Felix Sater, a Moscow-born businessman now at the centre of the Trump-Russia affair, says he lives by a simple code: “Screw me once, shame on you; screw me twice, shame on me for letting it happen.”
As the Trump presidency finds itself increasingly hemmed in by an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, and as key protagonists hire their own lawyers and reportedly make their own arrangements with prosecutors, they are words likely to become ever more relevant to those caught in the whirlpool.
Sater – a former Trump associate who the president has in recent years had trouble recalling – repeated the motto more than once in exchanges with the Guardian, while asking for fair coverage of his past. He insists it has sustained him through a convoluted and colourful life that led him from Moscow to Wall Street to prison to the freewheeling world of international real estate deals, secret arrangements with US law enforcement and intelligence agencies – and ultimately, to Trump Tower.
Whatever the truth of Donald Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin, Sater is likely to end up being part of the story. He surfaced this week in leaked emails that he sent in 2015 to Trump’s lawyer, claiming he could engineer Putin’s support for a Trump Tower in Moscow and thus, somehow, a victory in the US presidential election.
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater said, according to one of the emails, leaked to the New York Times. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
