INTRODUCTION
A reader's job when reviewing this curious case of Felix Sater would be easier if this case were a short and simple one. However, this case is hardly short or simple, and if it were, it would hardly be considered curious. A reader tackling this "then vs. now" review should be forewarned this is a lengthy read which could be reviewed in one sitting like a mini-book or over an extended period of days. It has been broken out into sections which will begin by reviewing what Glenn Simpson (Fusion GPS) should have known in the public record regarding Felix Sater in the fall of 2015, what additional facts came out through a chronological review of the years and unearthed details since then, along with the four main points or ways Felix Sater came to be described in the media as the "heart" of the Trump Russia investigation and wrapped up in the Mueller investigation. The ending will summarize some of the main remaining questions.
"THEN"
There were many opportunities over the last decade, even before the 2016 presidential election race, for the American public to read or hear the name Felix Sater. This could have been in 2007, during the construction of Trump SoHo, when The New York Times published a story with a headline, ‘Real Estate Executive With Hand in Trump Projects Rose From Tangled Past.’ Or in 2008 when NYMag wrote in their article the Times story “outed” Sater as an “ex-con with possible Mafia connections.” It could have been even as late as September of 2012 when the Miami Herald linked Felix Sater to being referred to as “John Doe” in a pending legal case. Their article was titled ‘Strange bedfellows: Swindler, Stinger-missile brokers, the CIA.’
Any decent and critical researcher, and especially a company like Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS being paid handsomely to perform such work, should have established the following high-level summary timeline on Sater from 1991 - 2015. When reviewing this timeline, understand this sets the basis of what should have been gleaned of public court records and media articles by the time Fusion GPS admittedly began looking into Sater for his reported links to Russian organized crime. However, the conclusions Glenn Simpson and his company reached were arguably different than others may have drawn based on the same set of facts. While this by itself isn't very noteworthy considering people draw different conclusions based on the same facts all the time, what is interesting is how these conclusions never changed as new facts emerged with time, Mueller's Special Counsel investigation came and went, and Felix Sater was never indicted for a single lie.
1991 - bar fight; age 25 - same year Soviet Union collapsed
1993-96 - fighting appeal on bar fight conviction, resorted to partnering with three others with stock fraud scam common on Wall Street during this years (see: Operation Street Cleaner reference CNN, March 2000); in prison for bar fight between June 1994 and September 1995
1996-98 - Traveled to (and briefly lived in) Russia as consultant for AT&T with two of the partners in stock fraud scam, Salvatore “Sal” Lauria and Gennady “Gene” Klotsman, at a time when President Bill Clinton was in office and Russia was like the Wild Wild West with unbridled and unregulated capitalism
1998 - older article linking Felix Sater to opened rental storage locker with documents related to stock fraud scam and corresponding indictments
2000s -working at Bayrock licensing Trump brand on real estate deals with Tevfik Arif, Sapir Organization, while also doing consulting work for Rixos Hotels, Sembol Construction, and Mirax Group between 2005-2010
2003 - The book Scorpion and the Frog: High Times and High Crimes was published where Lex Tersa was the pseudonym for Felix Sater and described the 90s stock scam along with Sater and his partners' travel to Russia; described Sater's family having links to world organized crime
2007-08 - Sater was specifically named in articles in 2007 and 2008 as possibly having Mafia ties and having helped the CIA in the late 90s to hunt down Stinger missiles on the black market
2009 - Patrick Byrne's (then-CEO of Overstock) website Deep Capture linked Felix Sater to the "Milken network" and organized crime; the Michael Milken of naked short-selling 80s fame; Byrne also had associated Felix Sater to a death threat he believed he had received in prior years
2010 - Lawsuits started and continued for years beyond this point to have Sater's files being sealed by the government unsealed; public records indicated an ex-Bayrock IT employee, Josh Bernstein, had been asked to make a backup of the Bayrock system, and when he was later fired, had shown to other people files he had found which Sater had stored on the Bayrock system related to his criminal conviction from the stock fraud scam and related cooperation with the FBI
2012 - article in Miami Herald detailed how in the previous year (2011) files had been submitted to the court which had, per their reporting, “set off a reaction in the courts rarely seen, with one judge sealing the civil suit and another judge ordering a criminal probe of the lawyer who filed it.” Two lawyers had been given copies of these files Bernstein illegally obtained and even though they were marked as sealed information, submitted them in their motion publicly. They received the wrath of the Judge for taking this action. The lawyer representing Sater on behalf of the government, Kelly Moore, called keeping his files sealed important to “national security." (This was in 2011, over two years after he’d already faced sentencing for his role in the mid-90s stock scam.)
2013 - While Donald Trump is most often quoted in a deposition from this year as saying he wouldn't recognize Felix Sater if they were in the same room together, he also said three different times Sater "seemed close to the federal government"; this is the year then-CEO of Overstock's Deep Capture website linked Felix Sater to Mogilevich, a so-called "Russian mobster" on the FBI Most Wanted list
2015 - Supreme Court ruled against the request for unsealing of Sater's files; Obama Attorney General then-nominee Loretta Lynch was asked in her nomination hearing about the continued sealing of Felix Sater's records and made a personal and public statement on his behalf
By the fall of 2015, when Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS began digging into Felix Sater for their Republican client, at a summary level this is what they should have been reporting back. Trump Tower Moscow discussions had started by September of 2015 but it is fairly unlikely this was known by Fusion GPS at the time. By December of 2015, the first negative media reporting regarding Donald Trump's association to Felix Sater during the 2016 election was published by ABC News. What should be underscored here is even though Glenn Simpson should have had read an article only three years earlier which made it pretty evident the government was clamoring to get the private information which had been wrongly publicly submitted made private again as quickly as possible, it is odd they felt this was likely taking place if Sater was actually tied to Semyon Mogilevich. After all, in the same year 2011 the files were publicly submitted by these lawyers, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller had referred to the Mogilevich Network in a speech stating, "...we are also building a long-term strategy for dismantling these enterprises. Last year, we set up two units, called Threat Focus Cells, to target Eurasian organized crime. The first focuses on the Semion Mogilevich Organization; the second on the Brother’s Circle enterprise. For those of you not familiar with either group, their memberships are large, their reach is global, and their scope of operations is broad, from weapons and drug trafficking to high-stakes fraud and global prostitution. If left unchecked, the resulting impact to our economy and our security will be significant. Indeed, Semion Mogilevich is on the FBI Top Ten Most Wanted List, and he will remain so until he is captured."
The sheer volume of articles from both mainstream, as well as independent and alternative media regarding Felix Sater, as well as the amount of misinformation and fake news amidst them is almost staggering. What has likely stuck in most Americans’ minds, if they even still recognize the name Felix Sater, is recalling him as the margarita-glass-wielding Russian gangster who slashed a guy’s face and played a role in a stock scam in the mid-90s, cooperated with the CIA and FBI at some point, and worked for a company which licensed the Trump brand on real estate deals. Then got himself wrapped up in the Mueller investigation by sending strangely-worded emails about getting Trump elected and building a Trump Tower Moscow. While this may now be the extent of what many Americans vaguely remember of Felix Sater from this Russian collusion hysteria, new and additional facts have come to light since the Mueller team released their report. A review of these new facts, as well as context where lacking, will highlight many remaining questions which remain to be answered.
The relentless focus on Sater's criminal past from the 90s by the mainstream media should also be pointed out considering the core of the mystery of Felix's story is what happened after those two unrelated events, and why the government had his files sealed for over two decades. The narrative was never framed to ask why the government would have this man's files sealed for such a length of time to end up being accused of colluding with a foreign government. During her nomination hearing in early 2015, Loretta Lynch stated, "At this point, the majority of the materials that remain sealed go to the heart of the nature of Sater’s cooperation in several highly sensitive matters."
There have been conspiracy theories regarding Felix Sater’s involvement with Donald Trump on both sides of the two major U.S. political parties, and yet none of these theories seem close to truth or reality. To the political left, Felix was a mobster linked to Semion Mogilevich, an asset for Russia or even a double agent working both sides, and helped get Trump elected President. To the political right, Felix’s ties to multiple members of Mueller’s team, his connections and prior known cooperation with multiple U.S. intelligence agencies meant he must have been a deep state plant dispatched to spy on Trump, the Trump Org, and helped to orchestrate this Trump Russian collusion conspiracy. Neither of these theories make complete sense or are remotely likely to be the truth.
In order to gain a fresh perspective of where things stand now in 2021, over two years after the completion of the Mueller Report and several months following the release of the Senate Report Volume 5, a review of some of these conspiracy theories compared with the facts is warranted and in fact, necessary. Is there any evidence Felix Sater is tied to organized crime, or more specifically Semyon Mogilevich? Is there any evidence supporting Felix Sater could have been some sort of deep state plant for the FBI, CIA, or DIA? Is there any evidence to support that he ever worked for Russia or was a double agent? Why was he described "at the center of Mueller's Russia investigation," yet also had connections to multiple members of the Mueller team, showed up in the Senate Intel Report as having the closest connections to Russia, and the Mueller Report never addressed any of it?
If a researcher trying to resolve these questions reviewed the Mueller Report to seek answers, they were hard-pressed to find any. Felix Sater is mentioned over a hundred times in the Mueller report but there is nothing there regarding his criminal past, or his prior cooperation with agencies like the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Interestingly, an article regarding Felix Sater published by BuzzFeed News in March 2018, ‘The Asset,’ offered far more details on Sater’s work for the U.S. government than the Mueller Report had ever pointed out (even though the report came out over a year after the article).
As stated, the Senate Report Volume 5 which didn't come out until the middle of 2020, was a completely different story. Sater was mentioned close to 500 times. In their report, it stated, “Sater told Cohen about high-level outreach to Russian businessmen and officials that Sater claimed to have undertaken related to the deal. While Sater almost certainly inflated some of these claims, the Committee found that Sater did, in fact, have significant senior-level ties to a number of Russian businessmen and former government officials, and was in a position, through intermediaries, to reach individuals close to Putin.”
Regardless of what one might feel about any of these intelligence agencies or even the level of trust an American may have in our government, it should be irrelevant in evaluating the case of Felix Sater. Before all of this Russian hysteria started, it was because Fusion GPS believed Felix could have been working to help Russia elect Trump as their candidate of choice. This constructed belief and described "research" later led to the hiring of Christopher Steele and the infamous Steele dossier. Though it is highly likely the hacking of the DNC would have warranted an investigation, the scope of the investigation broadened around Trump and within and outside of his campaign due to the actions of these individuals. The time has long past to begin to ask ourselves why.
2013
PATRICK BYRNE’S DEEP CAPTURE WEBSITE LINKED SATER TO SEMION MOGILEVICH WITH NO EVIDENCE
In the middle of 2013, Patrick Byrne had already been paying Mark Mitchell, a journalist, to help him with what he has referred to as his war on Wall Street and the naked short-selling of stocks. Byrne had accurately predicted the 2008 Wall Street collapse and cracks in the system but the mainstream media made him sound like a crackpot until it actually happened. Regardless, Mitchell wrote the following in his Chapter 7 of the named “Milken network” series on the Deep Capture site in July of 2013:
“One of the people Silverman brought in to help run his brokerage – another of the select traders with special partnerships at Gruntal – was a fellow named Felix Sater, who was (and is) a Russian mobster and a member of the Mogilevich organization (controlled by Semion Mogilevich, often described as the “most dangerous mobster in the world”). While still at Gruntal, Sater was charged with stabbing a Wall Street trader in the face with the broken stem of a wine glass (actually, it was martini glass, according to a man who witnessed the attack).
While still at Gruntal, Sater and several other former Gruntal traders founded a brokerage called White Rock Partners. Most of White Rock’s employees were former Gruntal employees, and there is no doubt that White Rock’s partners all had ties to organized crime. In 1996, the FBI discovered a locker at a Manhattan Mini-Storage in Soho that belonged to Evgeny Klotsman, a White Rock principal who was formerly among the select traders who had effectively run the Milken-financed Gruntal & Company. The FBI announced that the locker contained guns and documents that linked Klotsman and Sater to a “global market manipulation and money laundering network controlled by Russian organized crime.”
This reference of Sater with Mogilevich became more important years later during the 2016 election, and for the conspiracy theories which followed after. Felix Sater had been mentioned within Byrne's site's reporting years earlier in 2009 but this was the first time (2013) he had been linked to Mogilevich based on zero evidence.
In 2009, the following had been written regarding this alleged death threat which was described as being made with a Russian Matryoshkas doll which had an "F" on it with a cross at the center.
TRUMP QUESTIONED IN DEPOSITION ABOUT FELIX SATER
An oddity which has been counterintuitive to the entire claim Felix Sater helped work with Russia and Vladimir Putin to elect Donald Trump has been contained within this deposition when Trump was asked what he knew of Felix Sater. This was public record at the time Fusion GPS-owner, Glenn Simpson, testified he had already started researching Sater and explained to the House Intelligence Committee he was questioning Trump’s connections to Russia because of him. Why this is striking is, not only does it undermine the argument Felix Sater was actually spying on Trump in some capacity during the years he worked to license the Trump brand on real estate, because Donald obviously already knew Sater was close to the US government in 2013 in Donald’s own words, but he also told the interviewer he didn’t believe Sater was involved with the Mafia. It is also pretty unlikely the US government would trust a person enough to have their files sealed for this many years if they were really actually working in Russian interests or for Vladimir Putin. Regardless, conspiracy theories had spiraled out of control.
It’s hard to imagine a man like Donald Trump openly or even covertly, committing crimes with, or in front of, a man he already is aware by 2013 was close to our own federal government or intelligence agency(ies) in some unknown way, shape, or form. But if and when Glenn Simpson read this 2013 deposition during his research of Sater which began in fall of 2015, it apparently never once caused him to stop and question why Trump would have been indicating a guy he didn’t really know was actually “close to the government as a witness or something” in his first initial response. Instead, Glenn automatically assumed the government fought to keep Sater’s files sealed for over two decades because he was actually tied to Semion Mogilevich and Russian organized crime. This was Simpson’s testimony later in 2018, but by summer of 2019, Felix Sater accused Glenn Simpson of perjuring himself in front of reporters while he stood next to his lawyer, Robert Wolf. Even now in 2021, there is no one in mainstream media even placing any of this into context or asking serious and critical questions.
[p.148-157]
Notice the attorney questioning Trump for this Trump SoHo-related lawsuit brought up the most recent interview Trump had with BBC first, and then went back to the older articles in his review of exhibits. The BBC interview took place in July 2013 and the deposition quoted above occurred a few months later (Nov 2013). These articles had mentioned the fact Felix Sater might have in the past done work for US intelligence agencies like the CIA. The attorney questioning Trump was actually referring to articles referencing Sater’s known cooperation with US intelligence agencies, the fact the government had sealed records on him they were fighting to remain sealed (and only unsealed in August of 2019, months following the publication of the Mueller report), but at the same time were indicating to Trump through their questioning Sater may have been “mafia.” Trump disagreed.
Trump made it clear he did not personally fault Sater for any of the legal challenges then facing the Trump SoHo development. By this point in time in late 2013, Donald Trump has shown a clear pattern of trusting Felix Sater. In the mid-2000s, when he asked Felix to fly separately to Russia from where he was in London to meet both Ivanka and Donald Trump, Jr. to keep them safe. Even after these articles used as exhibits had come out, Trump was not saying anything negative in regards to Sater, while at the same time remarking he wouldn’t know Felix if they were in the same room together. These two statements are definitely contradictory but Trump’s response from the get-go indicated a knowledge not of a Mafia-connected individual, but a person connected to the US government.
It is also worth noting less than two years after Trump stated this and in fall of 2015 during the election primaries, he still trusted Sater to be the intermediary with Michael Cohen to work on another effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow when there were other interested parties who had reached out to Michael Cohen. This is per Mueller Report as well as Cohen’s testimony in his transcript.
2015
ATTORNEY GENERAL NOMINEE LORETTA LYNCH
ASKED ABOUT FELIX SATER
In 2015, then-President Obama’s own Attorney General Loretta Lynch was asked about Felix Sater during her nomination hearing [p.142 of 221]. To provide some background, the two lawyers who had fought over several years to have Sater’s files unsealed by this point had in some unclear way, engaged Paul Cassell, a former Judge, to ask questions about the Sater case. This brought attention to the case and prompted Senator Orrin Hatch to pose the question and Lynch responded in the following way (below). There were specific human rights concerns in regards to restitution towards the stock scam victims and an insinuation the government was overstepping their bounds in keeping Sater’s files sealed since 1998. Keep in mind their sealing of his stock scam conviction enabled his career and employment with Bayrock most of the 2000's. While some media reporting did cover part of Lynch’s statement, they never reported her statement in its entirety.
QUESTIONS FROM SENATOR HATCH
1. On April 25, 2013, Professor Paul Cassell of the University of Utah College of Law testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution regarding implementation of crime victims’ rights statutes. These include the Mandatory Victim Restitution Act, 18 U.S.C. §3663A, and the Crime Victims Rights Act, 18 U.S.C. §3771, both of which I helped to enact. He suggested that your office had failed to follow these statutes in a sealed case involving a racketeering defendant who had cooperated with the government. Specifically, he cited documents appearing to show that your office failed to notify victims of the sentencing in that case and had arranged for the racketeer to keep the money he had stolen from victims, even though the law makes restitution mandatory. Please explain in detail how your office protected the rights of crime victims in this case and, in particular, how it complied with the mandatory restitution provisions of these two statutes.
RESPONSE: The defendant in question, Felix Sater, provided valuable and sensitive information to the government during the course of his cooperation, which began in or about December 1998. For more than 10 years, he worked with prosecutors from my Office, the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and law enforcement agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies, providing information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra. For that reason, his case was initially sealed. During my most recent tenure as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, the Office’s only activity related to this matter was to address whether certain materials should remain sealed. My Office’s position has consistently been upheld by the courts.
The initial sealing of the records related to Sater—which predated my tenure as United States Attorney—occurred by virtue of a cooperation agreement under which Sater pled guilty and agreed to serve as a government witness. In 2013, following proceedings before United States District Judge I. Leo Glasser of the Eastern District of New York, roughly three-fourths of the materials in this case were unsealed. At this point, the majority of the materials that remain sealed go to the heart of the nature of Sater’s cooperation in several highly sensitive matters. Judge Glasser has ruled that these remaining materials should remain sealed on the basis of, among other things, the “safety of persons or property” and the “integrity of government investigation and law enforcement interests.”
In addition to Judge Glasser’s 2013 ruling, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals twice rejected efforts to reconsider the decision to keep certain materials sealed in this case. The judges reviewing Judge Glasser’s order concluded that “given the extent and gravity of Sater’s cooperation,” continued sealing of select materials was appropriate. In a separate instance, the court went out of its way to warn the plaintiffs behind the lawsuit to cease any further “frivolous” motions or else risk court-imposed sanctions. Finally, just last month, the Supreme Court declined to hear any further arguments from the parties behind this lawsuit. In terms of restitution, there has been speculation that my Office pursues restitution from cooperating defendants differently than it does from other defendants. It does not. With respect to Sater’s case, the information in the record that concerns the issue of restitution remains under seal. As a matter of practice, however, the prosecutors in my Office work diligently to secure all available restitution for victims, whether the defendants convicted in their cases cooperate with the government or not. In fact, since June 2010, in EDNY cases, judges have imposed nearly two billion dollars in restitution to individual and government victims.
Loretta Lynch’s reply was worded to guide an assumption Felix Sater may have ceased cooperating with the government in late 2009 when he was finally faced sentencing for his role in the stock scam, received leniency, zero probation, and a $25,000 fine. Perhaps Glenn Simpson had read this deposition as part of his research and still considered it plausible (along with many others) Felix Sater went from cooperating with the US government to committing financial crimes with Donald Trump, but one must agree it becomes murky to consider Simpson seemingly not once considered if he might be incorrect in his analysis of Sater, or consider perhaps any acquaintances Felix had with known organized crime elements might have been in order to assist US intelligence agencies. Either way it should be crystal clear by this point in February of 2015, before Glenn Simpson had ever been hired later that fall to look into Donald Trump and said he honed in on Felix Sater, then-President Obama's own nominee for Attorney General had acknowledged the court decisions regarding keeping Sater's files sealed were upheld twice. Did Glenn Simpson miss this information or ignore it?
(Note that the Supreme Court case Loretta Lynch referenced in her statement had concluded only the prior month and they had declined to hear any further argument regarding the matter. What’s interesting, however, is these same lawyers who had been referred for criminal investigations based on their actions had written in their Supreme Court writ of certiorari--which had been publicly filed--about Sater having this connection to Semion Mogilevich. Yes, they sourced this detail from Patrick Byrne’s website article from 2013--a fact Mark Mitchell had claimed with zero sources or data to back up the claim. More on this later.)
DONALD TRUMP ANNOUNCED HIS CANDIDACY
Donald Trump announced his run for the Presidency and the general consensus at this point in time was there was no real expectation he could win.
FELIX SATER AND MICHAEL COHEN START DISCUSSING TRUMP TOWER IN MOSCOW / FUSION GPS’S SATER RESEARCH STARTED
By the fall of 2015, both Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS had started their research into Felix Sater as he related to Bayrock, Trump Org, and Donald Trump. Also, Felix Sater was chosen by Trump to pursue Trump Tower in Moscow similar to his earlier effort back in 2005, and Michael Cohen was to be the intermediary when a non-binding letter of intent (LOI) was signed by October of 2015.
TRUMP’S FELIX SATER MEDIA RISK BECOMES REALITY
In December of 2015, ABC News published an article written by Matthew Mosk and Brian Ross. During Felix Sater’s testimony, he is asked about an exchange between himself and Cohen about this particular reporting. Felix was upset about the article at the time and Cohen was telling him it would basically be a story for about a day and amount to nothing and to get over it, more or less. But in his transcript, Sater referred to Ross as the “recently suspended Brian Ross.” Felix Sater was married at the time and his children, he explained to Cohen, were very upset by the story, with the headline linking him to the mafia. When reading the article, it is understandable Felix may have been upset to see descriptions of his bar fight from when he was 25 years old splashed across the ABC News website when he was then the age of 51, married, settled down with a family, and not indicted of a single crime the prior two decades. His crime at the time was being associated with Donald Trump through the Trump SoHo development and Bayrock. Below is an excerpt of what Matthew Mosk and Brian Ross reported:
“Sater had already served prison time for a grisly 1991 assault at the El Rio Grande restaurant and bar in New York. According to court documents, Sater allegedly told a man at the bar, “I’ll kill you. I’ll rip your f****** head off and stick it down your throat.” Sater then allegedly grabbed a frozen margarita from the bar, flung the contents in the air, smashed the glass on the bar, and stabbed the man in the cheek and neck, breaking his cheek and jaw, lacerating face and neck and severing nerves. He was convicted of first degree assault.
As he began his work with Bayrock, Sater was also awaiting sentencing for his role in what authorities called a $40 million “pump and dump” stock scam. Federal prosecutors announced in a March 2, 2000 press release that Sater had pleaded guilty in the federal racketeering case, and was found to have been collaborating with members of four New York mob families. Sater and others had “planned and carried out a series of fraudulent securities schemes and then laundered tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits,” the release said.
Prosecutors said Sater and others had “enlisted the help of individuals affiliated with organized crime families of La Cosa Nostra to protect and promote their criminal activities.”
Sater avoided prison after FBI agents testified at his sentencing hearing that he had become an important government witness on both mob-related and national security matters, heralded by federal agents for his cooperation. His lawyer, Robert Wolf, told the Associated Press that some of the information about Sater in public records and lawsuits is defamatory. Wolf told the AP that credits Sater's stint as a government cooperator with potentially saving American military lives, although he did not provide details. Wolf told the AP to write about Sater's past "at your own risk" but did not cite specific concerns.”
SPOILER ALERT: FELIX SATER WORKED FOR US GOVERNMENT AND INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES FOR ALMOST TWO DECADES
To skip ahead to one of the lesser-known facts and the biggest punchlines to the Russian collusion narrative, it has become clear Felix Sater did not stop cooperating with US intelligence agencies after his late 2009 sentencing. As he stated in his testimony which has since been made public, his cooperation lasted “almost two decades.” However, both Sater and Trump endured conspiracy theories by the Left and the mainstream media all during and even after the Mueller investigation due to Felix’s alleged involvement with Russia. After this information was made public in 2020 in Sater’s opening remarks of his transcript, and confirmed Buzzfeed’s earlier reporting in August of 2019 he had cooperated “until at least late 2017,” there were really no follow-up media articles questioning how the guy now confirmed to have been cooperating with the U.S. government now for all of this time ended up in conspiracy theories about colluding in order to have Trump elected on behalf of Putin. It also raised the question of what the government reaction had been internally and privately when they realized their asset who had been described by former U.S. State Attorney Todd Kaminsky as “key to opening a hundred different doors” was caught up in a Special Counsel investigation and being insinuated by the media as being involved along with Donald Trump in Russian organized crime.
AP QUOTED TRUMP LAWYER REGARDING SATER: IF HE WAS GOOD ENOUGH TO WORK WITH GOVERNMENT, WHY NOT WITH TRUMP?
In December of 2015, an Associated Press article quoted Trump’s lawyer Alan Garten stating, “If Mr. Sater was good enough for the government to work with, I see no reason why he wasn’t good enough for Mr. Trump.” There is not a single media organization which had called into question why Donald Trump should have been smeared with Felix Sater’s criminal past from the 90’s when the US government had obviously sealed his files and criminal record for unknown reasons and it wasn’t to put Felix Sater in prison for colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin to get Trump elected into office.
Regardless, there was hardly anyone in late 2015 who was really taking Trump’s run for the presidency all that seriously, even though he was polling pretty well in the Republican party of voters. The assumption was really always Hillary Clinton would become the next President of the United States.
FELIX SATER FORMED LITCO
Felix Sater also formed a new company in 2015 named Litco which later became part of a lawsuit by BTA Bank years (March of 2019). BTA Bank is related to the major Ablyazov and Khrapunov money laundering case. Sater's lawyer negotiated the Litco terms which kept Sater's identity secret.
2016
TRUMP DID BUSINESS WITH BAYROCK & SATER DURING KNOWN YEARS SATER WAS COOPERATING WITH U.S. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES AS WELL AS SUPERVISED BY FBI AND TRUMP KNEW HE WAS CLOSE TO FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
Remarkably, even in October of 2016, Richard Behar of Forbes wrote: “It wouldn't have taken much vetting to get the scoop on Sater. FORBES retained a highly regarded global-risk-assessment firm to conduct a background check, using only what was available to it in 2007--the year the Trump-Bayrock relationship was promoted. The investigative firm (it asked not to be named for fear of political repercussions) discovered many facts that we're revealing here and others that have come out before, including felony convictions and organized crime ties. Such due diligence on Sater could have been done for $5,000.”
Yet he never once in his lengthy and detailed article mentioned or outlined the government’s lengthy fight to keep Sater’s files sealed at this point, or questioned if Sater could have still been cooperating with the FBI while employed at Bayrock. Interestingly, and perhaps more noteworthy, is Richard Behar never submitted, or at least had approved, an updated article for Forbes after more of Sater’s files were unsealed in 2019. This at least provided him with new information as to why the government had sealed Sater’s records for that length of time.
EVEN IN LATE 2016, HINTS OF KAZAKHSTAN LINK
In October of 2016, the Financial Times reported:
"One former executive at a developer that worked with Mr Trump accused him of “wilful obliviousness” to the details of his partners’ dealings. But a spokesman for the Trump Organisation said it conducted “extensive” background checks on its partners, including hiring outside investigators. One of those partners, Bayrock, has already been a source of controversy. Now the details of Bayrock’s association with the family of Viktor Khrapunov, a former Kazakh energy minister and ex-mayor of the city of Almaty, show it was connected to an alleged laundering scheme at the same time as it was collaborating with Mr Trump. Lawyers for Almaty told a US court in March that Mr Khrapunov and his family “conspired to systematically loot hundreds of millions of dollars of public assets . . . and to launder their ill-gotten gains through a complex web of bank accounts and shell companies . . . particularly in the United States.”
Three of the dozens of companies the Khrapunovs and Ablyazov were accused of using to purchase property in Trump SoHo were named Soho 3310, Soho 3311 and Soho 3203. They had been structured as limited liability companies, or LLCs. It was in April of 2013 these companies were created and within a week had purchased three apartments which corresponded with their names for a total of $3.1 million. The ultimate beneficiary behind the purchases was shown to be Elvira Kudryashova, Mr Khrapunov’s California-based daughter. Another excerpt from the article below made it unclear if Trump was one of the beneficiaries to these apartment sales:
"On the face of it, Mr Trump was not a beneficiary of the apartment sales. The vendor was another limited liability company, Bayrock/Sapir Organization LLC. It was named after the developers that jointly built Trump Soho: the Sapir Organisation, founded by Tamir Sapir, from Georgia, and Bayrock, founded by Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official. According to regulatory filings, however, Bayrock/Sapir Organization LLC had a third co-owner — the man who licensed his personal brand to the project."
Yet it was the first real indication in the media toward the end of 2016 Sater was involved in the major money laundering case associated with Muhktar Ablyazov and the Khrapunov family, Kazakhstan and BTA Bank. However, keep in mind the company, Arcanum, a private intelligence firm, had already been accused of phishing and bugging the Khrapunovs and Ablyazov in 2014, and were later accused by EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) of doing the same to their clients, this is the company Litco signed the agreement with in 2015.
During the start of Trump Tower Moscow talks.
During the 2016 election.
With BTA Bank having subsidiaries and representative offices in the following countries: Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, China, Georgia, Belarus, Armenia
2017
SPECIAL COUNSEL MUELLER INVESTIGATION
When late summer 2017 finally rolled around, Robert Mueller had already been named the Special Counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS had already pushed in all of their chips to the center of the table. They had gone “all in” on this idea Felix Sater and his ties to elements like Tevfik Arif, Fettah Tamince, Maxim Temnikov, among others, automatically meant he likely had ties to organized crime and Donald Trump could, too. Their research, their engagement with the media, their hiring of Christopher Steele and his related infamous source network and infamous “Steele dossier” had created such a turmoil factored in with the known meddling of Russians in the election, the Special Counsel investigation was kicking into full gear.
(Notably, Felix Sater is known to have been interviewed by the Special Counsel team twice in 2017, once in 2018, and another time in July of 2019. Of these four transcripts, only two have been publicly released. While they may be likely more of the same, the other two--both the april 2018 and July 2019 transcripts--have not been included in any of the document releases.)
FELIX SATER REPORTED AS COOPERATING IN BTA BANK MONEY LAUNDERING CASE
In July of 2017, the Financial Times reported Felix Sater was cooperating with a massive money laundering case into alleged billions of dollars stolen from BTA Bank by Muhktar Ablyzov and the Khrapunov family. This case was associated with Donald Trump due to this stolen money being reported as used to purchase Trump SoHo real estate. The lawyer of Boies Schiller Flexner who is representing BTA Bank, Matthew Schwartz, was quoted in the article as saying, “The alleged Kazakh launderers, not the US president or Mr Sater, are the main focus of the investigation.” The FT article had also informed readers: “Mr Sater has now agreed to co-operate with an international investigation into the alleged money-laundering network,” and sourced this information by adding it was per five people with knowledge of the matter. Sater’s cooperation was described as including “working with a team of lawyers and private investigators pursuing civil cases across three continents.” Mr. Sater, the article reported, had declined to comment.
“TEN YEARS OF CONSTANT UNDERCOVER WORK”
The following month in August of 2017, The Guardian, a UK publication, was the only one to write a quote from Dem U.S. Attorney Todd Kaminsky in a 2011 court document which had only been recently unsealed by the Judge. Kaminsky had been fighting in 2011 to make sure Sater’s files remained sealed, even though Sater had already faced sentencing late 2009 (and was presumed to be no longer cooperating with US intelligence agencies) and described Sater’s work in this way to the Judge. This quote really should have added another huge crack in the Simpson and Fusion GPS narrative. The Guardian’s article was headlined, ‘Felix Sater: the enigmatic businessman at the heart of the Trump-Russia inquiry.’ This court document has a filed date stamped on it indicating it was unsealed in July of 2016, but wasn't being quoted in any U.S. media reporting. It took a national newspaper in the UK to reference it and this was over a year later.
KAMINSKY: “Mr. Doe’s cooperation was of an extraordinary depth and breadth, almost unseen, at least in this United States Attorney’s Office. He [Sater] cooperated, unlike some cooperators who cooperate within one type of organized crime family or over one type of crime, Mr. Doe’s cooperation runs a gamut that is seldom seen. It involves violent organizations such as Al Qaeda, it involves foreign governments, it involves Russian organized crime. And, most particularly, it involves various families of La Cosa Nostra. By that specifically I mean an individual on the ruling board of the Genovese crime family, a captain in the Bonanno crime family, a soldier in the Gambino crime family, the list goes on and on.”
But though the journalists for The Guardian did review this newly unsealed document and included the quote by Kaminsky describing the level and extent of Sater’s effort for the US government to the Judge, they failed to include another Kaminsky quote in their article. He told the Judge Sater’s work was “ten years of constant undercover work.”
What this meant in reality was 1) the FBI was fully aware of where Sater had been employed for the past decade and that he was licensing the Trump brand on real estate deals from Trump Tower while acting in some form of undercover role for them, and 2) their concealment of his bar fight record and his role in the stock fraud scam is what enabled this Bayrock employment to even happen in the first place. Otherwise, Sater wouldn’t have been able to work at McDonald’s with a felony conviction.
DURING STEELE’S FBI DEBRIEFING, HE MENTIONED FELIX SATER, KAZAKHSTAN, AND CYPRUS
While this did not become public information until years later in 2020, it is now established Christopher Steele showed the FBI a PowerPoint presentation during his debriefing in September of 2017. The FBI debriefing states:
Notably, the related FBI notes about this debriefing with Steele regarding this particular part did not mention Felix Sater at all. This is what they wrote
Keep in mind it was the company Arcanum which provided Steele with this presentation "explaining the Sater connection."
“ARCANUM IS JUST ONE PIECE OF A CHESS BOARD THAT SPANS FOUR CONTINENTS”
The same month Christopher Steele was giving the FBI a presentation supplied to him by Arcanum (which had something to do with Felix Sater), the Financial Times had published an article describing the BTA case in this way:
"Those London meetings represented the early exchanges in perhaps the most remarkable battle the secrets industry has yet fought. A Financial Times investigation based on dozens of interviews and thousands of pages of court documents, leaked emails and confidential contracts exposes a saga in which Arcanum is just one piece on a chessboard that spans four continents. It reveals how the mercenaries of the information age are shaping the fate of nations."
2018
“THE ASSET”
It was when Buzzfeed News published an article entitled ‘The Asset’ in March of 2018 when it became apparent there was much more of this story remaining to be reported on. Journalists Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier inspired more questions than they did answers reviewing what they had confirmed Felix Sater’s work on behalf of the US government had entailed. They wrote:
“In the sprawling Trump-Russia investigation, one name constantly pops up: Felix Sater. In story after story, Sater is described as Donald Trump’s former business partner, a convicted stock swindler who was born in the Soviet Union, worked in Russia, tried to win Trump a deal in Moscow, and even helped broker a Ukrainian peace plan that Vladimir Putin would have loved.
Basically, he’s portrayed as something just short of a Russian spy.
Effectively, he has been a spy — but for the United States. For the first time, BuzzFeed News has verified the surprising sweep of Sater’s undercover work and many of his specific exploits. He worked as an asset for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (or DIA) and tracked Osama bin Laden. Then he worked for more than a decade for the FBI, providing intel on everything from the mob to North Korea’s drive for nuclear weapons. He still operates as a source for the bureau, according to two current FBI agents.”
Their article outlined a summary of Felix Sater’s work at least covering the approximate years of 1999-2008:
He obtained five of the personal satellite telephone numbers for Osama bin Laden before 9/11 and he helped flip the personal secretary to Mullah Omar, then the head of the Taliban and an ally of bin Laden, into a source who provided the location of al-Qaeda training camps and weapons caches.
In 2004, he persuaded a source in Russia’s foreign military intelligence to hand over the name and photographs of a North Korean military operative who was purchasing equipment to build the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Sater provided US intelligence with details about possible assassination threats against former president George W. Bush and secretary of state Colin Powell. Sater reported that jihadists were hiding in a hut outside Bagram Air Base and planned to shoot down Powell’s plane during a January 2002 visit. He later told his handlers that two female al-Qaeda members were trying to recruit an Afghan woman working in the Senate barbershop to poison President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney.
He went undercover in Cyprus and Istanbul to catch Russian and Ukrainian cyber criminals around 2005. After the FBI set him up with a fake name and background, Sater posed as a money launderer to help nab the suspects for washing funds stolen from US financial institutions.
It was shortly after the publication of this article which both Leopold and Cormier had “interviewed him [Sater] extensively, and corroborated many details of his spy-thriller account through legal documents, emails, letters, and interviews with 10 current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with his undercover work,” when Sater began to be explained as more of a Whitey Bulger-type of situation by the mainstream media. (More on this later.)
There was no real journalistic curiosity shown in the mainstream media about any of this new information, specifically related to bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and 9/11. There was no attempt to go back and place it into context of prior 9/11 research by investigators. Nor was any interest shown in the fact in 2005 (same year the media was fixated he had attempted to also build a Trump Tower in Moscow), he had also been helping the FBI hunt both Russian and Ukrainian cybercriminals. (He was also "crucial" to two international money laundering networks originating from Russia during this time but this information was not confirmed or public until his pre sentencing letter was unsealed in 2019.)
2019
MUELLER REPORTING FINDINGS
When March 22nd, 2019 rolled around, the news headlines were of the Mueller team report’s findings, conclusions, and the statement no additional indictments were anticipated was met with a mix of public emotions. Despite breathless media reporting for years and an insinuation there had been some form of collusion to help Vladimir Putin install his favored candidate, Paul Manafort charged with crimes dating back to the 2000s, and others ended up in trouble, Sater whom The Guardian had called “the heart of the Trump-Russia inquiry” was never charged with a single minor offense like lying to prosecutors, a fate met by both General Flynn and George Papadopoulos. And by this time, it was almost like the media wanted the public to forget about Felix Sater instead of asking more questions about this strange twist of events.
Almost is the operative word being used here because within three days of Mueller report summary headlines, BTA Bank had filed a lawsuit against Felix Sater which prompted new headlines unrelated to the Mueller probe. Their suit was filed on March 25, 2019 (and is still ongoing as of April, 2021). This lawsuit prompted again the conspiracy claims of BTA Bank monies allegedly stolen by Muhktar Ablyazov and Ilyas Khrapunov ended up purchasing property in Trump SoHo. Even though the public record to this point showed a lengthy fight by the US government to keep Sater’s files sealed during this same period of time, repeated media reporting he may have at some point assisted US intelligence agencies, and an unsealed court record which detailed a decade of undercover work. But no one ever said it was a narrative which was supposed to make complete sense, or any sense at all.
SATER’S PRE SENTENCING LETTERS UNSEALED AUGUST 2019
Towards the end of August in 2019, the records and presentencing letter (PSR) which had been written to the Judge (dated August 27, 2009) prior to his sentencing were made public. The details within the 5k1 letter, as well as the letter written to the judge by Leslie Caldwell confirmed the Buzzfeed News reporting from 2018, as well as providing new facts and context to the mix.
Leslie Caldwell represented Felix in 2009 for his sentencing for his role in the crimes which occurred between 1993-1996. She was a well-placed person to speak to Felix’s character and integrity at this time, given her work history and contrasted with his known cooperation details. Caldwell was recruited by then-US Attorney Robert Mueller to serve as Chief of the Criminal Division and Chief of the Securities Fraud Section of the United States Attorney's office for the Northern District of California; a role she served from 1999 to 2002. 1999 was the year immediately following Sater’s signed cooperation with the FBI in December of 1998, and the period of time describing Sater educating the FBI on how these securities fraud schemes were being organized and how organized crime was involved with Wall Street.
When she wrote her letter and was representing Felix, she had moved into private practice at the law firm, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. (She later went on to serve as the US Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division in the Obama administration between May of 2014 to January of 2017.) When this became public record in late 2019, an honest media would have reported an accusation of Mr. Sater helping Donald Trump collude with Russia to get Trump elected President therefore meant the person who had later served in Asst. Attorney General role in the Obama administration fought to lessen the sentencing of someone who actually was working in Russian interests. Which is nonsensical.
Leslie wrote in fall 2009 to the Judge in her letter:
The fact she wrote “every agent and prosecutor with whom Felix worked considered him an ‘exemplary cooperator’” should also be considered. There was no indication even after his many years at Bayrock as of this point of time in 2009, he had ever committed any criminal acts or they had ever considered him untrustworthy. There was definitely no hint they ever thought this guy would end up in a liberal-mainstream media conspiracy theory he colluded with Russia to get Donald Trump elected.
Leslie also wrote to the Judge, “Felix was more than simply honest and forthcoming--he was proactive and in fact risked his life numerous times in ways not normally seen in the criminal justice system.” She described Sater’s undercover operation in Cyprus which took place in 2005 as him meeting with “Russian criminals in Cyprus and Turkey.” She told the Judge Sater’s “...extraordinary cooperation merits extraordinary recognition by the criminal justice system and the Court.”
The most telling excerpt of Leslie’s letter is when she made it clear Felix had been under FBI supervision for nearly 11 years, which would have encompassed his entire length of time working at Bayrock. Below is what she wrote:
Leslie’s letter goes into further detail regarding Felix’s prior work on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and CIA before the FBI became involved, writing:
“Felix learned in 1998 that the FBI was looking for him in connection with an investigation into the activities of State Street. At the time, Felix was in Russia, where he was working as a consultant for AT&T. Without any assurance that his efforts would result in any leniency from the U.S. government, Felix immediately began to cooperate. Through a Russian contact, Felix arranged to meet a high ranking U.S. military intelligence officer and former military attache at the U.S. embassy in Moscow (the “Officer”). At the Officer’s request, Felix began to gather sensitive intelligence information for the U.S. government. Specifically, the Officer asked Felix to help the U.S. purchase a particular high-end anti-missile system from Russia. Through Russian contacts, Felix was able to enter covertly a closed Russian military installation, where he located the missile system, and provided details to the Officer. Again, at the Officer’s request, Felix assisted in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to repurchase U.S.-manufactured Stinger missiles from members of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Felix traveled to Central Asia and obtained the location and serial numbers of approximately 10 Stinger missiles, which he provided to U.S. authorities.”
Testament to the fact there was a lot of new information there which should have prompted an intellectually curious media, the detail in Leslie’s letter which specified “Felix delivered Bin Laden’s satellite phone numbers to the FBI in September 1998” was never placed in the context of Operation Infinite Reach which took place on August 20, 1998 where then-President Clinton ordered strikes in Khost, Afghanistan. In 2018, Buzzfeed News had already reported “...Sater … supplemented US intelligence by providing location coordinates for al-Qaeda camps that the US military ultimately bombed in Khost, Afghanistan.” The details of this timeline in the years leading up to 9/11 are still murky considering President Bill Clinton’s own remarks after leaving the Presidency. He referred to a missed opportunity in May of 1998 (when we know Sater was already in Central Asia seeking intel on Bin Laden) to capture or kill Bin Laden). This was also described further in a 2018 Newsweek article: (Note: “E” in the article excerpt below is in reference to Evgeny Shmykov, who was an ex-Senior Soviet military intelligence officer and had established a relationship with the leader of the Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Massoud, during this post Soviet-Afghan war period in time; Shmykov is also referenced in the Senate Report Volume 5.)
“One bizarre episode stood out, he claims: In the spring of 1998, he, E and about 15 or 20 ex–Soviet special forces fighters went to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic that borders Afghanistan. They had information from Hamid's sources in the Northern Alliance about bin Laden's location—a camp in the mountain range called Tora Bora. Hamid had proved his bona fides, so 'we had no reason to doubt what he was telling us,' Sater claims. And E and his men were going to try to take out bin Laden—for a price. They drove from Dushanbe across the border to Mazar-i-Sharif, where they rendezvoused with Northern Alliance fighters.
Sater claims he called Langley, saying he had real intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts and soldiers who were willing to move on the camp. What he needed to know was how much the agency would pay. 'Greed was always my go-to weapon,' Sater says. Getting E into potentially lucrative telecom deals, as well as Sater's background as a Russian-speaking former Wall Street guy, had cemented his relationship with the former military intelligence officer.
The CIA, Sater says, told him the bounty on bin Laden was $5 million. He claims he told the agency that wasn't going to cut it: 'These guys were walking into a potential bloodbath. There were about 50 of [them] total. They needed at least a million dollars each.' The CIA balked, Sater claims, and the group retreated to Dushanbe, then back to Moscow.”
This chain of events clearly showed Felix cooperating and operating in dangerous areas months before he ever signed a cooperation agreement with the FBI, or had any idea any of these efforts would help him when he returned to the States and faced the consequences for his role in the stock scam.
"NOT A JIT OR TITTLE THAT MENTIONS THE PRESIDENT IN RELATION TO SATER"
When Judge Leo Glasser in July had ordered the unsealing of these files, his "Sater Order" made it clear nothing which remained sealed had anything to do with then-President Trump.
CYPRUS REPEATS ITSELF
Sater’s 5K1 DOJ presentencing letter also referred to him having a meeting in Cyprus related to an international money laundering case originating from Russia.
What is worth mentioning here is a similarity between the case where Sater was sent undercover in 2005 by the FBI to Cyprus to infiltrate a cybercriminal ring, posing as a money launderer, to in this redacted section of the PSR, mention of a meeting in Cyprus but regarding the money laundering case. Why this continues to be a mystery as far as its significance (or lack of--it’s unclear) is because of a cryptic quote Sater gave to a reporter back in 2018 in the same Newsweek article; it referenced where Sater was in spring of 1998 when the group he was with had discussed attacking Bin Laden’s camp. Sater was asked about this cybercriminal ring from St. Petersburg and if it had anything to do with the hackers who had leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. Below is the particular quote in the context of the article. Sater doesn’t really indicate one way or the other if it is related, but there is a remark to some of the information that had been gathered was still “actionable”:
Law enforcement officials say that beginning in 2005—and continuing for several years afterward—Sater helped break up a Russian ring in St. Petersburg that was hacking into the U.S. financial system. Taddeo, the FBI agent who had summoned Sater back to the U.S. in the pump-and-dump case, worked with him on the case. The two men traveled to Limassol, Cyprus, a popular post-Soviet vacation spot for Russians. Under the FBI's watch, Sater had infiltrated the hackers, helping them launder money, and even met with the group's ringleader in Cyprus.
The irony of this operation is not lost on Sater. According to an indictment brought by Mueller, it was allegedly a St. Petersburg outfit, the Internet Research Agency, that spread ‘fake news’ in the U.S. before the 2016 election. I asked Sater whether the FBI has indicated that the cases he worked on were linked to the same group, or to the alleged Democratic National Committee hackers. ‘It could be part of the same group,’ Sater claims. ‘They've told my lawyer that some of the information we gathered is still 'actionable.’ (The Department of Justice declined to comment on the matter.)”
SATER COOPERATED “UNTIL AT LEAST LATE 2017” WENT OVER THE HEADS OF RUSSIAN-COLLUSION CONSPIRACY THEORISTS
Buzzfeed News published a follow-up article to their earlier 2018 Felix Sater reporting when Sater’s files became officially public in August of 2019. Although their article contained a pretty important detail and fact of Sater’s cooperation lasting “until at least late 2017,” the same media who had in the past insinuated he may have helped Russia and Vladimir Putin install Donald Trump as President were oddly quiet.
“The government makes clear that Sater was not exaggerating about his extensive cooperation with US agencies, which began before his involvement in real estate development with the Trump Organization and continued, according to Sater and law enforcement sources, until at least late 2017.”
While this was once again a damaging blow to the Russian collusion narrative, it was only compounded by what Sater stated in an interview he had the same day the files were made available to journalists and the public. Appearing on Skullduggery with Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Felix said “Donald knew. I lightly briefed him in the 2000’s. In 2015 I gave him a very detailed letter of everything I did. A letter from my attorney to his attorney.”
Within months of the Mueller Report not resulting in indicting Felix Sater for a single lie, there was confirmation not only was Felix still cooperating with the U.S. government before he started Trump Tower Moscow talks, during Trump Tower Moscow talks and the 2016 election, and after the election and when the scandal of the General Flynn-linked Ukrainian peace plan media became a thing; but also Donald Trump knew back in 2015 to a detailed level the work Felix had done for the U.S. government, FBI, intelligence agencies, etc. Yet there are still Americans today who would try to convince you Donald Trump committed crimes during the 2016 election and/or with Felix Sater. Well, then one is required to explain why the Mueller team didn’t see this as reality, and Sater even had history with multiple members of the Mueller team. There is nothing regarding these conspiracy theories which made sense.
SATER 2019 TESTIMONY WENT FROM PUBLIC TO PRIVATE
On the first day of March in 2019, Congressman Adam Schiff who had claimed to have this damning evidence of Russian collusion which never amounted to anything, informed reporters Felix Sater would be testifying publicly to the American public. National news reported Schiff had cautioned Sater's hearing would “not likely be the spectacle that Cohen's public hearing” had been only a day earlier, when Cohen had testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
By the time the Mueller Report was released and Felix’s testimony had been rescheduled twice (second time because he was sick and overslept), Politico was reporting [June of 2019] Sater’s testimony had been changed to private.
“Lawmakers had initially said the interview — which is expected to focus on the negotiations surrounding the failed Moscow real estate project — would be public. But the panel decided to make it private because the subjects are extremely sensitive and concern national security issues, including Sater’s previous work as an undercover asset for the Defense Intelligence Agency on Russia issues, said a person familiar with the matter.”
Politico reported Congressman Adam Schiff declined to comment. It was never made clear, nor was there follow-up reporting as to how or why Sater’s prior work for the DIA on “Russia issues” might necessitate a need for his testimony to be changed to private. His involvement in Trump Tower Moscow, the Bayrock company; it’s hard to determine what, if anything, it had to do with this work with the DIA regarding Russia.
EX-OVERSTOCK CEO PATRICK BYRNE WALKED BACK FELIX SATER DEATH THREAT CLAIM
In August of 2019, Patrick Byrne publicly stated he didn't believe Felix Sater was behind the death threat he said was made against him in the 2000s, or basically he liked him enough not to care. Here is a portion of what he wrote:
"Given the rather significant attention this site is now getting, Felix and an investigative journalist named Seth Hettena have been in touch on the subject. They are correct, that I certainly owe Felix a duty to print his denial that he was involved. So here it is:
Felix Sater denies being involved in any threat from Russian OC against me. He also denies that he has ever known Semion Mogilevich or had any connection to him in any way.
This same timeframe, Byrne wrote he was cooperating with the FBI during the 2000s, during the same years the alleged death threat from Sater took place. The years he alluded to helping the FBI were 2005-2009.
"... I swam around on Wall Street 2005-2008 drawing fire from the Establishment, in part so that the FBI and I could watch who was going after me, and put together the hedge funds, regulators, journalists, and maybe even parts of the government, who seemed to be in cahoots.
In the autumn of 2009, I was called one morning by a Man in Black, who said words I will treasure to my dying day: “Patrick, the Bureau wishes to thank you for what you have done. It is almost unprecedented. You are going to see handcuffs come out this week. You need to live the rest of your life knowing that everyone you see us arrest suspects your fingerprints are on his problems.”
2020
DNI RATCLIFFE RELEASED MUELLER TRANSCRIPTS
In May of 2020, Sater’s Mueller transcript was made public along with 52 others. Within it, each question posed to him about emails between himself and Michael Cohen regarding Trump Tower Moscow were answered. He explained how Tevfik Arif’s connections provided the pull to get Ivanka to sit in Putin’s chair in 2006. The quote from within his transcript where he admits to cooperating with the government for another decade following his 2009 sentencing fell to the sound of crickets within the mainstream media. In Sater’s opening remarks, he stated the following:
SENATE REPORT VOLUME 5 RELEASED
When the Senate Report was published in 2020, everything it reported now needed to be placed into its proper context. But this was not what happened.
As the Report stated, “In September 2015, Trump authorized Cohen to pursue the Sater-related deal. Cohen, through Sater, began negotiations with a Russia-based developer, Andrey Rozov and Rozov's company, LC. Expert. By late October 2015, Sater, Cohen, and LC. Expert had agreed on terms for a detailed Letter of Intent (LOI) .. The LOI laid out the main terms of a licensing deal that promised to provide the Trump Organization millions of dollars upon the signing of a deal, and hundreds of millions of dollars if the project advanced to completion. By early November 2015, Trump and Rozov co-signed the LOI.” This meant either Felix Sater was starting an effort to build in Moscow, the same effort he had in 2005 with Bayrock while cooperating with U.S. intelligence agencies and FBI, without informing them in late 2015. Or U.S. intelligence agencies and/or the FBI were aware early on of these efforts between their asset, Felix Sater, Cohen and the Trump Org to license the Trump brand on another Tower development in Moscow during the 2016 election. It really doesn’t seem likely Sater was trying to commit crimes with the guy running for President of the United States during a tumultuous and highly-divisive political election, especially colluding with someone like the Russian President Vladimir Putin in order to accomplish it and while he was still confirmed to be cooperating with our own government.
The Senate Report also added, “Sater began using his existing network, largely in Russia, to establish a network of contacts including intelligence officers, military operatives, and personnel at military research facilities in various countries. Sater explained that he was in contact with "mostly GRU [Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate] guys,” and became the first Russia-associated Congress investigational report to admit finally in the middle of 2020, “Over the course of approximately a decade, Sater was a
prolific cooperator for the U.S. Government, providing information on ‘the most elusive and dangerous’ individuals of interest to U.S. law enforcement. Sater also served as a source of ‘valuable foreign intelligence’ in a variety of national security areas, and his cooperation had revealed ‘a number of connections and accesses related to high level national security information.‘ Even though for the prior several years Felix Sater had been portrayed as an individual linked to Putin who might have worked to get Trump elected, the Senate Report was also clear when it wrote, “Sater provided information about Russian organized crime leaders in Russia, including their identities, roles, and U.S.-based operations. He also participated in FBI undercover operations in Cyprus and Turkey targeting Russian criminals.”
STEELE’S PRIMARY SUBSOURCE WAS NEVER ASKED ABOUT FELIX SATER
In July of 2020, the written notes of the discussion the FBI had held with Steele’s primary subsource, Igor Dashenko in February of 2017 were released to the public. It should be noted there is no reference in these over-fifty pages to Steele’s primary subsource (now known to be Igor Danchenko) mentioning Felix Sater, or anything at all concerning Kazakhstan or Cyprus. When Steele brought this up months later in his own debriefing with the FBI in 2017, it does not appear to have had anything to do with the infamous Steele dossier or Danchenko's source network. It remains unclear why Steele mentioned a "corrupt American official" or DOJ needing to be involved.
DAILY BEAST: "THE KLEPTOCRATS' MONEY-LAUNDERING MIDDLEMAN"
In September of 2020, the less-than-reputable Daily Beast had to get another smack in, alleging Felix Sater as a "fraudster" for "powerful, corrupt rulers the world over." This is worth noting here because their whole article is framed as if the US government intelligence agencies were utilizing a guy skilled in money laundering, securities fraud, and keeping most of his files sealed between 1998-2019, only to be surprised when he was found to be working with Khrapunovs and Ablyazov as far back as 2007, when hello, he wasn't even sentenced yet for the 90s stock scam at this point. That occurred two years later in late 2009.
There was a complaint filed against Sater (and Daniel Ridloff) in 2013 regarding the money they allegedly kept from the Ohio shopping mall deal; they were permitted to keep around half of it, or over $20 million. The terms of the settlement were secret. In fall 2020, this is how Daily Beast portrayed Ilyas Khrapunov's account of what took place in 2013 leading up to that suit:
"In Geneva, Iliyas received a message from Felix asking him to go to a serviced office building for a telecall. When Felix's face appeared on the screen, Iliyas thought he looked agitated. Then Felix announced: 'I know about the Kazakh stuff.' By this he meant that he knew where Iliyas' money was coming from: his wife's father, Mukhtar Ablyazov, a fugitive certified by London courts as a thief who had stolen billions.
'I'll keep the money safe,' Felix went on.
Iliyas asked him to return the money. Yes, he had once enjoyed a leg-up from Ablyazov. After his wedding to Ablyazov's daughter Madina, his mother Leila had given him $10 milion to get started in real estate and had persuaded his new father-in-law to do the same. But IIliyas maintained that the money from Ablyazov had been a loan, and that he had had to give it back when the Kazakh ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev seized Ablyazov's bank, BTA, in 2009. The money Felix had been investing for Iliyas in the U.S. did belong to someone who required discretion, but it was not, Iliyas insisted, Ablyazov. It was Gennady Petelin, a wealthy Russian reformer who had joined the opposition, been arrested, and fled, and whose son had married Iliyas' sister.
It's hard to imagine Felix Sater not knowing about the "Kazakh stuff" at this point in August 2013 considering the extradition of Mukhtar Ablyazov's wife and young daughter made world news around the time [Washington Post, July 29, 2013]. However, due to the fact Khrapunov has been shown himself to be contradictory on other subjects in various media reporting, his account of what took place should be considered through skeptical eyes.
“IF YOU'RE TRYING TO DO SOMETHING ILLEGAL AND OBSCURE SOMETHING, YOU DON'T DO IT THROUGH YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS.”
Buzzfeed News followed up in October of 2020 reporting on flagged transactions by six banks to the US Treasury over four years as part of their FinCEN series. The transactions exceeded $100 million and occurred between 2013-2017. Sater told them "no one from the FBI ever questioned him about his financial dealings."
For additional background and context on the BTA Bank case involving Ablyazov, Bloomberg reported in 2017, "While at BTA Bank, Ablyazov sold billions of dollars of bonds and borrowed from banks including Credit Suisse Group AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Then he turned around and used a unit inside the bank called UKB6 to lend money to investment projects throughout the former Soviet bloc, according to judgments entered by U.K. courts." The UK judges had concluded the borrowers were shell companies Ablyazov controlled. Ablyazov was accused of siphoning so much capital out of BtA Bank that "by the time the global financial crisis struck in 2008, the lender was crippled." The Kazakhstan government had nationalized the bank by February 2009, and later "defaulted on more than $12 million in debt."
ABLYAZOV ASSETS FROZEN
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, on November 13, 2020, the UK courts, then over a decade later, finally froze what was reported as $5 billion in assets linked to prominent Kazakh businessmen. In a freeze described as "among the biggest granted by the court," it included "stakes in luxury hotels, cash in bank accounts in half a dozen countries and a Burger King franchise." The $5 billion asset freeze was issued "based on a petition from Kazakhstan’s state-owned BTA Bank, which has alleged for years that its former bank chairman stole more than $6 billion and laundered it through shell companies around the world."
FOUR MAIN POINTS
There are four main points in which Sater ended up embroiled in the Mueller investigation:
1) his employer, Bayrock’s, established history of licensing deals with the Trump Organization during the 2000s, as well as Sater’s exclusive and initial attempt in 2005 to build a Trump Tower in Russia with Bayrock, Tevfik Arif’s company
2) Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS, in his very first weekend of researching Donald Trump for his client, zeroed in on Sater’s and Bayrock’s alleged ties to Russian organized crime as his first reason to research Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, linked Felix to Semyon Mogilevich in his testimony, and had hired Christopher Steele of the company Orbis, who later in 2017 showed the FBI a presentation from a company named Arcanum regarding Sater
Nellie Ohr tracking Sater among dozens of others names in a spreadsheet, with her outreach to Fusion GPS for employment coinciding with same month Sater and Cohen began Trump Tower Moscow discussions (Sept 2015)
3) Sater’s Trump Tower Moscow attempt with Michael Cohen which included a signed non-binding letter of intent by Donald Trump
4) Felix’s odd and small role in the strange Ukrainian peace plan story from early in 2017 which involved Michael Cohen and Andrii Artemenko, and loosely General Michael Flynn.
1. BAYROCK AND TEVFIK ARIF
As part of Bayrock's work, they were trying to close real estate deals which licensed the Trump brand. It is also the company Felix began working with closely following the start of his FBI cooperation. This kind of real estate branding was a fairly new concept and Felix Sater explained in his interview with journalism students at Berkeley when asked about his employment and how he made money, “Nobody has branded real estate. You have branded vodka, you have branded jeans, you have branded clothes, you have branded everything. He figured out how to brand a piece of real estate and I wanted to get into real estate … he was basically selling franchises … he had a famous name that I knew I could resell, basically.” A few minutes earlier in the interview, one of the journalism students had asked him about how he earned his income and he stated, “I’m a real estate developer. I make most of my money from real estate, other businesses that I’m involved with. That’s where I earn my living.” One of the students then followed up and asked, “But the fight and the stock scam didn’t prevent you from being active as a businessman, it didn’t place limitations on you?” to which Felix replied, “It placed extreme limitations on me but because I was cooperating with the government for over a decade, my stock conviction was sealed and nobody knew about it. So I continued working without being in the front of these businesses.”
While it has never been made apparent in mainstream media news articles regarding Bayrock and Sater during the timeframe of the Mueller investigation, the FBI had to have been aware Sater was employed at Bayrock during these years, who he was working with, what deals he had worked on, and the fact his company was proposing and selling Trump-licensed real estate deals around the world.
The Mueller Report never once mentioned Bayrock or Tevfik Arif. NPR appears now to have been incorrect in their reporting which had stated the scope of the Mueller Russian election interference investigation included Trump SoHo. However, in the Senate Report Volume 5, Bayrock and Arif were mentioned, detailing “Sater first began working with the Trump Organization in the early 2000s while he was an executive at Bayrock, a New York-based real estate and development company. Sater managed Bayrock; his partner was Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet government trade official. Arif has connections to Russia and Turkey, and information obtained by the Committee suggests he was involved in Russian organized crime, money laundering, and human trafficking dating back to at least 2000.” The Report also stated “Sater, Arif’s longtime business partner, suggested to the Committee that he believed Arif engaged in human trafficking in the United States and elsewhere. According to Sater, Arif brought ‘thousands’ of women into the United States, primarily from Ukraine.”
The Senate Report linked to a Black Sea article entitled ‘World leaders, mobsters, smog and mirrors’ in a footnote related to Arif, an article which was published in late December of 2016. Within this article, a raid on a yacht in 2010 (after Sater had already left Bayrock) resulted in the discovery of a “cabal of international businessmen, mostly from Kazakhstan,” well-known names including the “Kazakh Trio”: Alexander Mashkevich, Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov, on board being entertained by models from Russia and Ukraine. The article stated the three men, “none of whom are from Kazakhstan, own the multi-billion Eurasian Natural Resources Company, a mining conglomerate with close ties to the President Nursultan Nazarbayev.” Also on the yacht was the Russian-Chechen tycoon, Musa Bazhaev, who is head of Alliance Group in Russia. His Chechen family is reported as being “linked to the mafia wars of the early 90s” when criminal groups were fighting to control the region’s natural resources and “used forged bank papers to embezzle billions through the post-soviet financial system.” Black Sea’s reporting also indicated none of the Kazakh Trio or Bazhaev were ever questioned by the Turkish authorities even though they were in attendance. While charges were made against Arif for sex trafficking in 2010, the charges were later dropped in 2011.
Not a single media article ever posited the question of why the U.S. government fought so long and hard to keep Felix Sater’s files relating to his cooperation sealed, or how Felix’s cooperation in 2011 being described as “ten years of constant undercover work” might relate to his employment with Bayrock and Felix’s ties to Tevfik Arif, and his work for Bayrock between 1999-2009. Or how potentially Arif, linked to Russian organized crime even back in 2000, and Sater’s work with him all of the years of the government kept his files sealed and Sater’s being under FBI supervision for at least 11 years might all relate to each other. Even though it took over a decade for Felix Sater to be sentenced in 2009 for his role in the stock fraud scam which occurred between 1993-1996, the fight by lawyers to have Sater’s files unsealed by the Court went on from 2010 for several years, until finally in August of 2019 when Sater’s presentencing report (PSR) among other files were unsealed.
While each article which indicated Felix Sater’s known cooperation with US intelligence agencies and the FBI in relation to the attempted recovery of Stinger missiles or hunting for Al Qaeda, all which referred to Bayrock being somehow corrupt gave an impression the FBI were unaware of who employed him between the years of 2000 to late 2009 when he was finally sentenced. Or led the reader to form an impression the FBI would knowingly look the other way and ignore Sater working for a company laundering Russian money, while it’s now confirmed he was during those same years hunting people laundering money in international networks originating from Russia. What they never regularly did is call into question who managed Bayrock, even though many of these older court transcripts have now been public for years.
When Sater was asked in a 2010 deposition about who managed Bayrock, this was only months following his 2009 sentencing for the stock fraud scam when he received a $25,000 fine, zero probation and zero restitution for unnamed victims.
Q. Were you the chief operating officer?
A. Depends on how you look at it.
Q. Was there a chief operating officer at Bayrock?
A. Officially? I don’t know if there was.
Q. Who was Tevfik Arif? Was he your boss?
He was the boss. He was the boss of all bosses.
Q. Would you consider him to be the chief operating officer at Bayrock?
A. No.
Q. Was there a chief operating officer at Bayrock?
A. Depends on how you look at it.
Q. How do you look at it?
A. Depends on the time frame we are talking about.
Q. Was there ever a time frame where there was a chief operating officer?
A. Actual position, with a business card and title or de facto chief operating officer because sometimes somebody is the chief operating officer without having that title?
Note Felix almost sardonically called Tevfik “the boss of all bosses.” It’s unclear if given all of this in context, this was a mafia reference. Or Sater actually meant Bayrock had a bunch of bosses, but Tevfik was the ultimate boss.
Sater was introduced through Tevfik Arif to owners of other companies he ended up consulting for, at least from 2005 to 2010: the Rixos Hotels chain, Sembol Construction, and Mirax Group (2008-2010). The owner of both is Fettah Tamince, another name which had been listed on Nellie Ohr’s spreadsheet when Fusion GPS was employing her as a consultant. She was researching all of their names and known associates.
While throughout 2017, 2018, and much of 2019 the majority of the media reporting on Felix Sater cast shade on his many ties to individuals associated with Bayrock, Tevfik Arif, Tamir Sapir, among others, there was never any explanation provided for the reason the government had kept his criminal past sealed for so many years and even well past his sentencing. Nor was it highlighted when the U.S. government covered up the evidence of his criminal past, it enabled him to be employed at the Bayrock organization the media insinuated as being an alleged front for Russian money laundering. If it had been, why didn't the FBI ever bring charges? Leslie Caldwell's letter made it clear he had been under FBI supervision during all of the years working at Bayrock.
2. GLENN SIMPSON AND A PERJURY ACCUSATION
When Glenn Simpson testified before the House Intelligence Committee regarding the research work he was hired to do for two different clients during the 2016 election, he noted Felix Sater was the first person in Trump’s network to raise his eyebrows because he appeared tied to Russian organized crime.
Mr. Simpson stated:
“In the early -- the very first weekend that I started boning up on Donald Trump, you know, I found various references to him having connections to Italian organized crime and later to a Russian organized crime figure Felix Sater, S-A-T-E-R. It wasn’t hard to find, not any great achievement, it was in the New York Times, but as someone who has done a lot of Russian organized crime investigations as a journalist originally that caught my attention and became something that, you know, I focused on while other people looked at other things.
So from the very beginning of this organized crime was -- Russian organized crime was a focus of interest. I guess I should just repeat, you know, this is a subject that I covered extensively at the Wall Street Journal. I wrote a series of front-page articles about various corrupt politicians from Russia, oligarchs, and one of the things that I wrote about was the connections between western politicians and Russian business figures. So, you know, I was sort of an amateur student of the subject and I had written about some of these same Russian crime figures, you know, years earlier in the U.S. and various frauds and things they were involved in.
As it happens, Felix Sater was, you know, connected to the same Russian crime family that was at issue in the Prevezon case, which is the dominant Russian crime family in Russia and has a robust U.S. presence and is involved in a lot of crime and criminal activity in the United States and for many years was the -- the leader of this family was on the FBI most wanted list and lives openly in Moscow as a fugitive from U.S. law for a very elaborate stock fraud.
Q. Who is that individual and family?
A. The first name is Semyon, S-E-M-Y-O-N, the last name is Mogilevich, M-O-G-I-L-E-V-I-C-H.
Simpson never acknowledged in his testimony any awareness of Sater’s history of the government sealing his records, but repeatedly indicated his fixation on Russian organized crime stories and associated Felix with the Mogilevich crime family and a Prevezon case without a clear line of how he formed these conclusions.
The month before most of the remaining Sater files had been unsealed, Seth Hettena wrote an article, ‘Time to Put a Lie about Felix Sater to Rest.’ He had been searching for the origin of the claim of the tie between Sater and Semion Mogilevich. Below is an excerpt:
“In writing my book, Trump/Russia, I spent quite a bit of time looking for evidence of the Sater-Mogilevich connection. In the end, I concluded that it just wasn’t there. To paraphrase Robert Mueller, if I had found evidence that Sater was connected to Mogilevich, I would so state.
There’s no doubt Sater did have ties to Russian organized crime. Slater's father, Michael Sheferfofsky, was a Russian gangster who pleaded guilty in 2000 to two counts of extortion for shaking down businesses in Brooklyn.
But there’s no mention of Mogilevich in Sherorfksy’s criminal file.
So where does this claim come from?
The Sater-Mogilevich link is found in a Supreme Court petition for a writ of certiorari in Palmer v John Doe. 14-676.
This sounds like credible evidence. It’s convinced many people, including me, as my 2017 blog post shows.
The thing is it’s bullshit. Yes, I know. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
While reporting my book, Trump/Russia, I tried to get to the bottom of this. I asked Richard Lerner, the attorney who wrote the Supreme Court petition, how he learned about the Sater-Mogilevich connection.
He somewhat sheepishly admitted that it comes from a website called Deep Capture.
This is where things get weird.
Deep Capture was written by Mark Mitchell, a former editor at Columbia Journalism Review, to “expose the ‘deep capture’ of American institutions by powerful and corrupt financial interests.”
Seth Hettena had changed his tune by 2019, but in 2017--as he even admitted--he was taken in by this detail in the Supreme Court writ and had been fooled. There’s no evidence Mitchell provided on Byrne’s Deep Capture website, or anywhere else, to indicate Felix Sater was ever directly or indirectly associated in any way to Mogilevich. Yet Glenn Simpson testified Felix Sater was linked to Mogilevich and his transcript was made public in early 2018 by Senator Diane Feinstein, further exacerbating this issue of bad data floating around America during this time of Russian collusion hysteria. Feinstein released his transcript in January of 2018 and Felix Sater’s transcript wasn’t made public until the middle of 2020. In July of 2019 when Felix Sater walked out with his lawyer during a break in his private testimony, he told waiting and frenzied reporters Glenn Simpson committed perjury in his testimony regarding him. Video of this exchange can be viewed here.
Notably and interestingly, by the time Glenn Simpson and Peter Frisch published their book, ‘Crime in Progress’ in 2019, there was only one reference made to Mogilevich in it. It was not in relation to Felix Sater. It was in reference to Christopher Steele working with the FBI regarding Mogilevich.
Book excerpt --
“In 2011, he contacted Michael Gaeta, an FBI agent he met at a conference in 2009, who headed the Bureau’s Eurasian Joint Organized Crime Squad. Later, he would work with Gaeta on one of the FBI’s longest-running and highest-priority cases: the hunt for fugitive Russian mafia don Semion Mogilevich whom Orbis eventually established was hiding out in a small village north of Moscow under Russian government protection.”
When Sater spoke to reporters, he mentioned Glenn Simpson working on behalf of Prevezon’s lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Which is odd given the fact Fusion GPS was hired by BakerHostetler, and Simpson’s company wasn’t directly hired or working for Prevezon. What makes this more curious is a Business Insider article which quoted Bill Browder saying, “Glenn Simpson admits in his testimony to a number of facts that show he was part of the Russian anti Magnitsky lobbying campaign in D.C. that were summarized in our DOJ criminal complaint about his conduct filed in 2016." According to a letter Senator Chuck Grassley wrote to Dana Boente at the DOJ:
“In July of 2016, Mr. William Browder filed a formal FARA complaint with the Justice Department regarding Fusion GPS, Rinat Akhmetshin, and their associates. His complaint alleged that lobbyists working for Russian interests in a campaign to oppose the pending Global Magnitsky Act failed to register under FARA and the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. The Committee needs to understand what actions the Justice Department has taken in response to the information in Mr. Browder’s complaint. The issue is of particular concern to the Committee given that when Fusion GPS reportedly was acting as an unregistered agent of Russian interests, it appears to have been simultaneously overseeing the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier of allegations of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.”
This letter explained in 2013 the DOJ had initiated a civil asset forfeiture case against Prevezon Holdings and “argued that his company had received millions of the laundered $ 230 million from the conspiracy Mr. Magnitsky discovered, and had used it to purchase real estate in New York.” According to press accounts and Browder’s FARA complaint, “Prevezon Holdings and the Russian government began a lobbying campaign purportedly designed to try to: repeal the Magnitsky Act; remove the name “Magnitsky” from the Global Magnitsky Act and delay its progress; and cast doubt on the Justice Department’s version of events regarding the corporate identity theft of Hermitage’s companies, the fraudulently obtained $230 million, and the death of Mr. Magnitsky.”
The humor involved in the chain of those events is too entertaining again not to high-level summarize again for any slower people:
Felix Sater had a secret plea deal agreement with the U.S. government which had been sealed since 1998
Glenn Simpson had open source record information and media reporting suggesting Sater may have been working for U.S. intelligence agencies and cooperating with the FBI (and this cooperation would have taken place when Robert Mueller was Director of the FBI)
Glenn Simpson decided it was in his best interest to tell the Intelligence Committee Sater was tied to Russian organized crime, specifically Semion Mogilevich
Sater was never indicted for a single thing
Sater accused Simpson of perjury
Glenn Simpson looks like a failure
Who predicted that outcome coming almost in slow-motion?
What exactly did he expect to happen?
Hilarious.
Whether or not Sater has a link to Mogilevich, or knows of people above his level, isn't even the point. It's this former Wall Street journalist turned corporate researcher-for-hire thinking he's some kind of Russian expert and the government was going to tell him, "yeah, we sealed the files of this guy the FBI has had on their Most Wanted List for over a decade who just happened to be linked to him. Thanks for letting us know."
3. TRUMP TOWER MOSCOW
The Trump Tower Moscow, after critical scrutiny, appears to have been more hype by the mainstream media than an actual serious attempt. A review of all transcripts in comparison to the Mueller Report and later Senate Report Volume 5 provides some interesting details, especially when placed into the context of what is now known and established facts regarding Felix Sater’s timeline with US intelligence agencies. To save space, only a few of these points will be outlined below. Covering all of it would make this section way too long.
SATER MET ROZOV WHEN HE WAS STILL WORKING “CONSTANT” UNDERCOVER, PER U.S. ATTORNEY IN 2011
The Mueller Report reads, “Sater contacted Cohen on behalf of I.C Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007,” which means Felix met Rozov while he was also consulting for Rixos Hotels chain, Sembol Construction, and Miraz Group, as well as still working at Bayrock. (Sater was not sentenced until late 2009.)
Rozov made clear in his FBI 302 he would have been the one responsible for finding the necessary land in Russia, as well as the financing. In February of 2018, he had told the FBI, “The Trump Tower Moscow project was just a business idea, it never made it to the financing, location identification, design, or construction phases.“ If the project had ever come to fruition, Rozov would have been the developer with the Trump Org simply licensing its brand to Rozov’s company, I.C. Expert.
When the 302s, or interview notes of the Mueller investigation were made public and referring to Felix Sater, there were redactions in areas which made all of this more confusing. Many on the left who had actually read any of the 302 materials would point to areas like this where Steve Bannon considered it to be a “big reveal” there was “a signed term sheet in December 2015 on Trump Tower Moscow” [Steve Bannon 302].
This is contrasted with Michael Cohen’s 302 which explained Trump felt he was being truthful when he said he had no deals in Russia because he didn’t consider it to be a deal. As a legal site explained, a non-binding letter-of-intent or signed term sheet could only ever be considered legally binding when the material terms of the agreement have been met. In the case of the Trump Tower Moscow, there was no defined land or established financing, and no legal reason for Trump to consider this to be a viable deal which would be coming to fruition even if he had lost the election. The talks weren’t ever getting much traction. The letter of intent made clear it was only “intended to facilitate further discussions between the Parties and solely represents the Parties’ current intention to negotiate for and attempt to enter into a mutually acceptable agreement.”
Another odd point of note regarding Trump Tower Moscow was how the Genbank invitation was described in the Mueller Report as “purported,” calling into question if it was in fact even a legitimate bank invitation from this sanctioned bank. Using purported in a sentence usually implies a form of deceit. According to any consulted dictionary, this word being used in the Mueller Report’s context would mean “appearing or stated to be true, though not necessarily so; alleged" or to “appear or claim to be or do something, especially falsely; profess.” This should have prompted the question if the Genbank invitation was not genuine, who was it meant to deceive, and why?
Below is how it was written about in the later Senate Report:
Where this becomes more confusing is another Russian figure connected to Felix was Evgeny Dvoskin, also according to the Senate Report Volume 5, an individual connected to Genbank. According to a footnote on page 438, “...Dvoskin was a key player in the money laundering market and had close ties to the FSB,” and adding the fact, “Dvoskin’s GenBank opened its first branch in Crimea two weeks after Russia’s 2014 invasion and rapidly expanded to 175 branch locations to become one of the largest banks in the region.”
When author Catherine Belton published her book, Putin’s People, she referenced a quote given to her by Felix Sater regarding Dvoskin and alleged “Russian mobster” Semion Mogilevich. Belton wrote Felix told her, “I am telling you it is complete and utter bullshit. It’s a complete fucking lie. I wouldn’t know him if he came and sat down next to us.” Yet she said he also added “Any claim I’m associated with Mogilevich is kind of insulting. I am active on a much higher level than him,” and that he also indicated he and Dvoskin had grown up together in the same block in Brighton Beach. Sater is quoted in the book as saying he [Dvoskin] “‘wouldn’t even piss on Mogilevich if he was on fire’. He told of how Dvoskin had worked closely with Ded Hasan, another powerful Russian mobster, who was later shot dead in a Moscow restaurant. When I naively asked if he hadn’t been worried when he best friend was doing business with Ded Hasan, Sater snorted scornfully. ‘Look at what happened to Ded Hasan. They were the ones who should have been worried doing business with [Dvoskin].’”
Belton wrote in her book of a network Trump had formed which predated even Sater entering his orbit in 2000 or 2001. “The relationship Tchigirlnsky began to forge with Trump that night would form the roots of a network of Russian intelligence operatives, tycoons and organized crime associates that has orbited Trump almost ever since. The people tied to Tchigirlnsky included a Georgian, Tamir Sapir, his business partner Sam Kislin, and an Azeri, Aras Agalarov, who set up some of the first Soviet-American joint ventures and US trading operations before the Soviet fall. They were part of an interconnecting web of figures that became testimony to the enduring power of the black-cash networks created in the final years of the Communist regime.”
It’s important to recognize when reading any media reporting or even book, as in this case, is to view it with a critical eye. Even if something is being reported to be an actual truth doesn’t necessarily mean it is the case. How in the world could any of this then make any form of logical sense? One would need to assume the U.S. government had their own “extraordinary” asset of almost two decades in Trump’s orbit as well as Arif’s, Tamir Sapir, and these so-called “black-cash networks” were moving black money around of the Russian criminal variety while no one did anything about it, and then nothing was said or done about it when he became President of the United States for four entire years. How should or could this remotely be the truth if American taxpayers are funding the largest intelligence apparatus in the world?
As an aside and to make another point, Belton also wrote the following in her book regarding Evgeny Dvoskin: he became “the driving force behind many of the biggest money laundering schemes, the shadow banker who became known as the king of Russian black cash” and that through Ivan Tkachev, who was the head of the Directorate K, Dvoskin had “powerful protection.” Belton wrote the Directorate K “was the department supposedly charged with investigating economic crimes, but in essence it did almost the opposite of that: it oversaw and controlled Russia’s biggest money-laundering channels into the West.” She explained her sources to be two senior Russian bankers “with direct knowledge of the matter.”
(Note: Carter Page tied into the Russia collusion narrative and was involved in the Evgeny Buryakov case, whose indictment referenced Directorate K. The comment was in regard to the spies arrested in 2010 during the Obama-Biden administration.)
PURPORTED GENBANK INVITATION
When Sater provided a GenBank invitation to Cohen which doesn’t appear to have been authentic, this was when GenBank, connected to Dvoskin, had only been days earlier sanctioned by the U.S. government. It’s never been clear why Sater felt the need for “scorched earth” related to this attempt at a deal.
After all, according to Rozov’s statement in his 302 he had informed the FBI Sater “did not have land, nor financing lined up” and that he wouldn’t have relied on Sater to, either.
It remains unclear why Rozov felt Sater didn’t take any action towards moving the project along after the LOI was signed, but Sater did make several calls and go on a trip to connect with someone who was associated with the Rotenberg brothers. They had also been sanctioned by the U.S. government. Below is how Sater answered questions regarding sanctions in his transcript.
Notably, it’s unclear if sanctions would have actually applied in a scenario like this one. It was a Russian company who would have been doing the developing and financing, and only purchasing the licensing of a brand from the Trump Organization. Sater would have been paid a percentage from the Russian company. If it was a Russian company who would have sought financing from Russian banks for the development, would sanctions have mattered?
There was reference in the Senate Report to Rozov perhaps having “at least some ties to individuals associated with Russian influence operations,” and listed the name Stalbek Mishakov as an associate of Rozov’s with “significant ties to Oleg Deripaska.”
It is also unclear why Rozov wanted to meet with Trump and there is no record of Sater ever asking Cohen if this was possible.
All of this was going on at the same time in 2015 either before or during Trump Tower Moscow talks:
Bruce Ohr and Christopher Steele were involved in efforts to cultivate Oleg Deripaska into an asset between 2014-2016 [NYTimes, Sept, 2018]
Sater, after having not reached out to Rozov recently, contacted him out of the blue regarding a potential deal to be made in Moscow; Rozov, who was associated through Mishakov with Deripaska
BTA Bank case was involving journalists, hackers, and lobbyists and Felix Sater was immersed in it
Fusion GPS was already investigating Felix Sater in the fall of 2015
Biden family was being targeted by a Russian influence campaign between 2014-2020 while Hunter Biden sat on the board of a reportedly corrupt gas company in Ukraine named Burisma [per ODNI Report, 2020 election interference]
4. UKRAINE-RUSSIA PEACE PLAN
Despite crazy pundits on entertainment news television having a complete meltdown over the scribbled bullet points which made up the Ukraine peace plan Artemenko gave to Cohen in early 2017, it didn’t amount to much questioning in the final transcripts. Sater didn’t explain in any way a “pro-Russia” form of proposed deal in his transcript. It's actually more interesting BTA Bank had moved on at this time to also paying Michael Cohen and BTA Bank may have benefited from the lifting of Russian sanctions due to their financial interests.
Due to the fact it wasn't mentioned much in either report, really seem to be of concern to the Russian collusion narrative and only warranted a couple of questions to the involved party in their transcripts, it will be left at that to save space.
STILL AN “ENIGMA” IN 2021
WHITEY BULGER ARGUMENT
In December of 2015, an obscure blog by Doug Brown, a writer and historian, wrote the following: “The AP has raised the Felix Sater story again as a possible factor in the 2016 Presidential race. Is Felix Sater an American hero as his well paid lawyer insists? Or is he something else? A mistake by Federal Law Enforcement and Intelligence agencies which the powers to be across all three branches of government are afraid to admit or even to see discussed in an open society? A mistake embedded with a gross miscarriage of justice which leaves an unfortunate impression that organized crime now holds a safe refuge within our judicial system where the witness protection plan has in effect become a criminal protection plan?”
While it was often proposed by the mainstream media (when addressing Felix Sater’s cooperation with intelligence agencies) Sater’s cooperation for 20 years must be a Whitey Bulger-type of situation, there has never been one apology, correction, or retractions on this past reporting now that it has been confirmed in government records Felix Sater actually helped our government against Russians (among other things). He didn’t collude with them
This was not a Whitey Bulger-type of cooperator nor situation.
Insinuating it is like Bulger, or outright stating this is the reality of what went on here is detrimental towards reaching the truth. This would mean when former President Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch made a statement regarding Sater in 2015 for her nomination hearing, she was covering for the U.S. government. As was former U.S. Attorney Todd Kaminsky when he described Sater’s work for the U.S. government as “ten years of constant undercover work,” that he knew of no time Sater had ever been untruthful, and his cooperation was of an “extraordinary depth and breadth, seldom seen.” If one understands the Bulger story, he was convicted of multiple murders and it is hard to imagine any U.S. Attorney ever telling a Judge in a private court session Bulger’s cooperation involved Al Qaeda, foreign governments, and Russian organized crime including various families of La Cosa Nostra. These two people are not the same.
REMAINING QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS IN 2021
As time has passed, the political debate or argument has changed from did Felix Sater help Trump collude with Russia to get elected, to multiple other silly theories that do not need to be restated here. In reality, perhaps the focus should not be if forgiveness is warranted for decades-old crimes of a bar fight or stock fraud scam when contrasted with going undercover with cybercriminal rings, helping investigate international money laundering networks, turning over intel on planned assassinations, and supplying bin Laden's phone numbers in 1998; but instead the clear and glaring fact he should have never been potentially considered as colluding with Russia by an honest media or Fusion GPS in the first place. Not given the demonstrated, repeated and fierce attempts by the U.S. government over the years leading up to the 2016 election to keep Sater's files sealed.
Remaining questions around Sater's story could easily get into the tens or hundreds so only a few main ones will be summarized here.
Bayrock and Other Consulting Work in Foreign Countries
Were the FBI aware of Sater's Bayrock employment and work with Tevfik Arif, a man linked to Russian organized crime and human trafficking? If so, why was Sater in that role for almost a decade and there is no evidence Arif was ever a target of a criminal investigation Sater was working on during these years?
Were Arif and others at Bayrock only made aware of Sater's prior cooperation with U.S. intel agencies when his files were stolen, or were they aware all along?
BTA Bank Money Laundering Case
Were the FBI aware of Sater's engagement with the Khrapunovs and Ablyazov before he was sentenced in late 2009, considering he had been under FBI supervision for at least ten years at this point?
Was Sater ever granted permission from DOJ to commit criminal acts and he would not be prosecuted?
Is it possible a private intelligence firm hired by BTA was monitoring Sater's comms during 2015 when the Trump Tower Moscow talks started?
Mogilevich and Russian Organized Crime
If Sater was in fact tied to at least Evgeny Dvoskin, his childhood friend who he said wouldn't piss on Mogilevich if he were on fire, why was the FBI hunting Mogilevich all these years? Were they still unable to get intel or was Mogilevich even a serious focus; could there have been higher players who were other targets?
Did Byrne's prior work for the FBI have anything to do with his website later linking Sater to Mogilevich network in 2013, or was it a screw-up where Sater was assumed to be an organized crime member when he was apparently really only immersed in these circles and feeding back intel?