Buzzfeed is reporting that despite President Trump’s personal attorney‘s claims that Trump Tower Moscow was barely a dream, in reality it was well into development.
“The plan was dazzling: a glass skyscraper that would stretch higher than any other building in Europe, offering ultra-luxury residences and hotel rooms and bearing a famous name. Trump Tower Moscow, conceived as a partnership between Donald Trump’s company and a Russian real estate developer, looked likely to yield profits in excess of $300 million,” Buzzfeed’s Azeen Ghorayshi reports.
On Monday, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said “the proposal was in the earliest stage,” and he went on to tell the New Yorker that “no plans were ever made. There were no drafts. Nothing in the file.”
Buzzfeed says it has obtained “hundreds of pages of business documents, emails, text messages, and architectural plans,” and has published some on its website.
“By September 2015,” just a few months after Donald Trump delivered his now infamous Mexicans are “rapists” speech launching his presidential campaign, “a New York architect had completed plans for a bold glass obelisk 100 stories high, to be topped by a gleaming, cut-diamond-like shape emblazoned on multiple sides with the Trump logo.”
“The building design you sent over is very interesting,” the Russian real estate developer Andrey Rozov wrote to Cohen in September 2015, “and will be an architectural and luxury triumph. I believe the tallest building in Europe should be in Moscow, and I am prepared to build it.”
Buzzfeed also published the 17-page letter of intent Donald Trump signed one month later, on Oct. 28, 2015. It promised “approximately 250 first class, luxury residential condominiums,” and “not fewer than 150 hotel rooms.”
There would also be “a luxury spa and fitness center,” which could be branded, “The Spa By Ivanka Trump,” if they chose. Also, “a commercial component,” the letter stated, along with offices “consistent with Class A luxury office properties,” and “luxury” parking, which was not defined.
Along with the letter of intent, Buzzfeed published screenshots of texts and emails, and an artist’s renderings of Trump Tower Moscow, including one showing it taller than the Eiffel Tower, as Buzzfeed’s Editor-in-Chief, Ben Smith, tweeted:
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