Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he didn’t spend a night in Moscow on his 2013 trip to the Miss Universe contest, so the Night of the Golden Shower as described in the Steele Dossier is not possible. Trump has not only said this publicly, it’s what he told James Comey when Comey was still the FBI director.
“He said he had spoken to people who had been on the Miss Universe trip with him and they had reminded him that he didn’t stay overnight in Russia for that,” Comey recounted from his Jan. 28, 2017 dinner with the president. “He said he arrived in the morning, did events, then showered and dressed for the pageant at the hotel (he didn’t say the hotel name) and left for the pageant. Afterwards, he returned only to get his things because they departed for New York by plane that same night.”
There has never been serious doubt that Trump spent the night, but now Bloomberg has looked at the details of flight records to piece together that weekend, and in a way Trump is right. He didn’t spend one night in Moscow. He spent two.
The Bombardier jet landed in Moscow at 6:15 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 8. From Vnukovo airport, it’s less than an hour’s drive to the Ritz-Carlton hotel, where Trump stayed, according to the pageant’s host, developer Aras Agalarov. …
Ruffin’s Bombardier took off from Vnukovo airport at 3:58 a.m. Moscow time, the records show.
That’s 3:58 AM on Sunday morning. Trump was in Moscow all day Friday, Friday night, all day Saturday, and into the wee hours of Sunday morning. So to speak.
@AgalarovAras I had a great weekend with you and your family. You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next. EMIN was WOW!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2013
The original collection of memos by Christopher Steele contained this section:
… there were other aspects to TRUMP’S engagement with Russian authorities. One of which had borne fruit for them was to exploit TRUMP’S personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable “kompromat” (compromising material) on him. According to Source D, where s/he had been present, TRUMP’S (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) shows in front of him. The hotel was known to be under [Russian Federal Security Service] control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.
Trump absolutely stayed at the Ritz-Carlton on Friday night before the pageant, and may well have stayed there again on Saturday night before heading out for his early flight.
The one thing that’s absolutely clear is that Trump’s statement that he did not stay overnight in Moscow is a lie. Times two.
This is a Creative Commons article. The original version of this article appeared here.
