All eyes have been focused on Houston this week as Hurricane Harvey killed at least 35 people and caused catastrophic flooding. But the investigations into possible ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continue, with a number of potentially significant developments emerging in the past few days. Here’s a look at what happened.

Pressure on Manafort

The team of prosecutors working under the special counsel Robert Mueller is cooperating with New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, to investigate the former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his business dealings, Politico reported. Mueller is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to sway the election in his favor.

Schneiderman’s presence – as a state attorney general – is potentially significant because the president’s power to issue a pardon applies only to federal crimes, not state convictions (hypothetical, in this case).



Cooperation by Manafort with investigators could be damaging to Trump. Manafort and Trump have denied any wrongdoing.

Schneiderman is something of a nemesis to Trump, who has accused the attorney general of carrying out a political vendetta against him. Schneiderman brought a class-action fraud lawsuit against Trump University in 2013, which was resolved in a $25m settlement 10 days after the election.

Trump sought Moscow tower deal

Early in the presidential campaign, Trump signed a non-binding letter of intent to build a tower in Moscow, his lawyer, Michael Cohen, confirmed in a statement to ABC News. This despite Trump’s claiming during the campaign that he “knows nothing about Russia”, has “no loans” and “no deals” there. In the absence of his tax returns, which the president refuses to publish, the truth of Trump’s holdings is unknown.

Cohen said: “The Trump Moscow proposal was simply one of many development opportunities that the Trump Organization considered and ultimately rejected.” It separately emerged, however, that Cohen had written an email asking for help with the deal to a top Vladimir Putin aide in January 2016, in a previously undisclosed example of direct contact between the Trump Organization (Cohen was vice-president at the time) and Moscow during the US presidential campaign.

“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,” the Washington Post quoted the email as saying. “Without getting into lengthy specifics, the communication between our two sides has stalled.” No tower was ever built.

Trump associate’s email: ‘I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected’

A former broker for the Trump organization, Felix Sater, who also helped to develop Trump’s SoHo hotel tower in Manhattan, wrote an email to Cohen related to the same Moscow tower deal on 3 November 2015, obtained by the New York Times, that read in part:

Michael I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.

In a statement, Cohen said that Sater, whom he has known since their teenage years in Brooklyn and Long Island, was practicing salesmanship and exaggerating what he could do. Trump has denied familiarity with Sater, saying in a 2013 court deposition: “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” The two are pictured together below, in 2007.

Donald Trump, Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater attend the Trump SoHo launch party on 19 September 2007 in New York. Photograph: Mark Von Holden/WireImage

Separately, Ivanka Trump said she could not recall sitting in Putin’s chair. At the time the email was sent, there had been four Republican primary debates and the former and current governors Rick Perry and Scott Walker had already dropped out of the race.

The overarching allegation that investigators are exploring is that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to tip the election, which could violate campaign finance laws and carry other charges. It is not clear that Sater’s email indicates collusion. Sater has not said whether he is talking to Mueller. Read a Guardian interview with Felix Sater.

Cohen denies collusion

In a letter to Congress, Cohen rebutted point-by-point allegations in a dossier assembled by a former British intelligence agent that he had participated in collusion between Moscow and the Trump presidential campaign. In the letter, Cohen repeatedly denies having made a trip to Prague, Czech Republic, to meet with Kremlin emissaries, a denial the letter says can be proven by Cohen’s passport. The Daily Beast obtained a copy of the letter.

Grand jury interviews Trump Tower meeting figure

A grand jury used by Mueller has taken secret testimony from Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian American lobbyist who attended a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr, the Associated Press reported. Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner also attended the meeting.

Trump Jr took the meeting on the promise of damaging information about Hillary Clinton provided by Russian agents. Investigators are trying to figure out what information, if any, changed hands at the meeting, which was followed soon after by the release of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. The Trump campaign denies any collusion with Russian agents.

Trump contacts judiciary chairman after news that son will meet committee

Trump called senator Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the judiciary committee, a day after reports that Donald Trump Jr would meet with the committee behind closed doors to talk about Russia.

In the call, Trump promised Grassley critical federal support for the biofuel ethanol, a key issue for the lawmaker, reported the Guardian.

A spokesman for Grassley said by email: “The president called Senator Grassley and talked briefly about ethanol. It was a two-minute conversation. Senator Grassley told the president he was glad to hear him voice his support for ethanol and that he would tweet about it to the people of Iowa. Nothing more specific about ethanol policies came up. The other topics that came up were Hurricane Harvey and Ambassador Branstad in China.”

Terry Branstad, a former governor of Iowa, is Trump’s new ambassador to China.



Trump lawyers met Mueller team to deny obstruction of justice

Lawyers for the president have met multiple times with the special counsel and delivered memos defending their client, the Wall Street Journal reported. One memo reportedly argues that Trump did not obstruct justice when he fired FBI director James Comey because he has an inherent power under the constitution to hire and fire at will. A second memo was described by the Journal’s sources as arguing that Comey is not a reliable witness to the special counsel investigation, “calling him prone to exaggeration, unreliable in congressional testimony and the source of leaks to the news media”.

The meetings seem to indicate that the Mueller investigation is focused on the president’s conduct and is specifically considering obstruction of justice allegations, a charge that figured largely in impeachment proceedings against both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. The perceived integrity of Comey’s testimony is important because the nature of his private conversations with Trump could constitute key evidence for prosecutors building an argument about Trump’s motives.

More to come …

Sater predicted in an email to the Guardian: “[T]here are many additional stories that will be coming out about me in the future, much more timely and important than 20-year-old stock cases.”