The House Intelligence Committee plans to issue a subpoena to compel Felix Sater, one of President Donald Trump’s former business associates, to testify after he failed to appear Friday morning for a voluntary interview, according to multiple reports.
"The Committee had scheduled a voluntary staff-level interview with Mr. Sater, but he did not show up this morning as agreed," committee spokesman Patrick Boland said Friday in a statement obtained by CSPAN. "As a result, the Committee is issuing a subpoena to compel his testimony."
Sater's attorney, Robert Wolf, said in a statement released to The Daily Beast and other outlets that unspecified "health reasons" caused his client to skip Friday's hearing.
“He looks forward to voluntarily appearing at the next rescheduled date,” Wolf said.
Authorities have said Sater, a Russian-born businessman and real estate developer based in New York, lobbied Russian officials to approve of the building of a Trump Tower in Moscow. Last year, Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, admitted to lying to Congress in connection with the plan after prosecutors with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team charged him with making false statements.
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Cohen admitted he’d lied when he claimed that discussions surrounding the Moscow Trump Tower project ended by January 2016. Talks actually continued until June of that year, just months before the presidential election, he said.
The incident is one of several highlighted in the 448-page report Mueller submitted to the Justice Department in April at the conclusion of his 22-month investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. In the report, Mueller said his team found no evidence of collusion between Russian officials and the Trump presidential campaign, but he declined to make a decision on whether there was enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice.
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