A neglected point from the Buzzfeed report on Trump Tower Moscow: Sater says he was never told the deal was OFF: When Cohen bailed on the June 2016 to Russia, he explained it as a POSTPONEMENT until after the RNC. buzzfeednews.com/article/anthon…
Sater only concluded it wasn’t happening—on his own, not because Trump Org formally called it off—in July when he saw Trump start tweeting about how he has “ZERO investments in Russia”.
Even as of June 2016, in other words, Trump Org hadn’t explicitly “abandoned” the deal. It sounds more like the plan was to backburner it until it could be resumed without the bad optics. Events just unfolded in a way that made that impossible.
Sater kept working on the TT Moscow deal through late July, since nobody had told him it was off. 
Seems fair to ask: What if Trump hadn’t won, as seemed like the most likely outcome right until Election Day? Or if the Russian interference campaign hadn’t been exposed as fully & conclusively as it was (despite Trump’s feverish efforts to call it into question)?
Was the hope to resume the postponed deal, having earned major brownie points with Putin?
Note that when Trump said, at a July 2016 news conference "I have nothing to do with Russia — for anything,” Felix Sater had been actively working on advancing the Trump Tower Moscow deal until LITERALLY THE PREVIOUS DAY.
I realize none of this matters, because this isn’t an indictable felony, and according to 2018 standards, anything that’s not literally a federal crime is a “nothingburger.” I’m not sure how that became the new standard, but that’s apparently the world we live in now.
