Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

The rain started falling on Trump Tower on January 12, 2017, the day Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that a top aide to President-elect Donald Trump had spoken about sanctions relief with Russia's ambassador to the United States.

The rain has never stopped since, coming in sprinkles, sometimes in sheets, other times in icy soakers. But instead of washing Trump Tower spring-shower clean, the rain has coated Trump's proudest creation in the grime of scandal. The president’s showcase skyscraper in midtown Manhattan has now taken its place in U.S. history with Watergate, Whitewater, Teapot Dome and Chappaquiddick to serve as a synonym for something politically shady. For reasons indecipherable, attachment of a place name to a scandal lends it a physicality that helps us grasp it in its totality. The unimaginative have appended the -gate suffix to scandals, giving us “Koreagate,” “Debategate,” “Chinagate,” “Irangate,” “Nannygate,” “Travelgate,” “Troopergate” and other gates. Some would have us call our current scandal “Russiagate,” but for reason of self-respect we must reject it because a better place moniker exists to describe all the Trump improprieties orbiting around Russia. Location being everything, let’s agree to ditch the puns and wordplay and dub this scandal and all its heirs and forebears for the man and his signature moment in steel and glass: Trump Tower.


Trump Tower was, of course, the scene of the still mysterious June 2016 meeting Trump's son, son-in-law and campaign director took with a bevy of Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. It's the place where convicted felon, Trump business associate and Russian-American Felix Sater "frequently" popped into Trump's office to talk real estate and Russia deals. The building's namesake, Trump Tower Moscow, which the president first started talking about constructing with Azerbaijani-Russian real estate developer Araz Agalarov, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in 2013 has further besmirched the original's reputation: This week we learned that despite Trump's continued denials that he had any business commitments in Russia, he was plotting a Trump Tower Moscow while running for president.

Sater was close enough to Trump to have escorted Trump offspring Donald Jr. and Ivanka on a 2006 Moscow trip. "I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins [sic] private chair at his desk in the Kremlin," he said in an email to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that has been turned over to the House Intelligence Committee. He bragged to Cohen about how he could obtain a Russian partner for the new tower. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in a November 2015 message. “I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.” In a press statement this week, Sater was still laying it on thick about the development, saying the plan was to build "the world's tallest building in Moscow" when a simple "tallest building in Moscow" would have sufficed.

Cohen now concedes that he discussed Trump Tower Moscow with Trump at least three times between September 2015 and January 2016, roughly the period between the beginning of debate season and the landing of campaign troops in Iowa. In January 2016, Cohen sent an email to a top aide to Putin asking for help on the project. This concession comes after repeated assertions by Cohen that Trump had no Russia connections. Trump once told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that his businesses had “no relationship to Russia whatsoever.” It's a tune that Trump and his associates have sung repeatedly.

This week, the Huffington Post's Vicky Ward asked Cohen what getting caught in this crossfire of contradictions felt like. "I feel great," he said across the table at a coffee shop in the sunny Hamptons. “I am in many respects just like the president. Nothing seems to rattle me, no matter how bad the hate.” In a statement, Cohen discounted the hyperbole in the Sater emails as an example of his "salesmanship."

You may, however, prefer the way the New York Times put it—that the Sater emails establish that "from the earliest months of Mr. Trump's campaign, his associates viewed close ties with Moscow as a political advantage."

Wearing a pair of Gore-Tex mukluks, special counsel Robert Mueller waded into the gushing Trump Tower scandal, making incremental progress. He subpoenaed Paul Manafort's former lawyer and a former spokesman as part of his probe of the former Trump aide's business and tax dealings. His investigators were also asking questions about the president's knowledge about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, and whether he sought to conceal its purpose. And POLITICO reported that his team had joined forces with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on the Manafort investigation. Trump can't pardon those convicted of state crimes, all noted.

Big storms have a way of striking not once but twice. Mueller's probe gathered additional force at week's end when news surfaced that he had obtained the first draft of the letter Trump co-authored with aide Stephen Miller to fire FBI Director James Comey. The letter could be key in proving that the Comey firing constituted obstruction of justice. Trump had previously held that Comey's sacking was the product of consultations with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The letter that Trump cited recommending the firing, written by Rosenstein, criticized Comey's handling of the Hillary Clinton email-server investigation. The draft shows that Trump had decided to ax Comey before speaking to Sessions and Rosenstein and may help Mueller prove a purer motive—that Trump acted to blunt Comey's Russia investigation.

As the Trump Tower storm rages, the president's attorneys have met with Mueller several times, peppering his team with memos insisting on their client's innocence of any obstruction, the Wall Street Journal reported in a Page One story. But all the president's lawyers can't keep the rain—the greasy, filthifying rain—from falling on the president. Like its Texas cousin, the Trump Tower storm just seems to acquire additional power each day, redrenching the president in scandal every time he looks up from his Twitter account. The floodwaters of scandal have breached the Trump Tower lobby and are rising.

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"All the animals come out at night," the man once said. "Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets." Send your storm-chasing clips to [email protected]. My email alerts carry umbrellas. My Twitter feed wears a mac. My RSS feed strips naked and goes with the flow.