Consider what one is tempted to call President Donald Trump’s downright “Clintonian” non-denial denial during his recent press conference: “I own nothing in Russia, I have no loans in Russia, I don’t have any deals in Russia.”

“Russia,” he insisted. “is fake news put out by the media.”

Ah, but what about deals “with” or loans “from” Russia? Different question. Trump and his family have been up to their eyeballs in Russian cash for decades. The president denying this well-documented fact is the rough equivalent of Bill Clinton denying he’d ever met Monica Lewinsky.

Indeed, father and sons used to brag about Russian money. In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. told a real estate conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets ... We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

The invaluable blogger Digby says the way Trump talks about Putin is “obsequious and submissive, which is very uncharacteristic of his normal style”

“It would be one thing if we could chalk it up as another one of Trump’s weird psychological tics,” Digby says. “and hope that he isn’t so subject to flattery that he decides to help the Russian leader carve up Europe just to keep his approval. But it seems there’s more to it than that.”

It certainly does. Trump was similarly cagey about his campaign’s reported contacts with Russian intelligence. Another series of non-denial denials: Not that he personally knows. He, Trump, had no Russian contacts. He’s seen people on TV — people he scarcely knows, maybe he was in the same room with them once — denying any such liaisons. It’s all fake news to him. So now comes yet another guy Trump hardly knows — a Russian émigré who channeled millions from Moscow investors to various (eventually bankrupt) Trump projects in New York, Fort Lauderdale and Toronto.

Felix Sater’s name has surfaced in connection with a private “peace initiative” to settle the Ukranian-Russian dispute on terms highly favorable to Russia. According to highly detailed accounts in The New York Times and The Washington Post, the scheme was brokered by Trump’s attorney Michael D. Cohen, a pro-Putin Ukranian legislator, and Sater, supposedly through the good offices of recently fired national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The scheme’s absurd on its face. But what’s truly amazing is Sater’s participation, a twice-convicted felon: once for stabbing a guy in a bar fight, and later for a multimillion dollar securities fraud tied to the Genovese and Colombo crime families.

While awaiting sentencing, Sater lived two lives: one as a principal in Bayrock, an investment firm located in Trump Tower which funneled millions in Russian capital into several of Trump’s characteristically grandiose projects, a second as a CIA informant on international arms smuggling. The dude belongs in a Jason Bourne movie.

In a 2013 deposition, Trump said he wasn’t sure he’d actually recognize Felix Sater either. Chances are the rest of us will before this astonishing saga ends.

© 2017, Universal