Donald Trump, while campaigning to be president, was explicitly planning to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. According to "two law enforcement sources" in a new report by Buzzfeed, Trump gave explicit instructions to his now-jailed lawyer, Michael Cohen, to organize meetings with Russian businesspeople, politicians and even Vladimir Putin himself to negotiate a deal to put a Trump tower in Moscow.
Although it's no news that this Trump tower was in the works during the campaign, this reports gives a new perspective on Trump's involvement, which was very direct. He had his hands even more in the cover-up of the project, and apparently "after the election, the president personally instructed [Cohen] to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement."
Donald Trump, for his part, shrugged off the allegations as par for the course, despite many peoples' worries about election tampering by Russia: “there was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”
Plans for the building were, before Trump got elected, quite far down the line. Far enough to have an architectural rendering done:
Buzzfeed
