Trump Was Still Working on Russia Hotel With Convicted Mafia Stock Fraudster Felix Sater During Prez Campaign

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Central to the effort were Felix Sater, a colorful Russian figure who had worked with Trump on Trump Soho, a debacle of a development in New York City, in addition to having done shadowy work for the U.S. government and having mob ties and a history of securities fraud; and his childhood friend Michael Cohen, a Trump attorney and hanger-on.

"I know how to play this and we will get it done," Sater wrote to Cohen in November 2015, in an email reported by The New York Times. "Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this."

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the episode again underscores the problems with Trump's decision not to separate his business from himself. On the one hand, Trump used his supposed business prowess as the fundamental basis for his campaign, saying that his experience as a mogul both qualified him to run the government, and would also isolate him from the influence of special interests. Yet during the presidential campaign, Trump was lavishing praise on Putin even as he was attempting to complete a deal in Russia. And now that he is in office, Trump refuses to truly separate himself from his business empire, yet wants the public to accept that the actions his business took were entirely separate from his political work.