Trump teased a potential presidential run in the early 2011s. Trump claimed that “hundreds and thousands” of people had encouraged him to run through ShouldTrumpRun.com. What is ShouldTrumpRun.com? Begin this journey with me.
Rumours circulated the Internet claiming that Donald Trump, a real estate billionaire, will run for the U.S. presidency on the Republican ticket in…
ShouldTrumpRun.com launched in late 2010. It was a test site for possible Trump 2012 runs. It stated at the bottom that it was not endorsed by Donald Trump.
This site was not independent. It was started by Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen and two local lobbyists, who at the time were helping Trump push for a doomed Jones Beach project on Long Island.
Cohen was actually in hot water with FEC for the site. Someone filed a complaint against Cohen after Cohen flew private to Iowa to test the waters with Trump. ShouldTrumpRun.com was redirected to an FEC correspondence on the matter a while back.
FEC cleared Cohen of any wrongdoing, as Trump wasn’t an officially declared candidate at the time of the Iowa trip.
Who signed off on this decision?
Don McGahn, the then-FEC Vice Chair/current WH Counsel
What’s the latest from those lobbyists? After Trump’s election, They set up a new DC office. Their lobbying experience is diverse, with them lobbying DoD under the name of a summer camp business to lobbying Congress in favor of the “Turkish American Gulen Movement.”
Cohen and the lobbyists have not stopped working together.
Nope.
They represent Cohen now in FusionGPS’s lawsuit.
Funny aside: Cohen and the lobbyists didn’t register ShouldTrumpRun.com. It was Igor Berezner, a Brooklyn internet marketer.
Berezner owns an internet marketing firm that provides “social media brand amplification.” Berezner is now a big fan of cryptocurrency. On Twitter, he goes by the name “BTCMilli”, which stands for Bitcoin Millionaire. He has been registering many crypto URLs, including cryptoruble.net.