Ivanka Trump, President Trump’s eldest daughter and a White House adviser, said Friday she knew very little about the controversial Trump Tower Moscow project and downplayed the importance of the potential deal.
Ms. Trump told ABC News’ “Good Morning America” that she knew “literally almost nothing” about the project that the Trump Organization was exploring that overlapped with the early part of the 2016 presidential election.
“There was never a binding contract. I never talked to the — with a third party outside of the organization about it,” she said. “I mean, we could have had 40 or 50 deals like that, that were floating around, that somebody was looking at. Nobody visited it to see if it was worth our time. So this was not exactly like an advanced project.”
The project was revealed when the president’s former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the prospective deal to be consistent with the Trump campaign’s “political messaging.”
“There’s nothing there, yet it’s created weeks and weeks and months of headlines,” she said. “So no, I have zero concerns.”
Ms. Trump downplayed the project by arguing that many companies have property in Russia.
“We’re not talking about Iran. It was Russia,” she said. “And we weren’t even advanced enough that anyone had even visited the prospective project site.”
In other interviews, Mr. Trump has brushed off the project as a business deal that went nowhere.
When asked if she has any concerns about her loved ones being entangled as the special counsel investigation draws to a close, Ms. Trump said she’s not worried.
“I’m not. I’m really not,” she said.
• Gabriella Muñoz can be reached at gmunoz@washingtontimes.com.
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