Felix Sater, a former Sands Point resident and ex-associate of Donald Trump, testified before the House intelligence committee last week after several postponements.
After his closed-door testimony, however, the committee issued a rare statement saying that Sater did not fully comply as he had told multiple news outlets.
Patrick Boland, the committee spokesman, said Sater did not fully cooperate with the committee and is to remain under subpoena until he does so.
He said that Sater did not produce the documents requested and avoided responding to questions on a statement provided by Trump’s former attorney, Michael D. Cohen, citing “attorney-client privilege,” according to Reuters.
Sater was questioned about his knowledge of the proposed Trump Tower Moscow. Cohen originally testified that negotiations had come to a halt in January 2016, but later acknowledged that they continued until June 2016, extending further into Trump’s presidential campaign than was previously known.
Cohen and Sater’s exchange of communications about a Trump Tower in Moscow and an effort to arrange a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin were outlined in Justice Department special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s report released in April.
The report stated that initial communications about the Moscow project commenced in summer 2015 when Sater reached out to the Trump Organization on behalf of I.C. Expert Investments, a Russian real estate development company.
The Mueller report also identified Sater as the first to suggest that the real estate project’s success could help Trump clinch the Republican nomination.
“Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater said in an email to his childhood friend, Cohen, on Nov. 3, 2015. “Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow, and Donald owns the Republican nomination. And possibly beats Hillary and our boy is in.”
New York Magazine reported that Cohen and Sater were childhood friends, having grown up in Brooklyn together.
Sater was born in Russia and at the age of 7 moved to Brighton Beach with his family, claiming refugee status from the Soviet Union because of his Jewish religion.
He attended Pace University and dropped out at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a stockbroker on Wall Street. When he was 25, he lost his stockbroker’s license after an argument at a bar led to his arrest for stabbing a man in the face with the broken stem of a margarita glass.
In an attempt to stay involved with Wall Street, Sater became involved in a “pump and dump” scheme where his company inflated stock prices and sold them off once investors started buying in, according to court documents.
After having pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering in 1998, Sater was enlisted by the FBI as an informant and “provided crucial intelligence information and assistance to numerous U.S. national security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies,” he said in a statement provided to the House intelligence committee in December 2017.
In 2003, Sater joined Bayrock Group LLC, a luxury mortgage firm whose home office was on the 24th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan.
From his desk, Sater performed clandestine operations on behalf of the United States and also brokered deals for Trump, his neighbor two floors up who at the time was a real estate mogul, according to news reports. Sater was involved in negotiations for Trump SoHo.
Sater told The Los Angeles Times that he “was building Trump Towers by day and hunting Bin Laden by night.”
According to Buzzfeed News, in 2004 Sater “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 told Buzzfeed News last year that he had no involvement with Russian meddling in the 2016 election and said “he was just doing what he always done: working a deal.”
Sater sold his Sands Point home for just over $2 million in February, more than a year after it had been put on the market. Sater purchased the home in 2004 and sold it in order to relocate to waterfront property, local real estate agent Kathy Levinson said in a past interview with Blank Slate Media. She said he already lived in Port Washington when he purchased the home.
