“Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower-Moscow project in Moscow City,” Cohen wrote to Peskov, The Washington Post reported. “Without getting into lengthy specifics, the communication between our two sides has stalled.” But the Times notes that Cohen’s message was sent to a general inbox, rather than to a direct email address for Peskov. Cohen says he never received a reply from Peskov. He says he also never made the trip to Russia that Sater urged.

These developments do not fit into the story of the Russia investigation in any clean way. Sater’s message to Cohen suggests close ties to the Kremlin, of course, and his choice of words is peculiar: Though the Times suggests that Sater believed that developing a skyscraper in Moscow would deliver the presidency to Trump, that makes little sense. Trump was already well-known for building skyscrapers, any project would have taken years to complete, and it’s not like most American voters would ever see a high-rise in the Russian capital.

Given that emails about Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower included the intimation that the Russian government supported Trump’s run for office, Sater’s statement that they could “engineer” Trump’s election with the help of “Putins team” is peculiar, but it could also just reflect the poor political instincts of a man prone to wild and unrealistic schemes. And Cohen’s amateurish outreach to Peskov, using a general account, suggests that in January 2016, at least, the Trump team had no easy access to Putin and his inner circle.

Yet as with the June 2016 Trump Jr. meeting, one thing that stands out is the eagerness among Trump’s inner circle to get close to Russia, a major American geopolitical rival. Just as Cohen says he never heard back from Peskov, and scuttled the project that same month, Trump Jr. said he never received the promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton after the June 2016 meeting. If the Trump team did not collude with the Russian government, it was not because of its unwillingness to try. (As in that case, it is remarkable what figures around Trump were willing to put into writing, despite the shadowy nature of their work and Trump’s long history of litigation, as both a plaintiff and a defendant.)

Moreover, the episode again underscores the problems with Trump’s decision not to separate his business from himself. On the one hand, Trump used his supposed business prowess as the fundamental basis for his campaign, saying that his experience as a mogul both qualified him to run the government, and would also isolate him from the influence of special interests. Yet during the presidential campaign, Trump was lavishing praise on Putin even as he was attempting to complete a deal in Russia. And now that he is in office, Trump refuses to truly separate himself from his business empire, yet wants the public to accept that the actions his business took were entirely separate from his political work.