Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer and public spokesperson for Donald Trump, confirmed on Sunday that Trump and his then-lawyer Michael Cohen engaged in active discussions of the Trump Tower Moscow real estate development project throughout 2016, with the conversations about the proposed project — a project that would have needed to obtain approval from Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to NBC News — ending only when Trump won a surprise victory in the presidential election on November 8, according to a report by the New York Times .
“‘It was all going from the day I announced to the day I won,’” Trump said, according to Giuliani, referring to the ongoing discussion of the Moscow development.
But the admission appears to show that Trump would have had to conceal the existence of the ongoing project for more than two months after the FBI officially informed him that the Russian government was attacking the election, as NBC News reported, hacking, stealing, and public releasing Democratic emails as well as attempting to infiltrate Trump’s own campaign.
The FBI briefed Trump on the Russian election attack on August 17, 2016, but would have also asked if Trump himself has any business or personal dealings with Russia, according to former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa, who is also national security analyst for CNN. Rangappa, writing on Twitter , said that if Giuliani’s admission is accurate, Trump “didn’t report either the deal or the contacts as the FBI requested in their security briefing, and lied about both.”
Giuliani also made the admission on NBC’s Meet The Press , as seen in the video below.
Not only did Trump apparently conceal his Moscow business dealings and contacts from the FBI, but according to Seth Abramson — author of the bestselling Trump-Russia book Proof of Collusion — Trump may have been committing a crime simply by continuing the Trump Tower Moscow project once he had been officially informed of Russia’s cyber-attack on the election, Abramson wrote on his Twitter account.
“Trump had a legal obligation to do nothing to aid/abet Russian cybercrimes after August 17, 2016, when he received his first classified briefing as a candidate and learned of Putin’s cyberwar,” Abramson wrote on Twitter . “Today we learned he did just that. As of August 17, 2016, Donald Trump was one of the few civilians in the world with a legally cognizable level of certainty that the Kremlin was engaged in a hot cyberwar against America.”
As the Inquisitr reported, the Trump Tower discussions may actually have continued even after Trump’s inauguration, as Emin Agalarov — one of the Russian developers involved in the project, said in February of 2017 that he still considered Trump Tower Moscow to be an active project.