During Donald Trump’s early November trip to Moscow, he attends a party thrown in his honor at “The Library,” a room in the Baltschug / Balchug-Kempinski Hotel. The hotel is owned by Semion Mogilevich.
Mogilevich also owns Balchug, Ltd., a furniture-manufacturing company in London, United Kingdom, and the Balchug-Kempinski Hotel and Casino in Moscow, Russia.
DOJ / FBI: Semion Mogilevich Organization, 1996, p. 23
At the party, Trump begins a relationship with a Russian woman who may have been an associate of Mogilevich. Her name is redacted from the 2020 Senate Intelligence report.
Trump may have begun a brief relationship with a Russian woman
named [redacted]. Theodore Liebman, an architect who lived in Moscow and New York in the 1990s, and who traveled to Russia with Trump and the other investors from the Brooke Group, attended the event. According to Liebman, shortly before the party Geovanis had a chance encounter with [redacted] who Geovanis knew, and Geovanis invited her to the Brooke Group party…Surran told the Committee that, based on what Geovanis told him, “I think Trump and [redacted] might have had a brief romantic relationship,” and that “[Geovanis] said then that he saw them before he left and then he saw them again together … I’m not sure if it was the next day or a subsequent day or whatever. I do remember he said that he saw them together.”
U.S. Senate Report
The Geovanis referred to above is David Geovanis, a “Moscow-based U.S. businessman who holds a Russian passport and may be a dual U.S.-Russian citizen” who claims that he is “aware of Trump engaging in personal relationships with Russian women” during Trump’s visits to Moscow in 1996 and 2013. Geovanis also suggests the Russian government knows about the relationships.
The woman mentions Donald Trump in a 2007 interview.
With some I was briefly met by chance, while others there was a much longer relationship due to mutual affection. For example, Trump is a person who I like very much. I cannot call him a friend, because we do not call up and do not meet daily, but perhaps [if] we would live in the same city (I am in New York or he would be in Los Angeles), we would communicate more closely. Let’s just say we are on a friendly footing.
U.S. Senate Report
In addition to Geovanis, Trump also met with Leon Black and American investor Bennett LeBow in Moscow. Though it’s not mentioned in the report, Black is a colleague of Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein is listed as the director of Black’s charity foundation and works for Black for at least 15 years. In the 2010s, Black funnels millions of dollars into Epstein’s fraudulent Virgin Islands bank, the Southern Trust Company.
Bennett LeBow has been “developing and investing in real estate for a Russian-American joint venture called Liggett-Ducat and for Brookemil Ltd.” He’s in business with a Ukrainian mafia head who knows Mogilevich. For more on this trip and another Mogilevich figure Trump meets, read here.
External Sources
Senate Intelligence Report, PDF
FBI Document on Mogilevich Organization, Archived
New York Times – Epstein & Black (Archived)
New York Times – Epstein & Black 2 (Archived)
Other sources listed on Trump meets son of Mogilevich’s NYC underboss
Photo: Senate Intelligence Report
