Felix Sater, a former Sands Point resident and past associate of President Donald Trump, failed to appear for a closed-door interview with the House intelligence committee last Friday.
Sater told The Washington Post before the scheduled interview that he would answer every question that he was asked.
The New York Times reported that intelligence committee members had already gathered in the Capitol meeting room when they received notice from Sater’s lawyer, Robert S. Wolf, that he would be unable to attend due to health reasons but was willing to reschedule.
Sater told Politico that he was feeling ill and had slept through his alarm on Friday morning.
U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), the chairman of the intelligence committee, said in a brief interview after the canceled hearing that a subpoena would be issued calling for Sater to appear.
Sater became central to investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election due to communications obtained between him and Trump’s former attorney, Michael D. Cohen. Messages between the pair revealed that negotiations for a proposed Trump Tower Moscow continued into June 2016 after Trump had been declared the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
Cohen had originally testified that negotiations had come to a halt in January 2016.
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 said the initial communication about the Moscow project came from Sater in late summer 2015 when he reached out to the Trump Organization on behalf of I.C. Expert Investments, a Russian real estate development company.
Sater knew of the Trump Organization’s interest in a Trump Tower Moscow, after having made an attempt to forge a deal on behalf of the Trump Organization in the mid-2000s, according to the report, which was followed by a trip to Russia with Donald Trump Jr. and his sister Ivanka.
The Mueller report said Sater was 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.”
Mueller’s report said Cohen was the only member of the Trump Organization to have dealt with Sater and I.C. Expert directly. He then provided status updates to “candidate Trump” regularly throughout 2015 and into 2016.
New York Magazine reported 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 in the finance business, 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 the 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 said in an interview with 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.”
When Buzzfeed reporters sat down with Sater last year, the Russian-born New Yorker had already moved to Los Angeles, where he shipped his Porsche to meet him there.
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.
