The House Intelligence Committee plans to question Felix Sater, the longtime business associate of President Trump involved in efforts to build a Trump property in Moscow, in a public hearing next month.
Schiff said the open hearing with Sater, a mob-linked felon turned FBI informant, is scheduled for March 14 and would focus on the Trump Moscow discussions.
Sater, a Russian-born businessman who carried a business card identifying him as a “senior adviser” to Donald Trump, pursued Russian deals throughout the 2000s.
On one visit in which he was accompanied by Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, he claims he arranged for Ivanka to sit in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chair during a tour of the Kremlin.
Sater drew on connections he had made in Russia in the late 1990s when he began secretly working for American intelligence agencies, which in turn helped reduce his penalty after a guilty plea in a $40 million securities fraud case.
He told the House Intelligence Committee last year that he had cultivated a network of foreign contacts that included “ranking intelligence, military operatives and military research facilities.”
Sater worked with former Trump attorney Michael Cohen to move the Trump Moscow real estate project forward, though it never came to fruition.
Schiff announced the hearing after a daylong closed-door testimony from Cohen, which was widely expected to focus on the Trump Moscow discussions.
In November, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to the House and Senate Intelligence committees about the extent to which the Moscow project was discussed within the Trump Organization.
His testimony was part of a deal to cooperate in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Cohen admitted, in part, that the discussions extended as late as June 2016 — six months later than he previously testified — at which point Trump was the presumptive Republican nominee for president.
According to court filings, Cohen and an unnamed “Individual 2” — widely believed to be Sater — discussed efforts to gain approval from the Russian government for the real estate deal as late as June 2016.
They also discussed Cohen traveling to Russia in connection with the project during the heat of the campaign, filings say.
Sater has attracted media scrutiny as a result of his ties to Trump and involvement in the proposal.
The New York Times reported in August 2017 that Sater referenced his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin in emails to Cohen and said the real estate deal would help elect Trump to the presidency.
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in November 2015. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
In public testimony before a separate House committee on Wednesday, Cohen said he briefed the Trump family on the project roughly a half-dozen times between January and June 2016 and that the president asked for updates on it during the campaign.
He also said he briefed Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump on the plans.