Way back in early 2011, Trump began teasing a possible presidential bid. He claimed “hundreds of thousands” of people had urged him to run through an independent site called ShouldTrumpRun.com. So, what is ShouldTrumpRun.com? Come on this journey with me.
Rumors have been circling the Web buzzing that real estate billionaire Donald Trump will run for U.S. President on the Republican ticket in…
ShouldTrumpRun.com was launched in late 2010. Ostensibly, it was an independent site to test the waters about a possible Trump 2012 run. It even explicitly said on the bottom it was “not endorsed by Donald Trump.”
But this was not an independent site. It was founded by Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, along with two local lobbyists who, at the time, we’re helping Trump push for a doomed project in Jones Beach on Long Island.
The site actually got Cohen into some hot water with the FEC. After Cohen took a private jet to Iowa to test the waters for Trump, someone filed a complaint against Cohen. For a while earlier this year, ShouldTrumpRun.com actually redirected to an FEC letter on the issue.
Cohen was cleared by FEC of any wrongdoing because Trump was not an officially declared candidate in the time of the Iowa trip.
Who signed off on that decision?
Then-FEC Vice Chair / Current WH Counsel Don McGahn.
What are those lobbyists up to now? They set up a new office in DC after Trump was elected. They have an eclectic lobbying practice, ranging from lobbying DoD in the name of a summer camp company to a lobbying Congress for the benefit of the “Turkish-American Gulen Movement.”
But that does not mean Cohen and the lobbyists stopped working together.
Nope.
They now represent Cohen in his lawsuit against FusionGPS.
Funny Aside: Cohen and the lobbyists did not register ShouldTrumpRun.com themselves. That was a Brooklyn internet marketer called Igor Berezner.
Berezner runs an internet marketing company that offers “social media brand amplification.” But recently, Berezner has been getting big into cryptocurrency. He even goes by the name “BTCMilli” (for Bitcoin Millionaire) on Twitter. He’s been registering a lot of crypto URLs, including crypto-ruble.net.
Which brings us to today. What Does ShouldTrumpRun.com Look Like Now? You guessed it: CRYPTO!!! The URL, which Berezner still owns, redirects to this site:
Now, with a name like Igor, I’m am using the current owner of shouldtrumprun.com is Russian… so, you know what that means.
