‘He knows he and [Trump] are going to prison’
Behind The Spectator‘s paywall is a newly published article by Paul Wood, “Forget Charlottesville – Russia is still the true Trump scandal” with the subheader “Why has a friendly tabloid exposed a sex scandal in the President’s ranks?”
The first half of the article focuses on National Enquirer’s salacious article about an alleged affair involving Paul Manafort, who is now widely though to be – more or less – cooprating with Independent Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump Campaign’s ties to Russia, among other things.
Robert Mueller… now appears to be reaching back into Trump’s business past. Mueller’s team of prosecutors includes a number of experts in money-laundering and New York real estate. … Trump’s most recent partner in ‘selling a lot of condos’ was a man called Felix Sater. Sater was once jailed for stabbing a man in the face with the broken stem of a martini glass. He was convicted of a massive stock fraud — a partnership between the Russian and Italian-American mafias — but stayed out of jail by becoming an FBI informant.
For several weeks there have been rumours that Sater is ready to rat again, agreeing to help Mueller. ‘He has told family and friends he knows he and POTUS are going to prison,’ someone talking to Mueller’s investigators informed me. Sater himself added fuel to this fire when he told New York magazine last week: ‘In about the next 30 to 35 days, I will be the most colourful character you have ever talked about. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it now, before it happens. And believe me, it ain’t anything as small as whether or not they’re gonna call me to the Senate committee.’
Sater and Manafort together would pose a deadly threat to Trump’s presidency if they testify that Russian money in his businesses led to information being exchanged with Russian intelligence. This is exactly the relationship — an ‘exchange running between them for at least eight years’ — that the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele described in his ‘dossier’.
30 to 35 days, eh?
Tick… tick… tick…
