”Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it," Mr. Sater wrote in an email. ”I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process."
[...]
Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow's efforts to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr. Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow.
”I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected," Mr. Sater wrote.
Mr. Sater said he was eager to show video clips to his Russian contacts of instances of Mr. Trump speaking glowingly about Russia, and said he would arrange for Mr. Putin to praise Mr. Trump's business acumen."
[...]
In a statement on Monday that was also provided to Congress, Mr. Cohen suggested that he viewed Mr. Sater's comments as puffery. ”He has sometimes used colorful language and has been prone to ‘salesmanship,'" the statement said. ”I ultimately determined that the proposal was not feasible and never agreed to make a trip to Russia."
[...]
"As a broker for the Trump Organization, Mr. Sater had an incentive to overstate his business-making acumen. He presents himself in his emails as so influential in Russia that he helped arrange a 2006 trip that Mr. Trump's daughter, Ivanka, took to Moscow.
”I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin," he said.
Ms. Trump said she had no involvement in the discussions about the Moscow deal other than to recommend possible architects. In a statement, she said that during the 2006 trip she took ”a brief tour of Red Square and the Kremlin" as a tourist. She said it is possible she sat in Mr. Putin's chair during that tour but she did not recall it. She said she has not seen or spoken to Mr. Sater since 2010. ”I have never met President Vladimir Putin," she said.
