Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the incoming head of the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday it “wasn’t very cool” for President Donald Trump to be negotiating a real estate deal in Moscow in 2016 — and that it put the nation at risk.
In an interview on ABC News’ “This Week,” Schiff refuted Trump’s description of the proposed Trump Tower Moscow deal as “very legal and very cool.”
“Whether it was legal or not remains to be seen. It certainly wasn’t very cool,” he said. “More than that, it was very compromising of our country. In order for this Trump Tower deal to go through, sanctions had to be lifted on a Russian state bank.
“At the same time, Donald Trump is out there pushing to lift sanctions on Russia and this bank. There’s no way to describe that as cool or ethical or in the national interest. It means that the president, whether he won or lost, was hoping to make money from Russia, was seeking at the same time to enlist the support of the Kremlin to make that money.”
Schiff said with the guilty plea of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, “We find out that yes, there was compromise and that puts our country at risk” and that it “makes the compromise broader than we thought.”
“We have Michael Cohen saying that what the president was saying, what Michael Cohen was saying and others were saying about when this business deal ended was not true,” he said.
“And what’s more, the Russians knew it wasn’t true, that at the same time that Donald Trump was the presumptive nominee of the GOP, and arguing in favor of doing away with sanctions, he was working on a deal that would require doing away with sanctions for him to make money in Russia.
“That is a real problem, it means that the compromise is far broader than we thought.”
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