Thread: Mueller's Russian Interference investigation

Originally Posted by uncle junior

^wonder how much all those forfeited accounts and properties are worth....hope he's skint

Between property forfeitures and legal fees doubt he has much left. Ill gotten gains are like that when you get caught.

^Hmmm. Sometimes.

Originally Posted by Norton

Between property forfeitures and legal fees doubt he has much left

...he is a practiced and determined manipulator of financial transactions that are difficult to trace...I doubt he's anywhere near broke...

Attorneys for Donald Trump were dealt another major blow on Friday as Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman, agreed to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of a deal that involved pleading guilty to two conspiracy charges. Andrew Weissmann, a prosecutor from Mueller’s office, explained to the judge that as part of the deal, all other charges against Manafort will be dropped at sentencing or “at the agreement of successful cooperation.” Under the agreement, Manafort agreed to forfeit four properties and multiple bank accounts, along with cooperating with investigators by participating in interviews, providing documents and testifying in court.Manafort is one of a number of members of Trump’s inner circle who have cut deals with the special counsel’s office, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Manafort deputy Rick Gates. In recent weeks, it has also become common knowledge among close friends of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, that Cohen is talking to the Mueller team, according to people familiar with the situation. (Cohen did not respond to request for comment, nor did his attorney, Guy Petrillo. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.)

The extent and purpose of those talks is not entirely clear. Last month, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight counts of tax evasion, lying to a bank, and campaign-finance violations. During his allocution in front of a packed courtroom, Cohen read carefully chosen words stating that Trump had directed him to make payments to two women who had alleged affairs with the then-candidate, implicating the president as his co-conspirator. Trump subsequently criticized Cohen, contrasting his disloyalty with the contemporaneous actions of Manafort, who he tweeted had “refused to break” by making up stories in order to get a deal. “Such respect for a brave man!” he added. (Trump has denied sexual relationships with both women, and has maintained that he did nothing wrong.)

For months, Cohen has appeared to signal his willingness to cooperate with the government, both with the Southern District of New York and the special counsel’s office. While prosecutors for the Southern District did not initially approach Cohen about a cooperating agreement before he pleaded guilty, many speculated that he could still cut a deal in the months between the plea and his sentencing in December. Those familiar with Cohen’s thinking were unsure about what he might have to offer prosecutors, but because he had worked so closely with Trump and his family for more than a decade, it was assumed that he could potentially be a useful corroborating witness.

It is a remarkable reversal from a year ago, when Cohen told me he would take a bullet for the president. But Cohen has now been squeezed financially, emotionally, and legally in a way he could not have imagined. Since last month, his primary concern has been his family—what a prison sentence could mean for them, and what his financial situation will look like, given his mounting legal bills and lack of income. He had expressed to friends that he was willing to share what he knows, both because he wants to be on the right side of history, and to spare them. As one longtime friend of Cohen’s put it to me, “He doesn’t feel he needs to go out of his way to protect Trump anymore, particularly because Trump has gone out of his way to hurt Michael.” Earlier this week, Cohen and his attorney sat down with New York state tax-department officials, who subpoenaed him last month as part of their inquiry into the Trump Foundation.
According to people close to him, Cohen closely watched the White House’s reaction to his allocution in court last month. He listened as Trump railed against anyone who makes a plea deal, telling Fox News that cooperating with the government “almost ought to be outlawed.” And he has bristled at the feeling that he has taken the fall for a man who has refused to take any responsibility or face any consequence himself. In conversations with Mueller’s team, he is making good on what he told ABC earlier this summer: that his loyalty to Trump is no longer his lodestar.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018...-cohen-mueller

campaign manager manafort: GUILTY

deputy campaign manager gates: GUILTY

national security adviser flynn: GUILTY

foreign policy adviser papadopoulos: GUILTY

personal lawyer cohen: GUILTY


mueller sure seems to catching a lot of witches in this 'witch hunt'.

fake witches.....and even if they are witches they've done nothing illegal

Originally Posted by uncle junior

fake witches.....and even if they are witches they've done nothing illegal

...and even if they've done something illegal unless it can be directly linked to an email from Vladimir Putin sent prior to the election with the subject line: 'Re: Our Plans to Meddle in the Upcoming US Election' then who cares because it's nothing to do with the investigation. They should just be let go.

I wonder if baldy orange cunto is still feeling the lurvvvv......

“I think the whole Manafort trial is very sad,” Trump said. “I think it’s a very sad day for our country. He happens to be a very good person, and I think it’s very sad what they’ve done to Paul Manafort.”

Originally Posted by raycarey

campaign manager manafort: GUILTY

deputy campaign manager gates: GUILTY

national security adviser flynn: GUILTY

foreign policy adviser papadopoulos: GUILTY

personal lawyer cohen: GUILTY


mueller sure seems to catching a lot of witches in this 'witch hunt'.

ALL Guilty on Trumped up charges

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

I wonder if baldy orange cunto is still feeling the lurvvvv......

“I think the whole Manafort trial is very sad,” Trump said. “I think it’s a very sad day for our country. He happens to be a very good person, and I think it’s very sad what they’ve done to Paul Manafort.”

His next tack will be to start tweeting things like, "Lying Paul Manafort...".

The Art Of The Squeal.

A plea deal by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to cooperate with U.S. prosecutors in their investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election suggests he could shed light on unanswered questions revolving around the campaign, legal experts said on Friday. Manafort’s agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller to cooperate “fully, truthfully, completely, and forthrightly” could put to the test U.S. President Donald Trump’s denials of campaign collusion with Russia, lawyers not involved in the case said.

Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at George Washington University, said the agreement, which caps at 10 years a sentence which could have been much longer, was a “pretty good deal” that suggested the Mueller team valued Manafort’s cooperation.

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is representing Trump in the Russia probe, told Reuters on Friday that Manafort “knows nothing harmful to the president and the plea is the best evidence of that.” The White House said in a statement that the agreement had “absolutely nothing to do” with the president or his 2016 campaign.

Manafort attended a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Russian representatives and top campaign officials, including Trump’s son and son-in-law, who expected to receive derogatory information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Any light Manafort could shed on that meeting and other episodes could deepen the Mueller probe, legal experts said, increasing the pressure on Trump. The president and his allies have repeatedly called for the investigation to wind down and he describes the probe as a “witch hunt.”

Donald Trump Jr, who organized the meeting with Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others, initially said it was mainly to discuss a program on adoptions of Russian children. The president has since acknowledged the meeting was set up to find out damaging information about Clinton but that it was “totally legal and done all the time in politics.”

Moscow rejects the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies that it interfered in the election by hacking Democratic Party computer networks and spreading disinformation on social media.

Some legal experts said that if Trump and his advisers knowingly solicited help from Russia, they may have violated campaign finance laws, and a statute that criminalizes conspiracies to impair the functioning of the U.S. government.

Mueller’s investigators might also be looking to Manafort to learn whether the Trump team offered anything to the Russians in exchange for campaign help, said Seth Waxman, a former federal prosecutor.

Manafort’s deal could also prompt other subjects of Mueller’s investigation to cooperate, causing “the proverbial snowball to roll down the hill,” Waxman said.

Other issues Manafort could be questioned about are his longstanding business and personal ties with Trump ally Roger Stone. Stone’s communications have been a subject of the Mueller investigation, sources familiar with interviews of other Stone associates have said.

Manafort oversaw the 2016 Republican National Convention in which the party’s platform on Ukraine was altered in a way that made it more in line with Russian interests. Manafort represented pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine before his stint on the Trump campaign.

The structure of Manafort’s plea deal limits the effectiveness of any Trump pardon, said Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Fordham University. Manafort admitted to conduct chargeable as state crimes, to which a presidential pardon do not apply.

Manafort refused for months to assist Mueller’s inquiry before admitting guilt to criminal charges that he concealed money from tax authorities.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN1LU2VI

Tried to find a YouTube version of this but no luck.

https://www.facebook.com/NowThisPoli...5342501497227/

For much of the past year, whenever a major new indictment has come down in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, we’ve been showing you a version of this chart.



As Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential coordination with the Trump campaign moved forward, the indictments stacked up with impressive speed. So far, Mueller has charged 32 people in connection with the Russia investigation, far more than other major special-counsel investigations like Whitewater and Iran-Contra yielded. (Among the special investigations on our chart, only Watergate has more.)

There’s a problem, though, with simply comparing the number of indictments in different investigations. That approach assumes that all the indictments are in the same general category. For the Mueller investigation, they aren’t.




The vast majority of the people charged by Mueller live abroad — specifically, in Russia. This means that unless the 25 Russians individuals accused of crimes related to election interference travel abroad, are arrested and turned over to the U.S. or are extradited by Russia, Mueller can’t actually prosecute them. So far, attorneys for only one of the Russian organizations have appeared in a U.S. courtroom, in an apparent effort to force the Mueller team to hand over relevant evidence to the Russian firm.

It’s not surprising that a special counsel charged with investigating Russian interference in a U.S. election would have an international scope, but it does distinguish the Mueller investigation from similar probes going back to Watergate. It also places serious limits on Mueller’s ability to move beyond indictments to obtain guilty pleas and convictions. The indictments of the 25 Russians are symbolically important, but they almost certainly won’t result in a trial or any resulting legal accountability — like a fine or prison sentence — for the people charged.

In addition to the Mueller investigation, there have been 10 special counsel investigations since 1973 that resulted in charges. Of those 10, only two clearly involved the indictment of a person living outside the United States, according to my review of news and government reports. Neither resulted in further legal action — at least, related to that investigation.

One involved Robert Vesco, a financier who had fled the country to avoid charges that he had swindled mutual fund investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. He was living in the Bahamas and Costa Rica when he was indicted in May 1973, accused of fraud and obstruction of justice related to a $200,000 contribution he had made to Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign in an apparent bid to resolve his legal problems. Although Vesco’s case was part of the broader Watergate investigation, he doesn’t appear in the chart above because the indictment against him was filed before a special prosecutor was appointed. Vesco remained a fugitive for years and never stood trial in the U.S.

The other included a Singaporean businessman, Abdul Rahman, who was indicted as part of a minor Clinton-era scandal involving Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, who had been accused of taking kickbacks for federal contracts and soliciting illegal campaign contributions on behalf of Democrats. (Herman was not charged in the investigation.) Rahman was accused of lying about the source of $200,000 in Democratic campaign contributions and improperly making campaign donations as a foreign national. He was the only person charged, and the case didn’t move forward because he lived outside the U.S.

To get a sense for why domestic indictments are generally more consequential than international ones, look no further than Paul Manafort, former chairman for Trump’s 2016 campaign. Manafort pleaded guilty to a reduced sentence last week in exchange for a promise to aid Mueller’s investigation. It was a coup for the special counsel: Mueller had been trying to secure Manafort’s cooperation for months, but even after Manafort was convicted of one set of charges, he seemed initially unwilling to provide Mueller with information.

Manafort is cooperating at a pivotal moment in the investigation. There’s reason to believe that more indictments of Americans may be coming, based on who has appeared as witnesses before Mueller’s grand jury in Washington. Manafort could help get those indictments over the finish line. Manafort is also likely to be asked questions that may be answerable by only a handful of people — like the details of the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, when Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian attorney to learn about “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. And he could provide damaging information about other people in Trump’s orbit and maybe even the president himself.

It’s hard to say exactly why Manafort chose to work with the special counsel. However, Mueller applied a great deal of legal pressure before Manafort agreed to cooperate, including sending him to jail for two months on witness-tampering charges before the beginning of his first trial (on tax and bank fraud charges). Manafort, who is 69, could have spent the rest of his life in prison if he had been convicted in the second trial, which had been scheduled to start in Washington in September. It’s not hard to imagine why he might have decided to cooperate under those circumstances. But Mueller has no such leverage over anyone who is outside the country and won’t be extradited. And that’s why at this point, the 25 indictments of individuals abroad — impressive as they were in both number and content — have less of an impact on the future of Mueller’s investigation (and its implications for the president) than a domestic indictment like Manafort’s, which has the force of the American legal system behind it.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...n-indictments/

rosenstein just resigned.

updated:

conflicting reports on whether he resigned or was fired.....or is about to be fired.



may you live in interesting times...

Game is on!

Rosenstien has been summoned to the WH with the expectations of being fired

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/24/p...ein/index.html

so.
much.
spin.

Originally Posted by CSFFan

Rosenstien has been summoned to the WH

From Hua Mak to Pennsylvania Avenue bail out seekers, why can't they all send each other a pie and get along

when i wake up tomorrow i wouldn't be totally surprised to see that nothing had happened at all.

apparently he has been secretly campaigning against Trumpo, trying to sabotage his presidency and calling to have him removed

jesus christ, what a bunch of Replican hypocrites

Originally Posted by raycarey

when i wake up tomorrow i wouldn't be totally surprised to see that nothing had happened at all.

Like that, Ray.

Trump to meet with Rosenstein on Thursday

President Trump will meet with Rod Rosenstein on Thursday, the White House said Monday, leaving the deputy attorney general's future in limbo amid reports of his possible ouster.


The White House issued the statement after hours of confusion about Rosenstein's job status triggered by a visit to the executive mansion, where the No. 2 Justice Department official reportedly expected to be fired or would resign.


"At the request of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, he and President Trump had an extended conversation to discuss the recent news stories," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday in a statement


"Because the President is at the United Nations General Assembly and has a full schedule with leaders from around the world, they will meet on Thursday when the President returns to Washington, D.C.," she added.


As of early afternoon, Rosenstein remained in his position, but it is unclear if he will survive Thursday's high-stakes meeting with the president.

MORE https://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...in-on-thursday

Seal Leak Hunt

Not so crowdy here? Re-freshing a bit:

The Plot to Subvert an Election
Unraveling the Russia Story So Far

For two years, Americans have tried to absorb the details of the 2016 attack — hacked emails, social media fraud, suspected spies — and President Trump’s claims that it’s all a hoax. The Times explores what we know and what it means.
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
SEPT. 20, 2018

ON AN OCTOBER AFTERNOON BEFORE THE 2016 ELECTION, a huge banner was unfurled from the Manhattan Bridge in New York City: Vladimir V. Putin against a Russian-flag background, and the unlikely word “Peacemaker” below. It was a daredevil happy birthday to the Russian president, who was turning 64.

In November, shortly after Donald J. Trump eked out a victory that Moscow had worked to assist, an even bigger banner appeared, this time on the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington: the face of President Barack Obama and “Goodbye Murderer” in big red letters.

Police never identified who had hung the banners, but there were clues. The earliest promoters of the images on Twitter were American-sounding accounts, including @LeroyLovesUSA, later exposed as Russian fakes operated from St. Petersburg to influence American voters.

The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history.

For many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. What Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain. President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.

But to travel back to 2016 and trace the major plotlines of the Russian attack is to underscore what we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.

To many Americans, the intervention seemed to be a surprise attack, a stealth cyberage Pearl Harbor, carried out by an inexplicably sinister Russia. For Mr. Putin, however, it was long-overdue payback, a justified response to years of “provocations” from the United States.

And there is a plausible case that Mr. Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr. Trump, though it cannot be proved or disproved. In an election with an extraordinarily close margin, the repeated disruption of the Clinton campaign by emails published on WikiLeaks and the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference, a possibility Mr. Trump flatly rejects.



Read more
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...p-clinton.html