Documents disclosed this week show just how far former Trump Organization adviser and convicted felon Felix Sater will go to help his one-time business associate President Donald Trump. In emails released by The New York Times on Monday, Sater bragged to the president’s lawyer in 2015 that, with Kremlin help, “our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it.”
Now a dive into Sater’s history on the web and in courts suggests the lengths Sater is prepared to go to damage a man who tangled in the courtroom with him and Trump.
Sater used his email and office address to register websites including IAmAFaggot.com, IAmADirtbag.com, several variations of FecalBoy.com and FecalMatter.info, CuntMan.net, Blackmailer.net, VaginaBoy.com, and dozens of other crudely named domains.
ADVERTISEMENT
While registered to Sater, some of those sites attacked Jody Kriss, Sater’s former business associate. The two used to work together at the Trump Tower-headquartered real-estate firm Bayrock, where Kriss served as a finance director until he left the company and sued them for money laundering, according to Bloomberg. Donald Trump was initially targeted in court by Kriss, as well.
Sater’s email and office address were used to register more than a dozen domain names relating to Kriss. Those sites then attacked Kriss for a lawsuit mentioning the Trump family, among others. That’s according to records The Daily Beast discovered using the domain analysis site DomainTools, which tracks changes in official domain registrar databases.
Despite this, Sater’s attorney, Robert Wolf, claimed in an email to The Daily Beast that “Mr. Sater neither owns nor is associated with these websites. Publishing anything to the contrary is defamatory and in reckless disregard for the truth.”
“Your information is completely false and inaccurate,” he added.
Wolf did not give any evidence to back up that assertion.
Many of Sater’s anti-Kriss sites have been pulled down, but the sites that remain, including EastRiverPartners.org, still direct to a screed slamming Kriss, who owns the real-estate firm East River Partners.
“Meet Jody Kriss, the man who, with his associate Michael Chudi Ejekam, sued PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP and his daughter Ivanka, along with half a dozen law firms, dozens of individuals and companies, such as CIM Group and iStar Financial, as well as a New York State Senator for $1 BILLION,” EastRiverPartners.org reads.
Archived versions of Sater’s other sites—including IAmAFaggot.com—show they once contained at least some of the same information.
Kriss filed a $1 billion New York state lawsuit another against Bayrock, Donald and Ivanka Trump, and many others in May 2013, over the alleged concealment of Sater’s 1998 racketeering conviction. The Trumps were dropped from the suit three weeks later.
Kriss and others filed a $1 billion New York state lawsuit another against Bayrock, Sater, and others in May 2013, over the alleged concealment of Sater’s 1998 racketeering conviction. Donald and Ivanka Trump were also listed on the suit as a type of defendant; the plaintiffs asked the judge to find whether they might also be owed declaratory relief. The Trumps were dropped from the suit three weeks later.
Litigation between Kriss and Sater is ongoing, Bloomberg reported.
Donald Trump has long tried to distance himself publicly from Felix Sater, a convicted felon (he avoided jail time by helping the feds in their pursuit of various mafiosi) and childhood friend of longtime Trump Organization vice president Michael Cohen. (Cohen is now Trump’s personal attorney.)
On Monday morning, congressional investigators received emails from Cohen and Sater related to Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 elections. Excerpts from some of those emails quickly leaked to a number of media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg.
Those emails, which have not been released in full, indicate that Sater and his acquaintances worked much more closely with powerful Russian figures than previously known.
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater emailed Cohen in November 2015, according to The New York Times. Sater wrote, according to the Times, that he “will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected… I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
Months later, Cohen asked Vladimir Putin’s spokespeople to help expedite the development of Trump Tower Moscow, a project that never came to fruition.
“As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals,” Cohen wrote to an email account for the Kremlin press office, obtained by The Washington Post. “I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon.”
He sent that email in January 2016, when Trump was leading the rest of the Republican primary field by double digits.
According to Bloomberg, Cohen told Congress he discussed the possibility of Trump Tower Moscow with Trump himself during the campaign.
By this time, Sater was already at war with Kriss, his former associate at Bayrock.
Bayrock is a real-estate investment firm founded by Kazakh businessman Tevfik Arif. Among other deals, Bayrock was involved in a Florida Trump International Hotel and Tower development that never came to fruition.
It was hardly the pair’s only legal clash. Kriss sued the owners of various websites containing Kriss’ name, like JodyKriss.com, for including disparaging information about him and was able to get the sites delisted from Google, Bloomberg reported. Using a court order, Kriss said he tracked the registration of the sites back to Sater’s address in Sands Point, New York.
The domain names and email addresses were registered using the same address Sater used to register his personal website, FelixSater.com, in 2013, according to ICANN records accessed through DomainTools. ICANN is the nonprofit responsible for allocating namespaces on the web, and domain record history can only be modified by registration companies themselves.
Sater admitted to owning several Kriss-linked domains—including JodyKriss.com and EastRiverPartners.net—in a separate lawsuit asking a court to find that he registered them “in good faith.”
In 2016, Kriss filed a complaint to have domains referencing his name or company transferred to his ownership. The complaint triggered a lawsuit against Kriss by the three parties who claimed to own the domains: Sater, a company owned by Konstantin Yudin, and Larissa Yudina, who Yudin says is his mother.
Yudin’s email address was sometimes listed as the technical contact in the domain registration data of some of the inflammatory websites.
"Each of the Disputed Domains was registered and is used solely for the noncommercial and fair use purpose of expressing First Amendment protected dissemination of factual information and expressions of opinion regarding [Kriss’s] activities,” Sater’s suit read.
Kriss’ lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wolf, the attorney who denied Sater’s involvement with the websites, served as Sater, Yudin, and Yudina’s attorney in the lawsuit, according to public records.
When reached by phone, Yudin initially said his mother wasn’t home. He later said he had no comment on the domain names or his relationship with Sater.
When asked about some of the obscenity-laden domain names, Yudin again refused to comment.
“Well that’s a puzzle for you to wonder about,” he said in Russian.
Some of the websites registered to Sater were pretty puzzling, too. In one archived front page of MafiaFront.com, which was registered to Sater’s email address, a post titled “Jody Kriss: Lying to Improve His Reputation?" blares at the top. Underneath it, an attempt at a meme reads, “If I was a dog, I'd be a shit-sue because I'm a shit and I love to sue!—Jody Kriss,” over a photo of Kriss on a boat in Turkey.
On the top right corner, the page links to an English-language interview between two unidentified Russian men titled “Jody Kriss on Russian radio.”
“The story really did attract my attention for one thing: because of the ping-pong, if one may say so, of various lawsuits that swarm like flies around Jody Kriss,” said an unidentified man named Volodja, a common nickname for Vladimir in Russia. “Jody Kriss took to sue Donald Trump and Ivanka Trump as well as a dozen other people for $1 billion, no more, no less.”
The audio file was posted in August 2014, a year before Trump began running for president. It was posted on a Soundcloud account under the username JodyKriss, which has added no other files.
“Any of our listeners can just punch Jody Kriss’ name into search engines and see a huge number of links and stories of lawsuits and scandals. He’s suing everyone and everyone is suing him,” Volodja says. “It’s something unbelievable.”
Update: This story has been updated with more information on the Trumps’ involvement in the Kriss lawsuit.
