Trump associate Sater appears for testimony before House panel

Russian-born real estate developer Felix Sater, who worked on a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow, appeared on Tuesday for testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

The panel had issued a subpoena for Sater last month after he failed to appear for a closed-door interview with the committee. He blamed his absence on an unexpected illness that caused him to sleep through his wake-up alarm. It was unclear if any lawmakers were attending the closed-door interview or if Sater was meeting only with the committee's staff.

As he arrived for the interview a reporter asked what he planned to tell the committee and Sater said, "The truth." In a statement to Reuters on Monday, Sater said: "I always have and always will cooperate with anything my country and my government asks of me."

New York-based Sater, whose links to Trump were examined in former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, worked with Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen on a plan to build a Trump-branded skyscraper in Moscow while Trump was a presidential candidate. The House Intelligence Committee wanted to talk to Sater about his work on the project, which came under renewed scrutiny after Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress about when negotiations on the deal ended in order to minimize Trump's links to Russia.

Numerous current and former associates of President Donald Trump have refused to cooperate with Democratic-led congressional investigations of the Republican president and his business interests.