Friday, November 30, 2018

Trump Signs New Trade Deal With Canada and Mexico After Bitter Negotiations



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President Trump, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico spoke at the G-20 summit meeting about the new North American trade pact, which will replace Nafta.Published OnCreditCreditTom Brenner for The New York Times



BUENOS AIRES — President Trump and his Mexican and Canadian counterparts sought to put the acrimony of the past two years behind them on Friday as they signed a new trade agreement governing hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce that underpins their mutually dependent economies.
Meeting for the first time since the revised North American Free Trade Agreement was sealed, Mr. Trump, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada hailed the results as a boon for workers, businesses and the environment, even as they alluded to the harsh talks that had preceded this day.
But Mr. Trump faces a daunting challenge at home, where Congress must approve the deal before it can take effect.
The complicated politics of trade would have made the task formidable enough even before the midterm elections, but it will grow only more so once Democrats assume control of the House in January.


Some pro-trade lawmakers complain that the revised agreement puts too many limits on the free flow of goods and services across borders, while trade skeptics maintain that it does not do enough to safeguard American jobs, encourage higher wages and protect the environment.
Submission to Congress will open a frenzy of fresh negotiations over legislation to enact the agreement, potentially unraveling the careful balance achieved with Mexico and Canada.
In signing the agreement on Friday, Mr. Trump sought to ratchet up the pressure on President Xi Jinping of China, with whom he will meet on Saturday amid an escalating trade war.
Mr. Trump has already imposed tariffs of 10 percent on many Chinese goods and has threatened to raise them to 25 percent. He signaled as late as Friday that he may reach an understanding with Mr. Xi during a dinner to forestall such a move.
The agreement with Canada and Mexico is a signature achievement for Mr. Trump, who has long derided nearly every major trade deal that the United States has entered.


Negotiators reached a last-minute deal in September after months of rancorous talks that raised doubts about whether any accord was possible. Mr. Trump repeatedly assailed his counterparts and threatened to scrap Nafta altogether.
The appearance of the three leaders side by side in Buenos Aires to attend an economic summit meeting of the Group of 20, or G-20, was meant to paper over the bitterness, but the hard feelings were still evident.
“We worked hard on this agreement,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s been long and hard. We’ve taken a lot of barbs and a little abuse, and we got there. It’s great for all of our countries.”




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A dairy farm in Rhode Island. Under the agreement, American dairy farmers would be allowed greater access to Canada’s market.CreditOliver Doyle/Reuters
Mr. Trump did not say that he was the one who had dished out most of the barbs and much of the abuse, but he insisted that he had come out of the process with a stronger relationship with the two leaders.
He said that Mr. Trudeau, whom he once assailed as “very dishonest and weak,” had become “a great friend,” despite it all.
“It’s been a battle,” he added, “and battles sometimes make great friendships.”
Stoic and unmoved, Mr. Trudeau did not respond directly but seemed to refer implicitly to speculation that he might not attend the ceremony and send a lower-level official to sign in his place.


His schedule for Buenos Aires did not initially list the ceremony. He opted to attend anyway, saying the deal “maintains stability for Canada’s entire economy” and removes the dangers associated with a threatened United States withdrawal.
“That’s why I’m here today,” he said. “The new agreement lifts the risk of serious economic uncertainty that lingers throughout a trade renegotiation process.”
Mr. Trudeau pointedly referred to the accord as the “new North American Free Trade Agreement” and described it as “modernizing Nafta,” despite Mr. Trump’s effort to rebrand it as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
The Canadian leader also used the occasion to press Mr. Trump on steel and aluminum tariffs, which remain unresolved.
“Make no mistake, we will stand up for our workers and fight for their families and their communities,” Mr. Trudeau said. “And Donald, it’s all the more reason why we need to keep working to remove the tariffs on steel and aluminum between our two countries.”
The signing came shortly after a separate ceremony, hosted by Mr. Peña Nieto, presenting Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, with Mexico’s highest award for foreigners in honor of his role in negotiating the trade agreement.
The announcement this week that the award would go to Mr. Kushner drew waves of criticism, given the insulting language Mr. Trump has used about Mexicans, including his description during the presidential campaign of illegal immigrants from Mexico as rapists.


In accepting the Order of the Aztec Eagle from Mexico, Mr. Kushner insisted that the president’s harsh language did not reflect the trust that has developed between the leaders of the two countries.
“Through your direction and leadership we were able to accomplish a lot of great things,” Mr. Kushner told Mr. Trump at the ceremony. “While there has been a lot of tough talk, I have seen the genuine respect and care that President Trump has for Mexico and the Mexican people, and I do believe we have been able to put that in the right light.”
While analysts said the new trade agreement was not as much of a transformation as Mr. Trump has suggested, it does rewrite the rules for an extraordinary amount of commerce between the three nations.




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Cars at the port of Veracruz, Mexico. To be exempted from tariffs under the new agreement, cars need to have a higher percentage of their parts manufactured in North America, in factories that pay an average of $16 an hour or more.CreditVictoria Razo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The United States did $581.6 billion in business with Canada last year, and $557.6 billion with Mexico, making them the nation’s second- and third-largest trading partners.
Under the agreement, American dairy farmers would be allowed greater access to Canada’s market to sell their cheese, milk and other products. A higher percentage of cars would have to be manufactured in North America and factories must pay their workers an average of $16 an hour or more to be exempted from tariffs.
The deal also updates provisions on the digital economy, agriculture and labor unions, but it preserves an international dispute mechanism that Mr. Trump had sought to eliminate.


Whether Mr. Trump can reach across the aisle to sell it to Congress remains an open question. In nearly two years in office, he has made little effort to forge bipartisan consensus in Congress, as Republicans controlled both chambers.
But trade muddies the usual partisan lines, with free traders and skeptics of globalization in both parties, and the dynamics were further complicated by the announcement this week by General Motors that it will eliminate 14,000 jobs and idle five plants in the United States and Canada.
Mr. Trump played down the challenge on Friday, expressing confidence that he would easily win approval by Congress.
“It’s been so well reviewed, I don’t expect to have very much of a problem,” he said.
Business groups and some Republicans praised the agreement and called for expeditious endorsement by lawmakers. “I believe it will create more jobs and expand economic opportunities for American workers, farmers and manufacturers by leveling the playing field on trade,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio.
But Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader and a longtime critic of Nafta, said on Friday that the new agreement could not be “simply a rebranding of the same old policies that hurt our economy and workers for years” if it is to pass Congress.
“It must prove to be a net benefit to middle-class families and working people in our country and must have strong labor and environmental protections, which in the present deal are too weak,” he said.
A dozen Republican senators sent Mr. Trump a letter last week urging him to submit the agreement for approval in the lame-duck session of the departing Congress before Democrats assume control of the House in January.


Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania who signed the letter, said the deal still needed to be improved even now, despite what he considered the improvements to the trade structure between the three nations.
“Unfortunately, the benefits of these enhancements are more than offset by the trade-limiting provisions,” he said in a statement. “However, I would be willing to vote for the agreement if the president takes steps to strengthen it in the coming weeks through pro-trade modifications in the implementing legislation.”
Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and a longtime critic of free-trade pacts, said that Mr. Trump and Democrats could reach a deal next year to ensure passage of the agreement if they go further to address labor, environmental and outsourcing concerns.
“Of course, who knows what lunatic things unrelated to trade that Donald Trump might do in the meantime to derail that prospect,” she said.



Follow Peter Baker on Twitter: @peterbakernyt.

NYT

Brexit, Borders, and the Bank of England (Wonkish)

How bad will it be when Britain leaves the EU?
Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

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The Bank of England's report on the economic consequences of Brexit included some very negative scenarios.CreditCreditTolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A few days ago the Bank of England released a report on the possible macroeconomic impact of Brexit. The most pessimistic scenarios were eye-poppingly bad – see Figure 1 — showing a worse slump than the one that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Not surprisingly, Brexit opponents seized on the report, while supporters accused the BoE of engaging in scare tactics.


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Figure 1CreditBank of England
I personally think Brexit is a mistake, but was puzzled by how big some of the numbers were; I tweeted about that, and the BoE reached out to me to offer some explanation of what was going on in their analysis. What I want to do here is, first, to recount my understanding of their logic; then offer my own views on what a reasonable Brexit projection might assume for both the short and the long run.
1. Brexit according to the BoE
First things first: the people I spoke to at the BoE were adamant that they were not trying to scare people, push them into accepting Theresa May’s deal, or anything like that. By their account, this report was about financial stability, assessing the robustness of the banks in the face of possible shocks. The very negative scenarios that caught everyone’s attention weren’t projections, but rather an attempt to game out the consequences if the worst happened.

But where did these negative scenarios come from?
When economists try to assess changes in trade policy, they normally use some kind of “computable general equilibrium” (CGE) model. These models attempt to take account of the impacts of trade policy on consumption, production, and the allocation of resources. And there has been quite a lot of CGE modeling of Brexit.
This modeling is tricky because Brexit isn’t about tariffs, which we know how to represent; it’s about invisible barriers to trade arising from the end of open border to goods movements and so on. Still, plausible assumptions give us some sense of the magnitudes. My own rough estimate was 2% of GDP in perpetuity; other estimates run higher, but generally in the 3-4% range.
But the BoE’s worst-case scenario shows a cost exceeding 10% of GDP, around three times what a CGE would tell you. Where’s that coming from?
Part of the answer is that the BoE includes some non-standard effects of trade: they assume that reduced trade (and foreign direct investment) will reduce productivity more than the direct impacts on resource allocation would predict. They cite some statistical evidence, but it’s important to realize that this is black-box, reduced-form stuff: there’s no explicit mechanism through which it’s supposed to happen.
However, these assumed nonstandard effects aren’t what’s driving the really bad scenarios; they only, as I understand it, contribute something like 1 percentage point of GDP to the predicted costs.

What’s key to the very bad results is, instead, the disruption that might come with a hard Brexit. Right now, goods flow into and out of Britain with minimal frictions. After Brexit, there would have to be customs inspections, and the UK doesn’t have remotely enough customs infrastructure to do the job. The result would be huge delays at Dover and other ports, with queues of trucks backing up for many miles on motorways, just-in-time production massively disrupted, and more.
That disruption is what’s driving the terrible scenarios. Notice that this analysis says that the costs of leaving the EU are much higher than the GDP that would have been foregone if Britain had never entered the EU, and therefore had the customs infrastructure to deal with trade flows in place.
OK, that’s what I understand about the BoE analysis. What do I think about it?
2. Would it really be that bad?
So, about the BoE’s purpose in issuing this report: if it wasn’t intended to scare people, the Bank was extraordinarily naïve in not realizing how it would be reported and read. They really led with their chin here.
On the substance: I’m skeptical about the supposed effects of trade on productivity. I know that there’s some evidence for such effects; trade seems to favor more productive firms. But relying a lot on effects we can’t model seems dubious.
In particular, I have strong memories of the openness-growth debacle of the 1990s. At the time, there were many statistical studies purporting to find that open, outward oriented developing countries had much higher growth rates than inward-looking economies. This was interpreted to mean that countries that had tried to industrialize by protecting domestic markets could achieve Asian-type growth rates if they liberalized trade.
As it turned out, the supposed statistical evidence on openness and growth was quite suspect. And when massive trade liberalization happened in places like Mexico, the hoped-for growth miracles didn’t materialize.

So I would treat that channel of Brexit losses as questionable. But what I learned from the BoE is that it’s not that central to the analysis.
What about disruption at the borders? This could indeed be a huge problem.
What’s puzzling about the scenarios shown in Figure 1 is that they show these disruptions going on for multiple years, with barely any abatement. Really? Britain is an advanced country with high administrative capacity – the kind of country that history shows can cope well with huge natural disasters, and even wars. Would it really have that much trouble hiring customs inspectors and installing computers to recover from an 8 or 10 percent drop in GDP?
And even in the short run, I wonder why Britain couldn’t follow the old prescription, “When all else fails, lower your standards.” If laxer enforcement, special treatment for trusted shippers, whatever, could clear the bottlenecks at the ports, wouldn’t that be worth it, despite the potential for fraud, as a temporary measure?
That said, it’s truly amazing that Britain finds itself in this position. If the downsides are anywhere close to what the BoE asserts, given the risk – which we’ve known for a long time was substantial – of a hard Brexit, it was an act of utter folly not to have put in backup capacity at the borders. We can’t possibly be talking about all that much money, and the Brexit vote was more than two years ago. What has the UK government been doing?
All in all, it’s quite a spectacle. Whether you’re pro-Brexit or anti, you should be horrified and outraged at how the issue has been handled.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.


Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

NYT

Thursday, November 29, 2018

When MAGA Fantasy Meets Rust Belt Reality

Trump can’t run America by yelling at people. Who knew?
Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

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Union workers concerned about jobs interrupted President Trump at a rally in Ohio in early November.CreditCreditDavid Maxwell/EPA, via Shutterstock

Let’s face it: Make America Great Again was a brilliant political slogan. Why? Because it could mean different things to different people.
For many supporters of Donald Trump, MAGA was basically a promise to return to the good old days of raw racism and sexism. And Trump is delivering on that promise.
But for at least some Trump voters, it was a promise to restore the kind of economy we had 40 or 50 years ago — an economy that still offered lots of manly jobs in manufacturing and mining. Unfortunately for those who trusted Mr. Art of the Deal, Trump never had any idea how to deliver on that promise. And even if he had a clue about policymaking, he couldn’t have changed the long-term trajectory of our economy, which is moving steadily away from making physical stuff and toward providing services.
As a result, Trump, who cares above all about image, is now getting headlines that make a mockery of his campaign posturing — headlines about closing auto plants and lost jobs. Now, autos are a special case; overall manufacturing employment is still rising, although not especially fast. But relative to his grand promises, what’s happening is an embarrassing bust.

Why was the vision of revived manufacturing nonsense? Talking about what Donald Trump doesn’t know is, of course, a vast task, since his ignorance is both broad and deep. But he seems to have misunderstood three specific things about manufacturing.
First, he believes that trade deficits are the reason we’ve shifted away from manufacturing. But they aren’t.
To be fair, those deficits have played some role in shrinking U.S. industrial employment. If we could eliminate our current trade imbalance, we’d probably have around 20 percent more workers in the manufacturing sector than we actually do. But that would reverse only a small part of manufacturing’s relative decline, from more than a quarter of the work force in 1970 to less than 10 percent now.
Indeed, even countries that run huge trade surpluses, like Germany, have seen big declines in manufacturing as a share of employment. Trade just isn’t the main story. What’s happening instead is that as overall spending grows, an increasing share goes to services, not goods. Consumption of manufactured goods keeps rising, but technological progress lets us produce those goods with ever fewer workers; so the economy shifts toward services.
By the way, if you want to know what “services” means: Of the four occupations the Department of Labor expects to add the most jobs over the next decade, three are some kind of nursing (food workers are the fourth). And if you can’t imagine how a prosperous economy can be built on services, bear in mind that health care is a large source of middle-class jobs, and could provide even more with the right policies.

Still, even if trade deficits are a distinctly secondary cause of manufacturing decline, can’t Trump help a little by getting tough on foreigners? That brings us to his second fallacy: No, trade deficits aren’t caused by unfair foreign trade practices.
The truth is that while tariffs and so on can affect trade in particular industries, the overall trade balance mainly reflects exchange rates, which in turn are mainly driven by capital flows: The dollar is strong because foreigners want to buy U.S. assets. And Trump’s policies — tax cuts for corporations, big deficits that drive up interest rates — are so far making the dollar even stronger.
Finally, Trump’s angry reaction to auto plant closings is a reminder of his third big policy misunderstanding: He believes that you can run the economy by yelling at people.
Why is he wrong? It’s not just that businesses have learned to discount his threats. More important, our economy is too big to make policy by singling out individual companies and ranting. How big is it? Around 1.7 million U.S. workers are fired or laid off every month. So even a president who spent less time golfing couldn’t bully or threaten enough employers to make a significant difference to the labor market.
Or to put it differently, running America isn’t like running a family business. It has to be done by setting broad policies and sticking to them, not by browbeating a few people whenever you see a bad headline.
So Trump’s promise to restore U.S. manufacturing was doomed to fail. Why did he make it in the first place?
For what it’s worth, I suspect that in this case Trump wasn’t actually trying to scam voters. My guess is that he genuinely believed that he could bring manufacturing, coal mining and so on roaring back, that others had failed to do so only because they weren’t tough enough.

You might wonder where his confidence came from, given how little he obviously knows about economics. The answer, probably, is the Dunning-Kruger effect: inept people are often confident in their abilities, because they’re too inept to know how badly they’re doing.
But the real question isn’t whether Trump will ever realize that he doesn’t know how to MAGA. It’s whether and when his supporters will figure it out. I guess we’ll learn the answer in the months ahead.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.


Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

NYT

How a Trump Lawyer, a Felon and a Russian General Chased a Moscow Deal

Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of President Trump’s, drew on deep Russian contacts to pursue a real estate deal during the 2016 campaign. One of those contacts was a former intelligence official in Russia.
When Donald J. Trump took a run at building a tower in Moscow in the middle of his 2016 presidential campaign, it was the high point of a decades-long effort to plant the “Trump” flag there.
The role his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen played in the endeavor entered the spotlight again on Thursday after he pleaded guilty to misleading Congress. But the effort was led in large part by Felix Sater, a convicted felon and longtime business associate with deep ties to Russia.
To get the project off the ground, Mr. Sater dug into his address book and its more than 100 Russian contacts — including entries for President Vladimir V. Putin and a former general in Russian military intelligence. Mr. Sater tapped the general, Evgeny Shmykov, to help arrange visas for Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump to visit Russia, according to emails and interviews with several people knowledgeable about the events.
The president’s former lawyer Michael D. Cohen, who pleaded guilty on Thursday to misleading Congress about his role in trying to secure a Trump Tower project in Moscow.CreditAndrew Kelly/Reuters
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The president’s former lawyer Michael D. Cohen, who pleaded guilty on Thursday to misleading Congress about his role in trying to secure a Trump Tower project in Moscow.CreditAndrew Kelly/Reuters
For months, the felon, the former Russian intelligence officer and Mr. Trump’s lawyer worked to land the deal, speaking with a Putin aide, Russian bankers and real estate developers. But by July 2016, with Mr. Trump having secured the Republican presidential nomination and accusations of Russian election interference heating up, the project was abandoned, and neither Mr. Cohen nor Mr. Trump traveled to Moscow.
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The improbable story of the Trump Tower Moscow deal was thrust onto center stage again Thursday after Mr. Cohen admitted lying to Congress about his role in the project. Mr. Cohen told the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that his involvement went on far longer, and his contacts with Russians and briefings to Mr. Trump were more frequent, than he had previously claimed.
Mr. Cohen’s recollections, disclosed in a court filing on Thursday, as well as documents related to Mr. Sater’s work for the Trump Organization that were obtained by The New York Times, provide a fuller picture of Mr. Trump’s pursuit of business in Moscow.
His effort in 2016 was only the latest episode in a long, sporadic quest dating to the 1980s. But as the Trump brand became increasingly common, emblazoning hotels and commercial towers around the world, a Russian equivalent never quite came together — even after Mr. Trump secured trademarks in the country and sent emissaries, including his children, to scout for deals.
Mr. Sater tapped Evgeny Shmykov, a former general in Russian military intelligence, to help with the Moscow project.
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Mr. Sater tapped Evgeny Shmykov, a former general in Russian military intelligence, to help with the Moscow project.
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One deal that almost got off the ground in 2005 — a Moscow tower on the site of a former pencil factory — was also pitched by Mr. Sater, an American citizen who immigrated as a child from Russia. He was working at the time for Bayrock Group, a development company that teamed up with Mr. Trump on several hotel projects in the United States.
Mr. Sater, who sometimes carried a business card identifying him as a “senior adviser” to Mr. Trump, pursued Russian deals throughout the 2000s. On one visit in which he was accompanied by Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, he arranged for Ms. Trump to sit in Mr. Putin’s chair during a tour of the Kremlin, he said in emails to Mr. Cohen.
Mr. 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 was previously convicted after slashing a man’s face in a Manhattan bar fight in 1991.) 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.”
One of his contacts was Mr. Shmykov, who worked with anti-Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in the late 1990s and early 2000s while serving in Russian military intelligence, according to documents and online research. Mr. Shmykov, who is 62, has a profile on a Russian social media site that says he attended the Academy of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, which trains intelligence personnel.
Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. during a trip to Moscow.
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Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. during a trip to Moscow.
Contacted by The Times, Mr. Shmykov declined to answer questions, but directed a reporter to photos of his time in the military, including one in which he appears with Mr. Sater, saying, “In these photographs are answers to all your questions.” Mr. Sater declined to comment.
Mr. Sater enlisted Mr. Shmykov in late 2015, when, with the United States presidential race well underway, he was making his latest push for a Trump Tower deal in Moscow. Mr. Sater had been exchanging emails and phone calls with Mr. Cohen about resurrecting plans for the tower. The two men were friends, and Mr. Sater seemed almost giddy as he explained to Mr. Cohen how he would use his connections to “get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.”
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Mr. Cohen emailed Mr. Sater in December 2015, linking to a news story about Mr. Putin praising Mr. Trump. In the email, Mr. Cohen said: “Now is the time. Call me.”
A couple of days later, according to copies of emails reviewed by The Times, Mr. Sater emailed Mr. Cohen with an urgent request. He said that he had Mr. Shmykov on the phone, and that he needed passport information for Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump so they could receive visas. Mr. Sater explained that the Kremlin could not issue them for diplomatic reasons, and that they would instead come from VTB bank as part of “a business meeting not political.”
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, right, with his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. Mr. Peskov had an aide contact Mr. Cohen to discuss the tower project.CreditMikhail Klimentyev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, right, with his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. Mr. Peskov had an aide contact Mr. Cohen to discuss the tower project.CreditMikhail Klimentyev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The chairman of VTB, one of the largest state-owned banks in Russia, has denied that his bank was involved in the project.
Mr. Sater later testified to the House Intelligence Committee that the tone of his emails reflected overeagerness on his part, and that he did not really have serious ties to the Kremlin. He said his suggestion that the tower deal could help Mr. Trump get elected simply meant that he believed it would generate positive publicity for the campaign.
In their report on Russian interference in the election, committee Republicans accepted assertions by Mr. Cohen and Mr. Sater that the Trump Tower project was a business venture with no political overtones. The report — which makes no mention of Mr. Shmykov or his role — concluded that no “element of the Russian government was actually directly involved in the project.”
Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea on Thursday casts that conclusion in a new light. Among other things, Mr. Cohen now admits that he tried multiple times to reach Mr. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, who had an aide contact Mr. Cohen to discuss the tower project. Mr. Cohen said he had a 20-minute conversation with the Kremlin aide in January 2016, who “asked detailed questions and took notes, stating that she would follow up with others in Russia.”
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In a message to Mr. Cohen the next day, Mr. Sater mentioned Mr. Putin and said he had heard from someone about the project: “They called today.” Later, in May 2016, he told Mr. Cohen that a Russian official had invited the lawyer to an economic forum in St. Petersburg, where it was hoped he could meet Mr. Putin.
Mr. Cohen initially agreed, but later met with Mr. Sater in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York and said he would not be going.
Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting.

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