Ex-Trump Affiliate Secretly Worked With Prosecutors, FBI and CIA for Years
Source: Wall Street Journal
Russian-born businessman Felix Sater went above and beyond in cooperating after facing fraud charges in 1998, unsealed letter shows.
A Russian-born businessman at the center of a plan to build a Trump -branded tower in Moscow spied for U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, providing cooperation at a breadth rarely seen against mobsters and others in matters unrelated to the president, federal prosecutors wrote in a newly unsealed letter.
Felix Sater, a former business associate of President Trump, began working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1998, after he was caught in a stock-fraud scheme. As he pleaded guilty, Mr. Sater turned on his co-conspirators, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn wrote in an Aug. 27, 2009, letter, unsealed Friday, to U.S. District Judge I. Leo Glasser, who was overseeing the case. He had gone on to assist various agencies in different areas of law enforcement for years, they wrote.
Sater went above and beyond what is expected of most cooperators and placed himself in great jeopardy in doing so, the prosecutors wrote in pushing for him to get a lighter sentence. On the strength of his continuing cooperation, they had put off his sentencing for more than a decade, an unusually long period for such arrangements.
In an interview, Mr. Sater said he assisted the government primarily to help his country and to compensate for the crimes of his youth, rather than solely to avoid prison, though that was a factor.
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