Thread: Mueller's Russian Interference investigation

More than three dozen sealed criminal indictments have been added to the federal court docket in Washington, D.C. since the start of 2018.

Sealed criminal court files are assigned a case number, but do not indicate the identity of the parties or the nature of the charges, so it is impossible for the public to discern what those sealed cases contain.

But several legal experts told ABC News the number of sealed cases awaiting action right now is unusual. Fourteen were added to the docket since late August alone, a review by ABC News has found, just as the midterm elections were drawing near and longstanding Justice Department policy precluded prosecutors from taking any public action that could appear to be aimed at influencing political outcomes.

And the inadvertent discovery on Thursday night of what appear to be secret charges pending against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has drawn fresh attention to the mystery. Legal experts told ABC News that the sealed cases could be tied to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and possibly part of a quiet effort to protect his investigation from any premature effort to shut it down.

“I assume that Mueller knew that once the election was over, there could be an existential threat to his investigation,” said Matthew Miller, a former senior Justice official under former Attorney General Eric Holder. “He knew the best thing to do was act before that.”

A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined to comment on the investigation or the uptick in sealed indictments.

Sealed indictments are often used in cases where a defendant is overseas and U.S. prosecutors don’t want to tip off their target before they have a chance to make an arrest. But they can also be used to pressure someone to flip on a more important target, according to Kendall Coffey, who served as U.S.

Attorney in the Southern District of Florida in the mid-1990s, “especially if there was someone who presented the hope of providing proactive assistance – undertaking conversations, especially recorded conversations with other suspects in the investigation.”

Mueller has used a sealed indictment before. The case against unpaid Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos remained a secret for three months before charges of lying to investigators were eventually made public in October 2017. Only then, after Mueller's team secured a cooperation agreement, did the public learn the one-time foreign policy advisor would be the first from Trump’s campaign to plead guilty in the probe.

Brett Kappel, a veteran political law expert said he calculated that 16 percent of all the criminal cases filed thus far in 2018 remained under seal, a number he considered “unusually high.” And those were kept under seal much longer than usual, he said.

“They normally only remain sealed until the person who has been indicted has been apprehended,” he said. “The other major reason why a case is initially sealed is that publicly revealing the name of the accused would impede an ongoing investigation.”

Coffey said he did not know if the stack of secret charging papers had any ties to Mueller. But if they did, he said, they would have enabled the special counsel’s team to keep cases moving ahead of the midterms.

“If indeed Mueller had prepared cases for prosecution but did not want the announcement to impact on pending elections then a sealed indictment might have been the preferred method,” Coffey said.

And there was good reason, Miller said, for Mueller to lock in charges before the midterms.

Mueller can only indict someone with the approval of the Attorney General, and once the indictments have been approved and filed, any effort to withdraw charges would involve a judge.

At the time, those approvals fell to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein because Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from the Russia matter. But President Trump had sent strong signals he planned to replace Sessions after the elections with someone who might be more willing to curtail the probe into Russian election interference and possible collusion.

The day after the elections, Trump appointed acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who has previously denounced the Mueller probe. A Justice Department spokeswoman said this week that Whitaker “is fully committed to following all appropriate processes and procedures at the Department of Justice, including consulting with senior ethics officials on his oversight responsibilities and matters that may warrant recusal.”

“You can’t prevent a new AG from blocking new indictments,” Miller said. “But if you were ready to move on cases, you could return a bunch of indictments under seal. If the stumbling block is approval from Mueller’s supervisors, you get that approval while you still have a supervisor who approves of your work.”

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/doze...0uufBF7UGt8pok

Originally Posted by bsnub

Fourteen were added to the docket since late August alone, a review by ABC News has found, just as the midterm elections were drawing near and longstanding Justice Department policy precluded prosecutors from taking any public action that could appear to be aimed at influencing political outcomes.

Trump waited less than a day to sack Sessions and appoint Whitaker.
Why, if there are some sealed indictments from Mueller, is he still waiting? My guess is that he's got stuff in the envelopes that, should it be revealed, may influence how Trump answers his 2 dozen questions.
The net is closing.
What of the "obstruction of justice" questions that Trump's not answering?

Originally Posted by Maanaam

What of the "obstruction of justice" questions that Trump's not answering?

...obviously fake questions...

Originally Posted by tomcat

...obviously fake questions...

Whitaker to the rescue?

Amid concern over the future of his inquiry, the special counsel lauded for integrity has kept his customary low profile



David Taylor in New York
Sat 24 Nov 2018 06.00 GMT





Robert Mueller’s office has remained seemingly impervious to leaks.
Robert Swan Mueller III wears a $35 Casio watch with the face on the inside of his left wrist, in the style of an infantryman trying to avoid giving away his position with a glint of sunshine off the glass.
Covert and careful, Mueller is still moving with stealth in Washington DC, 50 years after he was shot and wounded in Vietnam as a first lieutenant in the US Marines.
For 18 months now, the former long-serving director of the FBI has been the calm centre of a gathering storm which may be about to break over Donald Trump’s White House.


During an exhausting period of perpetual leaks across DC, the office of Special Counsel Mueller has stood apart, seemingly impervious and water-tight.
While Mueller has cast a shadow over Trump for 18 months now, he has been almost entirely silent since he was brought out of retirement as a special counsel tasked with picking up the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election, and “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump”.
Mueller’s silence has led to intense scrutiny of his personal appearance – that watch, steely hair parted on the left with scrupulous accuracy, his pin-striped Brooks Brothers suits, the white Oxford button-down collar shirts, always paired with dull geometric print ties. A study in methodical caution.
Robert De Niro has played him with predictable menace on Saturday Night Live, looming like a predator from every shady character’s worst nightmare.
Trump, of course, has had a lot to say about Mueller – denouncing his work as an all-caps “WITCH HUNT”, calling him “highly conflicted” and declaring last week that his team was not only “a disgrace to our Nation” but had gone “absolutely nuts”.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin talk during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang last year. Photograph: Jorge Silva/AFP/Getty Images
In attempting to discredit Mueller, Trump has implied that the lifelong Republican is a partisan stooge of Barack Obama. In fact, since the 1980s, Mueller has been appointed to public positions – as prosecutoinvestigatobyby five consecutive presidents, one of them called Reagan and two of them called Bush.t
He was inherited by Obama as director of the FBI, and was so widely admired that when his term limit of 10 years in the job approached, the Senate voted 100-0 to change the law so that he could stay on for two more years.
Garrett Graff, author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror,interviewed Mueller for about 12 hours for the 2011 book. He said: “He is probably America’s straightest arrow, very by-the-book, very professional.”
The word integrity seems to be almost sewn into the fabric of his pin-striped suits. “It’s why [Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein brought him into this role of special counsel,” Graff said, “because he is probably the one person in Washington that you could never accuse of having a partisan agenda – he’s always seen things with a very strong moral compass, instilled in him by his father, and really sees the world with a pretty black and white, right or wrong vision.”
Following a period of self-imposed public inactivity during November’s midterm elections, there is a new urgency surrounding the investigation.
Trump has fired the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and installed Matthew Whitaker, a political ally who many fear will move to shut Mueller down; Trump has huddled with lawyers and has submitted his written answers on questions from Mueller’s team about possible collusion between his campaign and Russia; Paul Manafort, the convicted former Trump campaign chairman, is co-operating with the special counsel and by 26 November could be unveiled as a star witness in a new criminal case aimed squarely at Trump world. Could Donald Trump Jr or the longtime Trump aide Roger Stone be next?
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Yet as rage, speculation and tension mount, Mueller keeps his profile low.


Thousands of New Yorkers joined a coalition of grassroots organizations in New York City to denounce the new acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker. Photograph: Erik Mcgregor/Pacific Press via ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock
Born into privilege, forged in combat

Like Donald Trump, Robert Mueller was born into money and east coast privilege, the son of an executive at the DuPont industrial conglomerate, educated at an all-male school where he excelled at sports, ranging from lacrosse to soccer.
But their paths really diverged in the Vietnam era.
Trump, 22 months younger than Mueller, got a medical disqualification from service due to “bone spurs” in his foot and went on to a life dedicated to private gain.
Mueller began a life of public service. He graduated from Princeton in 1966 and signed up for the US Marines.
Mueller reached Vietnam in late 1968, the bloodiest year of the war, and as a rookie second lieutenant, aged 24, found himself leading an infantry company which was part of a marine regiment nicknamed the Magnificent Bastards.
Graff recently pieced together Mueller’s untold Vietnam story for Wired magazine after contacting 140 members of the unit and told how Mueller was decorated for valour after rescuing injured marines under heavy fire.
The commendation for Mueller’s Bronze Star read: “Second Lieutenant Mueller’s courage, aggressive initiative and unwavering devotion to duty at great personal risk were instrumental in the defeat of the enemy force.”

Months later, after he was promoted to first lieutenant, Mueller was engaged in a close firefight. Graff wrote: “The incoming fire was so intense – the stress of the moment so all-consuming, the adrenaline pumping so hard – that when he was shot, Mueller didn’t immediately notice. Amid the combat, he looked down and realized an AK-47 round had passed clean through his thigh.
“Mueller kept fighting.”
Mueller has spoken only once in public since taking on his role heading the Russia investigation. In May 2017, 12 days after accepting the special counsel role, , where his granddaughter was one of the students graduating.
He spoke of the lessons of service, which he said he had learned from his family, his marine corps family, and his FBI family.
Setting himself, perhaps unwittingly, as the polar opposite of Donald Trump, Mueller urged the students to act with integrity and honesty.
“You can be smart, aggressive, articulate, indeed persuasive, but if you are not honest, your reputation will suffer, and once lost, a good reputation can never, ever be regained.”
Mueller came back from the war, went to law school, became a federal prosecutor and worked his way up to become head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice.

Robert Mueller III stands outside his office building in Washington in 1996. Photograph: Dennis Cook/AP
As acting deputy attorney general, he was in charge of the investigation and indictment of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the terrorist attack that brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland just before Christmas 1988.

In 1993, Mueller left the Department of Justice to go into private practice, but he returned after two years, effectively starting again, as a junior homicide prosecutor in Washington DC.
Within six years, George W Bush had made him head of the FBI - and one week after he took the post, the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington happened. Mueller had to change the FBI from a domestic law enforcement organisation to an international intelligence agency whose first task was to prevent the next attack.

George Bush meets with top US officials, including Mueller, on 15 September 2001 at Camp David, Maryland. Photograph: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
While he is lionised, Mueller has flaws and has acknowledged mistakes. In a in 2015 with the journalist Aaron Harber, he spoke about his failure to delegate and admitted that he micro-managed the FBI’s anti-terrorism operations. He has also conceded that he lost control of moves to modernise the computer records of the FBI, which were delayed and over-budget.
“When you look at the criticism that he faced as FBI director, his strength was the same as his weakness - hard-driving and not one to entertain a lot of dissent or dissension,” Graff said. “He will debate decisions, but once a decision is made he will push forward. You can see that he was never, at the FBI, a warm and fuzzy leader.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-investigation

That Papadopolopoulopos is a bit of a retard eh.

George Papadopoulos, the former foreign-policy aide to President Donald Trump's campaign who pleaded guilty in the Russia investigation last year, took to Twitter on Saturday to call for the former FBI director, James Comey, to testify publicly about the FBI's purported mishandling of the Russia probe.


"If Jim Comey wants to testify in public and tell America who/why in Trump’s advisory board was under FISA; who Joseph Mifsud is; if the FBI had any role in my dealings with Charles Tawil; and explain the UK and Australia’s surveillance role," he tweeted, "that would be good for the country."

But Comey has been asking to testify publicly from the start.

Earlier this week, House Republicans — who will be a minority in the lower chamber of Congress come January — made a last-minute push to subpoena Comey and former attorney general Loretta Lynch.

Comey acknowledged the news Thursday, tweeting, "Happy Thanksgiving. Got a subpoena from House Republicans. I'm still happy to sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a 'closed door' thing because I've seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion. Let's have a hearing and invite everyone to see."

http://uk.businessinsider.com/george...earing-2018-11

Stupid boy.

Paul Manafort—President Donald Trump’s jailed former campaign chairman—has been accused of violating a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller related to the former FBI director's probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.


The 69-year-old has been residing in jail since August when he was convicted of eight counts of bank and tax fraud in Northern Virginia. Following the verdict, the long-time political operative agreed to cooperate with Mueller to escape a second federal trial in Washington, D.C.

But in a blow to the investigation—and any hope Manafort had of a more lenient sentence—Mueller’s team now says Manafort began lying to them just two months after signing the deal in direct violation of the agreement, CNN reported. If investigators no longer consider Manafort a credible witness, they will not be able to use his testimony in their case.

In a joint statement with Manafort’s defense attorneys filed Monday, Mueller’s team explained, “Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement.”

As part of the deal, Manafort pleaded guilty to two federal charges related to his foreign lobbying efforts and agreed to cooperate fully with Mueller’s probe into alleged Russian influence in the 2016 election and possible collusion between the Kremlin and Trump.

Manafort is one of the key witnesses for the special counsel’s investigation given his senior position within the Trump campaign when the now-president won the Republican nomination and the race for the White House entered its final stage.

He was one of three Trump campaign officials who was presented at a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who offered damaging information on Hillary Clinton to help sway the contest in Trump’s favor.


According to The Washington Post, he also allegedly offered private briefings on the campaign to a Russian oligarch to whom he was indebted and had close business links to an operative linked to the Russian military intelligence service that hacked the Democratic Party.

In their part of Monday’s filing, Manafort’s attorneys suggested their client had done nothing wrong but voiced support to move forward on sentencing for his August convictions. “[Manafort] believes he has provided truthful information and does not agree with the government’s characterization or that he has breached the agreement,” the filing explains.

“Given the conflict in the parties’ positions, there is no reason to delay the sentencing herein, and he asks the Court to set a sentencing date in this matter,” it added.

The government filing noted it would provide a more detailed explanation of Manafort’s alleged crimes and lies before sentencing. It also said that any breach of the deal by Manafort would mean the government is freed from any of its obligations, including any promises to seek a lighter sentence for the convict.

As Reuters explained, these developments could see Manafort spend the rest of his life in prison.

Observers have speculated that the former campaign chairman may be hoping for a presidential pardon to rescue him from his dire situation. Thus far, Trump has not ruled out such a move, and after his conviction described Manafort as a “very good person.”

https://www.newsweek.com/what-will-h...2407?piano_t=1

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

If investigators no longer consider Manafort a credible witness, they will not be able to use his testimony in their case.

lose/lose.....until trump gives him a pardon

Busted!

Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy, sources say

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.


Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.


It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.


A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.


Manafort, 69, denies involvement in the hack and says the claim is “100% false”. His lawyers declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about the visits.


In a series of tweets WikiLeaks said Assange and Manafort had not met. Assange described the story as a hoax.


Manafort was jailed this year and was thought to have become a star cooperator in the Mueller inquiry. But on Monday Mueller said Manafort had repeatedly lied to the FBI, despite agreeing to cooperate two months ago in a plea deal. According to a court document, Manafort had committed “crimes and lies” on a “variety of subject matters”.


His defence team says he believes what he has told Mueller to be truthful and has not violated his deal.

Manafort’s first visit to the embassy took place a year after Assange sought asylum inside, two sources said.


A separate internal document written by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency and seen by the Guardian lists “Paul Manaford [sic]” as one of several well-known guests. It also mentions “Russians”.



According to the sources, Manafort returned to the embassy in 2015. He paid another visit in spring 2016, turning up alone, around the time Trump named him as his convention manager. The visit is tentatively dated to March.


Manafort’s 2016 visit to Assange lasted about 40 minutes, one source said, adding that the American was casually dressed when he exited the embassy, wearing sandy-coloured chinos, a cardigan and a light-coloured shirt.


Visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports. Sources in Ecuador, however, say Manafort was not logged.


Embassy staff were aware only later of the potential significance of Manafort’s visit and his political role with Trump, it is understood.


The revelation could shed new light on the sequence of events in the run-up to summer 2016, when WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails hacked by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. Hillary Clinton has said the hack contributed to her defeat.


The previously unreported Manafort-Assange connection is likely to be of interest to Mueller, who has been investigating possible contacts between WikiLeaks and associates of Trump including the political lobbyist Roger Stone and Donald Trump Jr.


One key question is when the Trump campaign was aware of the Kremlin’s hacking operation – and what, if anything, it did to encourage it. Trump has repeatedly denied collusion.


Earlier this year Mueller indicted 12 GRU intelligence officers for carrying out the hack, which began in March 2016.


In June of that year WikiLeaks emailed the GRU via an intermediary seeking the DNC material. After failed attempts, Vladimir Putin’s spies sent the documents in mid-July to WikiLeaks as an encrypted attachment.


According to sources, Manafort’s acquaintance with Assange goes back at least five years, to late 2012 or 2013, when the American was working in Ukraine and advising its Moscow-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych.


Why Manafort might have sought out Assange in 2013 is unclear. During this period the veteran consultant was involved in black operations against Yanukovych’s chief political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, whom Yanukovych had jailed. Manafort ran an extensive lobbying operation featuring European former politicians.


He flew frequently from the US to Ukraine’s capital, Kiev – usually via Frankfurt but sometimes through London, flight records seen by the Guardian show.


Manafort is currently in jail in Alexandria, Virginia. In August a jury convicted him of crimes arising from his decade-long activities in Ukraine. They include large-scale money laundering and failure to pay US tax. Manafort pleaded guilty to further charges in order to avoid a second trial in Washington.


As well as accusing him of lying on Monday, the special counsel moved to set a date for Manafort to be sentenced.


One person familiar with WikiLeaks said Assange was motivated to damage the Democrats campaign because he believed a future Trump administration would be less likely to seek his extradition on possible charges of espionage. This fate had hung over Assange since 2010, when he released confidential US state department cables. It contributed to his decision to take refuge in the embassy.


According to the dossier written by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, Manafort was at the centre of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and Russia’s leadership. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Clinton, Steele wrote, whom Putin “hated and feared”.


In a memo written soon after the DNC emails were published, Steele said: “The [hacking] operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.”


As a candidate Trump warmly welcomed the dump of DNC emails by Assange. In October 2016 he declared: “ seized from the email account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman.


The Trump White House subsequently sent out mixed messages over Assange and his legal fate. In 2017 and behind the scenes Assange tried to reach a deal with Trump’s Department of Justice that might see him avoid US prison.


In May 2017, , Manafort flew to Ecuador to hold talks with the country’s president-elect Lenín Moreno. The discussions, days before Moreno was sworn in, and before Manafort was indicted – were ostensibly about a large-scale Chinese investment.


However, one source in Quito suggests that Manafort also discreetly raised Assange’s plight. Another senior foreign ministry source said he was sceptical Assange was mentioned. At the time Moreno was expected to continue support for him.


Last week a court filing released in error suggested that the US justice department had secretly charged Assange with a criminal offence. Written by the assistant US attorney, Kellen Dwyer, the document did not say what Assange had been charged with or when the alleged offence took place.


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...dorian-embassy

Assange denies it, so who knows

Best bit is baldy orange cunto can't pardon Manafort because he's pleaded guilty to state crimes in three states.

It’s like shit hitting the fan now. Stone and Corsi have screwed up their stories so badly and been caught out by their own emails regarding their contacts with Assange and Trump.

^^Manafort must be more afraid of telling the truth than he is to be in prison the rest of his life. What’s up with that?


As an aside...
One of the things which came out of the Stone/Corsi emails, is the fact that they cooked up the Seth Rich murder conspiracy. They made up that lie and pushed it knowing it was a lie. Even with Rich’s parents begging for them to stop, they were more focused on bringing down HRC than what he was doing to those people. HRC got her stroke from Corsi, too.

Papadopoulos’s Russia Ties Continue to Intrigue

The former foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign boasted of a Russia business deal even after the election, according to a new letter under review.

Snip:

The statement makes a series of explosive but uncorroborated claims about Papadopoulos’s alleged coordination with Russians in the weeks following Trump’s election in November 2016, including that Papadopoulos said he was “doing a business deal with Russians which would result in large financial gains for himself and Mr. Trump.” The confidant said they were willing to take a polygraph test “to prove that I am being truthful” and had come forward now after seeing Papadopoulos “become increasingly hostile towards those who are investigating him and his associates.” A lawyer for Papadopoulos declined to comment.

If corroborated, the claims in the letter would add to an emerging portrait of Trump and his associates’ eagerness to strike backdoor deals with Russia even after the intelligence community concluded that Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election. (Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, tried to set up a “backchannel” to Russia in the weeks after the election and met with the CEO of a sanctioned Russian bank during the transition period. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, meanwhile, negotiated with the Russian ambassador about U.S. sanctions before Trump was inaugurated.)


MORE. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...schiff/576895/

big fooking deal, Russians or Israel or Saudi Arabia, the POTUS entourage always strike deals with foreigner power for money

Michael Cohen expected to plead guilty to lying to Congress in collusion probe; gave 70 hours of interviews to special counsel: Sources

Special counsel Robert Mueller has reached a tentative deal with Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney and long-time fixer for President Donald Trump, sources told ABC News.


Cohen is scheduled to appear in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday where he is expected to enter a guilty plea for misstatements to Congress in closed-door testimony last year about his contacts with Russians during the presidential campaign.

MORE https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mich...ry?id=59491450

Originally Posted by misskit

Cohen is scheduled to appear in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday where he is expected to enter a guilty plea for misstatements to Congress in closed-door testimony last year about his contacts with Russians during the presidential campaign.

It seems the net is closing in around Trump.

The Trump Organization Planned To Give Vladimir Putin The $50 Million Penthouse In Trump Tower Moscow

President Donald Trump’s company planned to give a $50 million penthouse at Trump Tower Moscow to Russian President Vladimir Putin as the company negotiated the luxury real estate development during the 2016 campaign, according to four people, one of them the originator of the plan.


Two US law enforcement officials told BuzzFeed News that Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, discussed the idea with a representative of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary.


The Trump Tower Moscow plan is at the heart of a new plea agreement by Cohen, who led the negotiations to bring a gleaming, 100-story building to the Russian capital. Cohen acknowledged in court that he lied to Congress about the plan in order to protect Trump and his presidential campaign.
The revelation that representatives of the Trump Organization planned to forge direct financial links with the leader of a hostile nation at the height of the campaign raises fresh questions about President Trump's relationship with the Kremlin. The plan never went anywhere because the tower deal ultimately fizzled, and it is not clear whether Trump knew of the intention to give away the penthouse. But Cohen said in court documents that he regularly briefed Trump and his family on the Moscow negotiations.

MORE https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...imir-putin-the

It's not naivete, it's downright arrogance to be running for president and making deals with a hostile nation for private gain.

Originally Posted by Neverna

It seems the net is closing in around Trump.

It seems the title of the world's most powerful person just flipped from POTUS to Robert Mueller.

Originally Posted by Maanaam

It's not naivete, it's downright arrogance to be running for president and making deals with a hostile nation for private gain.

a hostile nation? are you people under drugs? Russia is not hostile, the US is, look at how many wars they started and lost

anyway, nothing will come out of this, so they are still fishing

Originally Posted by Dragonfly

a hostile nation? are you people under drugs? Russia is not hostile, the US is, look at how many wars they started and lost

I think in this instance he means hostile to the U.S.
Not hostile in general, although there's a discussion to be had there.

Russia is not hostile to the US, Jesus Christ

they don't impose sanctions on the US on false pretense, and don't make a fuss about a fair election being lost by some Democrats, because Martians disguised as share shaping lizards have invaded earth, or Russians were hiding under the bed of every Americans

Originally Posted by Dragonfly

anyway, nothing will come out of this, so they are still fishing

Trump, your ideal, doesn't share your opinion. I wonder why?