In a fateful private White House dinner early last year, President Donald Trump raised with then-FBI Director James Comey the issue of “the golden showers thing”—a particularly salacious portion of an intelligence dossier claiming Trump hired Russian prostitutes to urinate on a Moscow hotel-room bed in 2013, while he was in town for the Miss Universe pageant.
According to Comey’s memos about that conversation, Trump claimed it was impossible for him to have done any such thing, because “he had spoken to people who had been on... the trip with him and they had reminded him that he didn’t stay over night in Russia for that.”
All available evidence proves otherwise—from flight records obtained by Politico to social media posts from the time to testimony from Trump’s own bodyguard. And now there’s more proof.
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Thomas Roberts, host of that year’s Miss Universe pageant, confirmed to The Daily Beast on Tuesday that Trump was in Moscow for one full night and at least part of another.
“The first time I met Donald Trump it was in Moscow on November 8th, 2013,” the former NBC anchor said. “I taped a sit-down interview with Trump the next day on November 9th. That was also the date for the Miss Universe broadcast.”
Roberts continued: “During the after-party for the Miss Universe event, Mr. Trump offered to fly me and my husband back to New York. He said he would be leaving directly from the party. We were unable to accept the invitation. That was the early morning hours of November 10th.”
Roberts’ retelling of those days in Moscow represents one of the first public contradictions of the timeline Trump offered Comey. While it does not necessarily prove the existence of a so-called pee tape, it does raise further questions as to why the president misled his one-time FBI director in the first place.
The findings of the dossier have already been of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, with news emerging a few weeks ago that it had corroborated portions of the explosive document.
Asked whether he has been interviewed by Mueller’s team, Roberts told The Daily Beast: “No comment.”
