Betrayal, Part 1: The Courtship
OPINION & ANALYSIS · BETRAYAL: THE PLAN ALL ALONG (1 of 4)
For almost 40 years, Donald Trump chased Moscow's money and Moscow's approval. The record shows a tower he pursued while running for president, and a story he told voters after.
By Joseph J. Jackson, Founder of FMNN and author of The Death of the American Dream. Published October 18, 2026. Facts current as of October 17, 2026.
Disclosure: FMNN sells merchandise referencing Donald Trump. Our reporting follows the record regardless.
The summer of 1987
In July 1987, a 41-year-old New York developer and his wife checked into Moscow's National Hotel, a short walk from the Kremlin. Donald and Ivana Trump had come at the invitation of the Soviet government. Their hosts toured them through possible hotel sites. Trump wrote about the trip that same year in The Art of the Deal, describing how the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Dubinin, had raised the idea and how the state travel agency set it up. [1][2]
Eight weeks after he flew home, Trump paid $94,801 for a full-page "open letter" in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. It attacked America's allies for letting the United States pay to defend them. It mocked protecting "ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need." [3]
That is where this series starts: a Soviet invitation, a Moscow hotel room, and a newspaper ad telling Americans their alliances were a bad deal. Four decades later, the alliances are under strain, Russia's sanctions are on hold, and Ukraine's drone crews have had their satellite service capped in the middle of a war. This series argues that ending was no accident.
THE LEDGER
| Row | What the record shows | Label | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAID | Trump, July 26, 2016: "I have ZERO investments in Russia." October 2016 debate: "I have no businesses there." Jan. 11, 2017: "I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!" | Documented, Tier 1 | Trump posts and debate transcript, July 2016–Jan. 2017 [4] |
| DID | Trump signed a letter of intent for a Trump Tower Moscow around Oct. 28, 2015. His lawyer pursued it into June 2016 and emailed the office of Putin's spokesman for help. | Documented, Tier 2 | Mueller Report, Vol. I, pp. 69–74 [5] |
| RESULT | His lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty on Nov. 29, 2018, to lying to Congress about how long the Moscow talks lasted and how often he briefed Trump. | Documented, Tier 2 | U.S. v. Cohen, 18-cr-850 (S.D.N.Y.); AP [6] |
| GAP | Trump pursued the largest deal of his career in Moscow into June 2016. From July on, he told voters he had no business in Russia, and his lawyer later lied to Congress to match that story. | Documented | [4][5][6] |
| KNEW | Cohen's Jan. 14, 2016 email to Dmitry Peskov's office asked the Kremlin for help moving the project. Cohen testified he kept Trump informed. | Documented, Tier 1 | Mueller Report, Vol. I, p. 74 [5] |
| SAID AFTER | Trump called the Russia investigation a "hoax" and a "witch hunt." | Documented, Tier 1 | Trump's public statements [4] |
That email is Tier 1: Trump's own lawyer put the request to the Kremlin in writing, during the campaign.
What you need to know
This is an opinion and analysis series. It argues a position: that Donald Trump's conduct toward Russia is a betrayal of the country he swore to protect. Every fact under that argument comes from the record, and where the record stops, we say so.
Two things in this part are often misreported, so we state them up front. First, the Steele dossier's most famous allegation, the "pee tape," has never been proven. Second, no prosecutor has ever charged Trump with a Russia-related crime. Neither fact weakens the case. The case never needed them.
The invitation
The facts of the 1987 trip are not disputed. Ambassador Dubinin, whom Trump met in New York in 1986, invited him. The trip ran through Goscomintourist, the Soviet state travel agency. Trump and Ivana toured sites in Moscow and Leningrad. No hotel was built. [1][2]
What happened behind the trip is disputed. In his 2021 book American Kompromat, journalist Craig Unger quotes former KGB major Yuri Shvets. Shvets says the KGB cultivated Trump starting in the late 1970s and arranged the 1987 invitation through Intourist, which Soviet intelligence used as cover. He also says Moscow celebrated the newspaper ads that followed. [7]
FMNN treats Shvets's account as unproven. It rests on one former officer's word, and no document released since has confirmed it. Fact-checkers have found no corroboration. [8] What is not disputed is the sequence: the Soviet invitation in July, the anti-alliance ads in September, and Trump's first public flirtation with running for president that fall.
Florida's Russian buyers
The money is better documented than the spy story, and much of it ran through Florida.
In 2005, the Bayrock Group, working with a Russian-born developer named Felix Sater, won an exclusive deal to build a Trump-branded tower in Moscow. It was never built. [9] In September 2008, Donald Trump Jr. told a Manhattan real estate conference that Russians made up "a pretty disproportionate cross-section" of the family's assets. "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia," he said. [10]
That same summer, Russian fertilizer billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev bought Trump's Palm Beach mansion, Maison de l'Amitié, for $95 million. Trump had paid about $41 million for it four years earlier. [11]
In March 2017, a Reuters investigation found at least 63 buyers with Russian passports or addresses had spent at least $98.4 million on units in seven Trump-branded towers in South Florida. [12] Buying a condo is legal. The point is narrower and harder to wave away: by the time Trump ran for president, Russian money was woven into his business, and his own son said so.
Miss Universe, Moscow, 2013
On Nov. 9, 2013, Trump brought his Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. The licensing fee, about $20 million, was reportedly paid by Aras Agalarov, a billionaire developer close to the Kremlin. [13] Trump tweeted his hope that Vladimir Putin would attend and become his "new best friend." Putin did not come.
The Agalarov family matters to this story because of what came next. Three years later, it was Agalarov's son's publicist, Rob Goldstone, who emailed Donald Trump Jr. offering Russian government dirt on Hillary Clinton. That email, and the Trump Tower meeting it produced, open Part 2. [5]
The tower he said didn't exist
In October 2015, four months into his campaign, Trump signed a letter of intent for a Trump Tower Moscow with a Russian developer, I.C. Expert. [5] Sater, back in the picture, wrote to Cohen that he could get Putin's people on board.
On Jan. 14, 2016, Cohen emailed the office of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Communication "between our two sides has stalled," he wrote, and he asked for help. Peskov's assistant called him back. [5]
The talks continued into June 2016, a month before he accepted the Republican nomination. Starting that July, Trump told voters he had "ZERO investments in Russia" and "no businesses there." Cohen later admitted he lied to Congress about the timeline to match Trump's public story. He was sentenced to three years in prison on that and other federal charges. [4][6]
This is the first hard fact of the series, and it is not in dispute: a candidate for president was negotiating with the Kremlin's circle for a skyscraper while promising voters warmer relations with Moscow. Whatever else he was, he was a man with something to gain from Putin's goodwill, and Putin's people knew it.
The dossier and the tape
In 2016, Fusion GPS, working through the law firm Perkins Coie for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to research Trump's Russia ties. His memos became the Steele dossier. In 2022 the Federal Election Commission fined the DNC and the Clinton campaign $113,000 for reporting the payments as legal fees. [14]
The dossier's most famous claim was that Russian intelligence held a compromising tape of Trump from a 2013 stay at Moscow's Ritz-Carlton. That claim has never been proven.
Here is what the record shows:
- In December 2019, the Justice Department's inspector general reported that Steele's main sub-source, later identified as Igor Danchenko, told the FBI his information was hearsay and that the hotel story was rumor he could not confirm. The same report found 17 significant errors and omissions in the FBI's surveillance applications on Trump adviser Carter Page. It also found the Russia investigation was properly opened and not driven by political bias. [15]
- In a 2022 court filing, Durham's prosecutors said the former Ritz-Carlton general manager denied ever speaking with Danchenko about the allegation. Danchenko was acquitted of lying to the FBI. [16]
- In May 2023, special counsel John Durham reported that the FBI could not corroborate a single substantive allegation in the dossier. [17]
- The Mueller Report records an Oct. 30, 2016 text to Cohen from businessman Giorgi Rtskhiladze about stopping a "flow of tapes from Russia." Rtskhiladze told investigators he had heard the tapes were fake. [5]
FMNN looked for the FBI witness statements on the tape allegation reported this week. As of Oct. 17, we could not find any FBI, congressional or court release on that allegation from the past week. We will add it when we can review the documents themselves.
Here is our read. The Trump defense rests on knocking down the dossier, and on the tape, the record is on its side. But the dossier is not the case. The tower, the money, the Kremlin email and the guilty plea are. None of them came from Christopher Steele.
Reality of the Situation
The White House did not respond to a request for comment sent Oct. 17, 2026, with a 4 p.m. ET deadline. FMNN will add any response it receives.
What his defenders say: The Russia story was a "hoax" built on a fake dossier the Clinton campaign paid for. The FBI abused its powers. Today, a federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, is investigating former CIA Director John Brennan and others over the origins of the Russia probe. [18]
What the record says:
- "It was all the dossier." False. The inspector general found the FBI opened the Russia investigation in July 2016 based on a tip about Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, not the dossier. [15]
- "The FBI abused its power." Partly true. The inspector general and Durham both documented real failures in the Carter Page surveillance applications, and one FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to altering an email. FMNN does not wave that away. It does not erase a single fact in the ledger above.
- "There were no Russia deals." False. Trump signed a letter of intent for a Moscow tower during his campaign, and his lawyer went to prison partly for lying about it. [5][6]
- "The investigators are the real criminals." As of Oct. 17, 2026, Brennan has been subpoenaed but not charged. His lawyer says he has been told he is a target, and the Justice Department has told a court it is unclear he will ever be charged. [18]
Voices of Resistance
On Feb. 27, 2019, Michael Cohen sat before the House Oversight Committee and testified in public that Trump knew about the Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign. Trump never directly told him to lie, Cohen said, but he spoke "in a code" that made clear what he wanted. Cohen was no hero; he had lied for Trump for a decade. His testimony cost him the last of his old life. He went to federal prison that May. [6]
Reading the Pattern
The official story. Trump told voters he had no deals in Russia while his lawyer was asking the Kremlin to help build one.
Accountability delayed and partial. The lawyer who lied went to prison. The man the lies protected was never charged.
Who Carried the Story
Reuters, a wire service owned by Thomson Reuters, documented the $98.4 million in Russian purchases of South Florida Trump condos. BuzzFeed News, since shut down, published the full dossier in January 2017 and drew both scoops and lawsuits. The Moscow tower timeline came out through federal prosecutors and the Mueller Report, not through any one newsroom.
Closing
The National Hotel still stands across from Red Square. Trump never got his Moscow tower. In our view, what he took from those years was a script. Allies are freeloaders. Moscow is a place to do business. Take the help, and deny it later.
Hold onto that newspaper ad. "Ships we don't own." This series argues that, by the end, those words read less like a complaint and more like a plan.
Sources
- Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal (Random House, 1987), on the Dubinin invitation and Moscow trip.
- Luke Harding, "The Hidden History of Trump's First Trip to Moscow," Politico Magazine, Nov. 19, 2017 — politico.com
- History News Network, on Trump's 1987 "open letter" ads — historynewsnetwork.org
- Trump statements on Russia business: X post, July 26, 2016; Oct. 2016 presidential debate transcript; X post, Jan. 11, 2017; "hoax" and "witch hunt" posts (archive). TIME's tally of Trump's Russia denials.
- Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, Vol. I, pp. 69–74, 110–123 (March 2019) — justice.gov
- AP, "Michael Cohen pleads guilty to lying to Congress," Nov. 29, 2018 — whyy.org; U.S. v. Cohen, 18-cr-850 (S.D.N.Y.)
- Craig Unger, American Kompromat (Dutton, 2021); Unger, "1987: The KGB reels him in" — craigunger.substack.com
- Yahoo News / Snopes, on the KGB recruitment claim — yahoo.com
- Richard Behar, "Trump and the Mob," Forbes, Oct. 2016; Financial Times, Dec. 13, 2016.
- Hazel Heyer, eTurboNews, Sept. 15, 2008 — eturbonews.com
- Alexei Barrionuevo, The New York Times, Apr. 5, 2012; CNN Money, July 27, 2016.
- Reuters, "Russian elite invested nearly $100 million in Trump buildings," Mar. 17, 2017 — archive.kyivpost.com
- Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, Feb. 19, 2018.
- AP, "DNC, Clinton campaign agree to Steele dossier funding fine," Mar. 31, 2022 — fox19.com
- U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, Dec. 9, 2019 — justice.gov; ABA Journal summary
- Fox News, Durham Danchenko filing, Sept. 13, 2022 — foxnews.com; Katelyn Polantz, CNN via WRAL — wral.com
- Special Counsel John H. Durham, Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns, May 15, 2023 — justice.gov
- CBS News, Brennan subpoenaed in "grand conspiracy" probe — cbsnews.com; AP reporting on Brennan's target status and DOJ's filing in D.C. federal court.
Updates and corrections
No corrections as of publication.
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