Records refute Trump's claim he didn't stay overnight in Moscow

Donald Trump poses next to Miss Universe 2013 Gabriela Isler after the 2013 Miss Universe competition in Moscow on Nov. 9, 2013. (ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

President Trump has repeatedly claimed that he didn't stay overnight in Moscow during his highly-publicized trip to the Russian capital in 2013 — but flight records reveal that those claims are likely false.

Trump insisted over dinner with ex-FBI Director James Comey last January that a scandalous claim about him engaging with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel suite couldn't be true because he didn't stay overnight when he went there for the Miss Universe pageant in November 2013.

"He said he arrived in the morning, did events, then showered and dressed for the pageant at the hotel," and then left for the event, Comey wrote in a memo made public by the Justice Department last week. "Afterwards, he returned only to get his things because they departed for New York by plane that same night."

But flight records unearthed by Bloomberg News on Monday show that Trump arrived in Moscow at 6:15 a.m. on Nov. 8, 2013 — and left 45 hours and 43 minutes later.

Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization responded to requests for comment from the Daily News.

A Facebook post confirms that Trump attended a birthday party for Russian developer Aras Agalarov in Moscow on the evening of Nov. 8, 2013. Trump attended the Miss Universe pageant the next day.

The 2013 Moscow trip lies at the heart of one of the most explosive claims in the Trump-Russia scandal.

According to an unverified dossier compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, Trump instructed Russian hookers to urinate on a bed that that the Obamas once slept on at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. The lewd act was meant as a way to "defile" the room where the ex-president once stayed, according to Steele.

Steele alleged that the Russian government caught the salacious act on video and has used it to blackmail Trump into doing its bidding.

In his newly released memoir, Comey paints Trump as being obsessed with Steele's dossier claims. (RALPH ALSWANG/AP)

Trump has vehemently denied the explosive claims, and U.S. intelligence agencies have stressed that they have not independently verified Steele's dossier.

But the revelation that Trump appeared to have lied to Comey about whether he stayed overnight in Moscow poses the question why a president would tell an FBI director something that can be easily disproved.

In his newly released memoir, Comey paints Trump as being obsessed with Steele's dossier claims.

The ex-FBI director says Trump asked him several times if there was any way that the FBI could officially denounce the dossier, since its claims of Russian hookers was upsetting First Lady Melania.

Trump denied staying the night in Moscow a second time to Comey during a meeting at the White House last February.

"(He) explained, as he did at our dinner, that he hadn't stayed overnight in Russia during the Miss Universe trip," Comey wrote in the memo.

Trump fired Comey three months later, setting into motion a series of events that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.

- ny news