While Donald Trump was in the middle of running for president, his namesake company wanted to give Russian President Vladimir Putin a $50 million penthouse apartment in a Trump-branded building it was trying to develop in Moscow, according to a report and the person who came up with the pitch.
Felix Sater, a real estate developer with ties to the Russian government, told the New York Daily News on Thursday he came up with the idea while trying to court investors for Trump Tower Moscow with the president's then-personal lawyer Michael Cohen during the summer of 2016.
Cohen approved of the idea and discussed it with a representative for Dmitry Peskov, Putin's longtime adviser and press secretary, federal law enforcement officials told BuzzFeed News, which first reported the proposal.
Sater claimed the idea was genius because wealthy Russian oligarchs would jump on any opportunity to invest in a building that would house Putin.
"Would the oligarchs bend over backwards to live in the same building as Putin? Obviously," Sater said in a phone interview.
But Sater said he had no idea whether Cohen actually broached the idea to the Kremlin.
"To me it was really simple: Selling the unit to a celebrity is marketing 101. Who's celebrity number one in Russia?" he continued. "This was pure marketing. I was being a marketing guy."
Cohen did not return a request for comment.
The disillusioned ex-Trump fixer copped a cooperation deal with special counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday, in which he pleaded guilty to misleading lawmakers about the extent of his conversations with Kremlin officials about the Trump Tower Moscow deal.
Cohen testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that discussions about the Moscow project ended in January 2016. But he admitted in his guilty plea that was a lie and that discussions in fact stretched until the summer of 2016 while Trump was running for president. According to Cohen, Trump and his family members were briefed on the discussions _ a claim the president's legal team denies.
It's not clear if Trump was aware of the discussions between Cohen and the Kremlin or whether he was ever filled in on the idea of giving a luxury pad to Putin.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump's top lawyer in the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference, scoffed at the claim.
"Who the hell would even come up with that?" Giuliani told The News with a laugh. "The president has never heard of it. If it's coming from Cohen or Sater or any of those guys, I can't speak to the truth of it."
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