Whether this explains Manafort’s decision never to register as a foreign agent with the Department of Justice (DOJ) is unclear; regardless, Manafort’s failure to register permitted him to keep the money he received from Putin ally Deripaska and Putin stooge Yanukovych hidden from U.S. authorities until it was uncovered by Robert Mueller in 2017. It also allowed him to be an undisclosed agent of pro-Kremlin forces for the entirety of the time he was working for Trump, a fact it would have been difficult for Trump not to know given his familiarity with Manafort’s past political work.140
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In 2006, the same year that Manafort moves into Trump Tower on a mission for Deripaska and Putin, the owner of the building—who has spent his career in real estate surfing on an ever-cresting wave of debt—suddenly shifts his philosophy on real estate development dramatically by putting up cash for most new projects. As the Washington Post explains, in 2006 Trump “began buying up land near Aberdeen [Scotland] … [for] $12.6 million.… [He] soon began to buy other properties in cash.… In 2008 and 2009, he paid $17.4 million in cash for two neighboring Beverly Hills homes. In 2009, Trump spent at least $6.7 million on two golf clubs.… In Charlottesville, he paid $16.2 million for a winery.… By 2011, Trump had spent at least $46 million on all-cash purchases” since 2006.141 The Post notes that Trump’s mysteriously accessible $46 million may have been attributable in part to a single transaction he completed in 2008: the sale of a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is close to a senior adviser to Vladimir Putin, Yuri Trutnev.142 Trump had purchased the southern Florida estate for $41.4 million in 2004, and had sought to flip it immediately. After finding no takers for several years, in 2008 he was suddenly offered $95 million by Rybolovlev, an offer that at the time made the sale “the highest price paid for any single-family home” in the history of the United States. Trump’s $53.6 million profit was enough to fund every one of his all-cash purchases between 2006 and 2011.143
When Rybolovlev makes his mysterious offer on Trump’s unpopular Florida property in 2008, he calls it a “company investment,” yet he eventually tears down all the buildings Trump has put up on the site. In March 2017, during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump-Russia ties, Rybolovlev will suddenly change his story, claiming that, rather than a company investment, the purchase was for a “family trust.”144 These will be only two of Rybolovlev’s shifting explanations for paying Trump well over twice what the New York City businessman had paid for a property Rybolovlev razed after its purchase; at other times the Russian billionaire will say the house was for “his children, or maybe an inheritance, or it might be used in connection with his daughter because she was an equestrian.”145 David Newman, a lawyer who reviewed the transaction as part of a team at the New York City law firm Sills, Cummis & Gross, will tell the Palm Beach Post in 2017 that despite the historic size of Rybolovlev’s purchase, his team “never found any evidence Rybolovlev hired experts to weigh in on the property’s condition as a residence—or its value as a teardown—before he bought the place.”146 How Trump came to Rybolovlev’s attention in the first instance is unknown, though recent investigations suggest a connection to Trump’s longtime, Kremlin-connected rainmaker, Felix Sater—a man who had by the time of the Trump-Rybolovlev sale spent years attracting Russian business clients to Trump properties.147 Sater is a U.S. and Israeli citizen whose father, Mikhail, according to Haaretz, has been “named [by the FBI] as a lieutenant for Russian mafia kingpin [Semion] Mogilevich,” the latter a man who has been called “the most dangerous mobster in the world.”148 Mogilevich is a former associate of Boris Birshtein, a Russian oligarch who was once one of Donald Trump’s partners in a major building project in Toronto.149
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In 2007, the parents of a longtime Elliott Broidy associate, Lisa Korbatov, purchase a Rodeo Drive mansion for $10.5 million. A year later, Korbatov’s parents sell the property for $10.3 million, taking a $200,000 loss, to “an Egyptian man with little money and a history of financial scams.”150 Six weeks later, this unlikely Egyptian purchaser of a Rodeo Drive mansion, Mokless Girgis, transfers the property to Donald Trump—for free.151 When the bizarre transaction is caught and becomes the subject of a lawsuit, Girgis