have any enforcement action stick, Republicans and Democrats have to work together. McGahn sought to overturn almost every staff recommendation. According to an analysis by the Boston Globe, in 2007, the year before McGahn took over, there were 612 cases pursued and very few dismissals. By 2012, after McGahn’s takeover, the number of cases had dropped to 135, and a fifth of those were thrown out.²¹ As one of McGahn’s fellow commissioners, Ellen Weintraub, wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post, “appointed to be an arbiter of campaign-finance complaints, McGahn instead assumed the mantle of defense counsel, making an art form of devising byzantine arguments against investigating alleged wrongdoing.”²² McGahn, almost single handedly, was dismantling the FEC’s ability to enforce the law.

When the matter of Cohen’s 2011 plane trip to Iowa came before them, by a vote of 3–2, the commission overruled its own lawyers and tossed Donald Trump’s case. One Republican commissioner refused to sign on to McGahn’s decision; years later, before Trump nominated him to be a federal judge, this same commissioner wrote a four-years-after-the-fact opinion agreeing with McGahn,²³ who by then, as White House counsel, was in charge of selecting judges.

 

Barely a week after Trump’s March 2011 press conference with Michael Cohen, Donald took a plane ride of his own, to Barcelona, Spain—this trip, too, would result in legal action. The trip wasn’t to discuss a development or a hotel-casino-golf course. It was to discuss a bulky video phone, and Donald Trump was urging people to pay money to a company named ACN for the opportunity to sell it.

By March 2011, the demand for videophones was questionable. Skype was available on almost any desktop computer or smartphone—indeed, it had 150 million monthly users—and Apple had already launched its FaceTime service. ACN’s videophones were bulky, by comparison, and only worked if users on both ends had a full complement of ACN equipment, making it impractical for travel and mobile use. By 2011 ACN’s supplier had already slashed production, laid off 70 percent of its staff, and would later file to liquidate in federal bankruptcy court.²⁴ But none of this was apparent as Donald Trump entered the Palau Sant Jordi arena in Barcelona, Spain, green spotlights pulsing over a cheering crowd, the O’Jay’s singing “Money, money, money, money” as “multi-billionaire, Mr. Donald J. Trump” took the stage against an enormous photograph of tall towers shining in a night sky.²⁵

Trump was there to hawk a scheme: attendees could choose to become independent business owners: that is, sellers of the video phones. To do so, they were required to pay $499, plus a $149 yearly renewal fee. But to really make money, they not only had to sell phones, but recruit new sellers, new entrants at the bottom of the sales pyramid who would send their money upwards to the executives of ACN. Eventually, some of it would go to Donald Trump. It’s not clear exactly how much Trump made in total from ACN, but disclosure forms filed when he ran for president put it at $450,000 per speech.²⁶ “It is a substantial amount of money, even if you’re rich,” he told the Wall Street Journal.²⁷

After the raucous welcome in Barcelona, Donald Trump sat in a chair on the stage and heartily endorsed the project. “A lot of the people that I’ve met had their job for two or three years, and all of a sudden they started leaving out of their job and going full-time at ACN because they’re making more money with ACN,” Donald Trump said. By this time, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York, ACN’s internal numbers showed the chances of making money were “miniscule.”²⁸

Trump also praised ACN’s executives (who by then, in addition to whatever fees they paid Trump, had purchased multiple properties near Trump’s North Carolina golf course, and held charitable events there²⁹). “I really like the guys,” Trump told the crowd, adding they’d “really become friends of mine. . . . I give lots of money to charity, and they contribute to my charities. They really have been very generous.”

The next week, Trump went even further, when The Celebrity Apprentice aired a ninety-minute prime-time Sunday night episode featuring ACN. On the show, standing in the elevator lobby of Trump Tower, next to Ivanka and Don Jr., Donald Trump introduced the theme of the show, and his “two friends.” Everyone nodded and smiled. “They run a company called ACN, which I know very well.” Donald Trump did not disclose to the show’s contestants, or to its viewers, that he had a financial relationship with the company. “Your task,” one ACN executive explained to the contestants, “is to create a thirty-second commercial showcasing ACN and our revolutionary new video phone.” At which point the making of the thirty-second commercials became the subject of 180 times that amount of television time.³⁰

“One of the hallmarks of my father’s television show, has been the brand-backed tasks or projects the contestants are assigned,” Ivanka Trump wrote in The Trump Card. “These invariably involve a corporate sponsor, which naturally looks to integrate its product or service into our story line so that there’s a clear carryover benefit to its business. Think of it as a transparent form of product placement, but you can be sure that NBC and the show’s producers (including my father, naturally) are being compensated handsomely for the ‘free’ airtime.”³¹

The publicity had its intended effect: thousands of people signed up to sell videophones. Many lost money. Among them: a hospice worker, a food delivery driver, and a formerly homeless man. They paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to ACN, sometimes borrowing it from family members. Four people who said they were victims of the scheme filed a class-action suit, Jane Doe et al. v. Trump. The Trump Organization argued that Donald, Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka were merely celebrity endorsers, not in any way involved in ACN’s corporate structure, and that, from context, it was clear they were being paid by ACN. Nor, the defendants argued in a legal brief, was there any intent to commit fraud or any conspiracy to do so. “The alleged associates must share a common purpose to engage in a particular fraudulent course of conduct and work together to achieve such purposes,” the Trumps’ lawyers argued, calling the legal claim that they had done exactly this “plainly inadequate.”³²

In the summer of 2019, a federal judge dismissed the part of the case that alleged the Trumps had engaged in racketeering, because, she said, it hadn’t been shown that the Trumps’ inducements to sign up with ACN had directly caused specific losses by the plaintiffs. But, she ruled, the defendants “deliberately misled consumers regarding the nature of ACN’s business.” Consequently, the class-action fraud lawsuit against Donald Trump, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric could proceed.³³

At the end of the ACN Celebrity Apprentice episode, after tangling with Donald Trump, Dionne Warwick was fired. Three weeks later, it was Gary Busey.

 

In May 2011, Trump announced he would not run for the Republican nomination for president in 2012. But, with Cohen at his side, he continued to act like a presidential run was in the offing. As the New York Times reported, Trump had by this time struck up a friendship with Citizens United’s David Bossie and would use “forums hosted by Mr. Bossie’s group to road test a potential campaign.”³⁴

Trump even held rallies, like one on the boardwalk at Jones Beach on New York’s Long Island on a gorgeous late summer day in 2011 whose stated purpose was to prompt state officials to make concessions to Trump for a catering hall he wanted to build in the middle of Jones Beach State Park. The project would be called “Trump on the Ocean.” Standing next to Cohen, surrounded by burly construction worker types—some of whom later said they were paid to be there³⁵—chanting “Let Trump Build! Let Trump Build!” Trump excoriated state officials for what he saw as unnecessary delays in the permitting process for a project he claimed would create a thousand construction jobs and five hundred permanent ones. “We Need Jobs!” read one of the preprinted placards onlookers held aloft. Trump himself seemed confused about the rally’s purpose; one person who was there said in an interview that Trump thanked her for showing up to support his presidential campaign. (Though she was there to protest Trump on the Ocean, she later supported his 2016 presidential campaign.)

Trump was taking on few domestic construction projects at this point, and this one, for a catering hall on the beach, appeared to be of outsized importance to him. There are some clues as to why. Not only would it be a visible construction project that could serve as the backdrop of a future campaign, but Trump, with Cohen as his representative, had wrangled a highly unusual concession from New York State officials: at a time when Trump desperately needed cash, the state parks department permitted him to use the entire value of his forty-year lease to collateralize borrowing, for any project he wanted.

Trump personally called four governors and a state comptroller to get the approvals he needed, the officials or their representatives said in interviews. He’d given each of the officials tens of thousands of dollars: well over $100,000 to committees controlled by Governor George Pataki; $48,000 to the state comptroller, Alan Hevesi; $41,000 to Governor Eliot Spitzer; $5,000 to Governor David Paterson.³⁶ A decade later, people familiar with the thinking of all of these state officials said Trump had reached out, personally, about Trump on the Ocean. “Oh I know exactly why Donald Trump gave that contribution,” said a person familiar with the Comptroller’s Office. “Donald was yelling and talking about his permit and the investment he had made.” After a call from Trump, Spitzer asked his staff if there wasn’t a way to give Trump a variance he wanted. (Spitzer said he didn’t recall this.)

In the end, Trump got most of what he wanted. But in the fall of 2012, the site of Trump on the Ocean flooded during Superstorm Sandy. After all he’d put into it, Trump walked away.

 

In June 2011, a month after her father doused his nascent presidential bid, Ivanka Trump held a meeting in Trump Tower with Igor Krutoy, a Ukrainian-born Russian musician. According to the Guardian, Krutoy and two other businessmen were there to discuss a possible Trump project in Riga, Latvia: a building to permanently house the New Wave music festival, which Krutoy had founded. A senior Trump Organization official had already discreetly scouted possible venues, and on that day in June 2011, as Krutoy and one of the other businessmen in attendance later told the paper, they met with Ivanka not just for their allotted forty minutes, but for four hours, and were walked into Donald Trump’s office for a meet and greet. “We had an extraordinarily good meeting with Ivanka,” one of them, Viesturs Koziols, told the Guardian, adding that he and Donald Trump “shook hands as possible partners.”

The next month Krutoy held a press conference in Riga with Ainārs Šlesers, another businessman and a former Latvian deputy prime minister, who separately said that he too had met with Donald Trump in New York and discussed the collaboration “several times” with Ivanka.

But the project soon stalled. Šlesers’s and Krutoy’s talks with the Trumps came as Latvian anti-corruption authorities were carrying out an investigation that became known as “The Oligarchs Case.” Voters responded by ousting the three eponymous oligarchs, including Šlesers, in September 2011. One recording of Šlesers had caught him bragging about working with Donald Trump, according to transcripts published by a Latvian newspaper. The Trumps were not implicated in the case and did not pursue business in Latvia.³⁷ “We went back and forth for a little while. Nothing went forward, but it’s an area that we are interested in,” Donald Trump Jr. told a pair of Latvian interviewers the following spring, in May 2012.

Don Jr. was in Riga that May for a conference, sponsored by the Baltic International Bank, where he spoke on the theme, “Inheriting a Family Business and Raising the New Generation.”³⁸ The day after his speech, sitting at an ornate wooden table, in a dark suit and a pale blue tie, across from the two interviewers, Don Jr. explained, “They wanted to talk about generational wealth, family businesses. And, you know, I think it’s something that I can actually talk very, you know, intelligibly about, something that is obviously very important to myself and my family, but not really a topic that is often spoken about.”

In the same interview, he was asked about whether the Trumps would pursue a project in Russia. Yes, he told his interlocutors: “I’ve been there many times and I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Moscow looking at deals.” When he traveled to places like Moscow, it was for the same reason he was in Riga to talk about intergenerational wealth: “A big part of my job is just forming the friendships that often lead to partnerships.”³⁹

Though the partnership with Igor Krutoy had failed to produce a project in Latvia, Krutoy had a connection to someone who would play a big role in the lives of all the Trumps: another pop star with ties to oligarchs, Emin Agalarov.⁴⁰

 

After the Riga deal died, the Trumps soon made another deal in another former Soviet satellite, in Baku, Azerbaijan. This deal would go a lot farther and be far more problematic than Riga; Adam Davidson of the New Yorker called the Baku tower “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal.”⁴¹ In April 2012, as the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal fraud investigation of Ivanka, Don Jr., and the Trump SoHo was reaching a particularly sensitive phase, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump filed paperwork to set up limited liability companies as the basis for a licensing deal for the Trump Tower Baku. According to the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, Azerbaijan was among the most corrupt countries in the world in 2012, on par with Nigeria, and worse than Iran.⁴²

The Trumps’ partner in Azerbaijan was Anar Mammadov, the son of the transportation minister, Ziya Mammadov. Ziya Mammadov had become a billionaire while making a government salary of twelve thousand dollars a year. During the time he was transportation minister, his son Anar bought a seven-bedroom home in London and regularly rode a forty-one-million-dollar Gulfstream G450 jet.

The Mammadovs, Davidson found, were closely tied to a company linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the wing of the Iranian military that protects Iran’s Islamic political system. Over the years, the US government has accused the Revolutionary Guard of drug trafficking and money laundering. (Later, the Trump Administration officially designated it as a terrorist organization.) Ziya’s brother Elton, a member of parliament, signed much of the Trump paperwork.

Davidson spoke with a series of contractors who described accepting fees in cash. One of them, an Englishman named Frank McDonald, said he himself once collected one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in a laptop bag, and that on another occasion a colleague had to stuff two million dollars into a large duffel bag.

The Trump Organization maintained that it had done “extensive due diligence” and come away satisfied, that it was not responsible for others’ behavior, and that it was “merely a licensor.” Moreover, its chief legal officer Alan Garten told Davidson that the “flow of funds is in the wrong direction” for the Trumps to have any legal liability; the Trump Organization had no equity in the Baku tower and was not responsible for its financing.

“No, that’s just wrong,” Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at George Washington University Law School, told Davidson. She added, “Nor can you escape liability by looking the other way. The entire Baku deal is a giant red flag—the direct involvement of foreign government officials and their relatives in Azerbaijan with ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Corruption warning signs are rarely more obvious.”⁴³

In October 2014, Ivanka Trump posted a video on Instagram. Wearing a white hotel bathrobe, looking like she had just stepped out of a spa, she said “A very long flight but I’m here in Baku, Azerbaijan, check it out,” before panning her cell phone to capture the city’s “flame towers.”⁴⁴ Her website proclaimed: “Ivanka has overseen the development of Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku since its inception, and she recently returned from a trip to the fascinating city in Azerbaijan to check in on the project’s progress.”

The hotel, located in a run-down area of Baku near a tangle of highway ramps, was very near completed. As late as 2015, Ivanka Trump told Baku magazine she couldn’t wait to try out the “huge spa” there, and that it was slated to open in June. Instead, her father announced his campaign for president.

 

While Ivanka was working on Baku, Donald Trump had his eyes on another city, the biggest market in all of the former Soviet Union: Moscow. He wanted to bring the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned, to Russia. This was, he made clear, a springboard to a real estate development project there.

In early 2013, a portly British music publicist named Rob Goldstone was working with a client named Emin Agalarov. The brown-haired, doe-eyed Russian-Azerbaijani singer was a pop star in Russia and desperate to break into the US market. He and Goldstone had a plan: Emin would perform in the Miss Universe pageant.

According to an account in Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s book Russian Roulette, Goldstone and Agalarov first pitched holding the Miss Universe pageant in Azerbaijan. When that didn’t work, they suggested Russia.⁴⁵ Emin’s father, Aras Agalarov, is known as “Putin’s Builder” because he is often tapped by Putin’s government to build large infrastructure projects for events where Russia needs to impress the world, such as sports facilities for the 2018 World Cup. One of Agalarov’s residential developments, outside Moscow, according to the Luke Harding book Collusion, was modeled on homes in Alpine, New Jersey, where Emin had gone to high school.⁴⁶

Aras Agalarov had built Crocus City Hall, a large theater complex where the Miss Universe pageant could be held, and where, in exchange for housing the event, Emin would get two slots at the Miss Universe contest and a cameo by the reigning Miss Universe in the music video for his song “Amor,” shot on a Los Angeles backlot.⁴⁷

In June 2013, the Agalarovs—Emin and Aras—the publicist Goldstone, and Donald Trump and his entourage all convened in Las Vegas, for the Miss USA contest, which is owned by Miss Universe. “These are the most powerful people in Russia, the richest men in Russia,” Donald Trump said during one photo opportunity. (They were not actually the richest men in all of Russia.) This dinner party was captured on a video, obtained by CNN, that shows Trump and Michael Cohen chatting with the Agalarovs, Goldstone, and another man, Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, the US-based vice president of Agalarov’s company.⁴⁸

Kaveladze had been scrutinized in 2000 by US Senator Carl Levin for establishing over two thousand Delaware shell companies to move $1.4 billion from foreign countries. Levin later called Kaveladze the “poster boy” for facilitating the movement of foreign wealth through the US financial system. Levin said that though the practice was not illegal under existing US law, it “allows individuals to set up shell companies—companies through which they can anonymously pass money, and which can readily be used to launder ill-gotten gains.”⁴⁹ (Kaveladze called the report, back in 2000, a “witch hunt.”⁵⁰)

The day after the dinner, Trump posed for photos at Miss USA, and touted the upcoming Miss Universe contest in Russia. “And honestly,” he said “they really wanted it in Russia very badly, politically they wanted it. It really is a great country, it’s a very powerful country. It’s a country we have a relationship with but I would say not a great relationship and I think that this can certainly help that relationship.” Miss Universe, and Trump, were going to Moscow.

“We all knew that the event was approved by Putin,” a Miss Universe official told the authors of Russian Roulette. “You can’t pull off something like this in Russia unless Putin says it’s okay.” As Corn and Isikoff put it: “Trump would only be making money in Russia because Putin was permitting him to do so.”

In Moscow, in an interview with the Russian press preceding the pageant, Trump returned the favor, saying, of Putin, “Look, he’s done a very brilliant job in terms of what he represents and who he’s representing.” (These Trump comments came just after a brutal anti-LGBT law passed in Russia, accompanied by a sharp rise in anti-LGBT violence there.) Trump kept gushing about Putin: “He’s put himself at the forefront of the world as a leader in a short period of time.”

In the days leading up to the pageant, Trump had been hoping and hinting that Putin might drop by the pageant. Instead, Goldstone later said, Trump had to settle for a call from Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, who told him Putin would be unable to stop by because he was waiting for a visit from the king and queen of the Netherlands who were stuck in Moscow traffic. (Later, Putin, standing next to Trump in Helsinki in 2018 as Peskov looked on, would deny he even knew Trump was in Moscow then.)

On the red carpet before the pageant, Trump kept up the puffery: “Russia’s just been an amazing place. You see what’s happening here, it’s incredible.” He was positioned in front of the logos of the Trump Organization, Miss Universe, the Russian state-owned Sberbank (the event’s financial sponsor), and an NBC peacock logo faded to black and white so as not to appear to be promoting homosexuality under the new Russian law.

Trump left Moscow having spent just one night in the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Soon after, Sberbank said it had struck a “strategic cooperation agreement” with the Crocus Group to finance 70 percent of a Trump Tower Moscow.⁵¹ Had that deal gone through, Trump would have been doing business with the government of Russia.

Just days after Trump’s return from Moscow, the New York–based Real Estate Weekly reported that members of the Sapir family had also traveled to Moscow, to start talking about a Trump Tower there. The article quoted Trump saying “the Russian market is attracted to me,” adding, “I have a great relationship with many Russians.” Then he noted, of the festivities surrounding the Miss Universe contest, “almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.”⁵²

Donald Trump also tweeted at Aras Agalarov: “I had a great weekend with you and your family. You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next. EMIN was WOW!”⁵³

Over the following month, Donald Trump Jr. started to draw up an agreement for a Trump Tower Moscow with Aras Agalarov’s right-hand man, Ike Kaveladze. Emin soon traveled to the Trump National Golf Club at Doral, outside of Miami, for a golf tournament, singing at a concert and posing for photos with Donald Trump and Ivanka Trump. Over the next year, Don Jr. and Kaveladze corresponded frequently. They discussed fees. There was a project proposal for an 800-unit tower, design discussions, questions from Don Jr. about the demographics of prospective buyers and the specs of a competing project by Marriott. When Kaveladze wasn’t available, Rob Goldstone acted as a stand-in.⁵⁴

The next time anyone heard of the Agalarovs was when Donald Trump Jr. released an email chain he’d been sent from Rob Goldstone, offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump—helped along by Aras and Emin,” Goldstone wrote to Don Jr.

“Thanks Rob I appreciate that,” Don Jr. replied. “I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first. Seems we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?”⁵⁵

This was early June 2016, after Trump, shocking the US political world, wrapped up the Republican nomination for president.