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Post by Old Badger on Feb 6, 2018 1:43:54 GMT -5
Rep. Trey "Benghazi" Gowdy, who reviewed the material behind the Nunes memo at the latter's request: “There is a Russia investigation without a dossier. The dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower. The dossier has nothing to do with an email sent by Cambridge Analytica. The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos’s meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn’t have anything to do with obstruction of justice.” linkMaybe Larry or jon can enlighten us on how Trey Gowdy went from right-wing scourge of Hillary Clinton to a sycophantic apologist for the left-wing cabal at the FBI, lol!
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 9, 2018 21:56:43 GMT -5
"In a letter to the House Intelligence Committee, White House counsel Donald McGahn wrote that the Justice Department had identified portions of the Democrats’ memo that it believed “would create especially significant concerns for the national security and law enforcement interests” if disclosed. McGahn included in his note a letter from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray supporting that claim.
"The decision stands in contrast to one Trump made last week on a Republican memo alleging the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to obtain a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. After the House Intelligence Committee voted on a Monday to make that document public, Trump authorized its release swiftly on a Friday afternoon."
Last week Trump ignored exactly the same objections from exactly the same people to issue the Nunes memo attacking the FBI. This week he's suddenly seized with a need to follow their advice. Geezus, who does this idiot think he's fooling, anyway?
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 9, 2018 22:40:51 GMT -5
You can't make this stuff up: The #3 official at the Department of Justice is quitting after only 9 months to take a job at...Walmart. OK, probably more money, but she didn't give up her previous private-sector gig to rejoin the DOJ, where she'd already been a senior official Bush II, just to hang around long enough to gestate an infant. So, why's Rachel Brand leaving? Well, you see, when Trump fires Rod Rosenstein, Brand will inherit the Mueller investigation into Trump-Russia. And we all have seen that once you become associated, even tangentially, with that, Trump, his minions in the WH, his lawyers, Fox News, and the enablers on Capitol Hill will make your life Hell. You will have your intelligence questioned and your integrity impugned. You can expect hate mail, hate calls, and threats of bodily assault, as the whack-jobs take their cue from Hannity. And in the end, you're going to get fired. Who wants a job like that. So, we can take away two things: Brand is smart enough to know when it's time to go before the damage is done. And Trump's getting ready to fire Mueller to cover up something, whether criminal, impeachable, or merely unsavory. And that will provoke a constitutional crisis the like of which we haven't seen since Nixon fired Archie Cox.
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Post by goldenbucky on Feb 10, 2018 17:04:45 GMT -5
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Post by buckybasser on Feb 11, 2018 7:55:36 GMT -5
America: Nobody Cares, End Liberalism!
The Radical Left & DNC Media: Russia, Russia, Russia!
Boy are you guys lucky to have the rocket scientist Adam Schiff on the House Intelligence Committee...
I wonder how many times Schiff has been cited as a worthy authority in this seemingly endless thread about absolutely nothing except hurt feelings?
Ahh, the irony... How truly embarrassing...
>O
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 11, 2018 11:00:24 GMT -5
Can you say "money laundering"?
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 11, 2018 11:02:16 GMT -5
I wonder, 'basser, just when you stopped being an American?
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 13, 2018 10:56:09 GMT -5
"The U.S. government’s top intelligence official said on Tuesday he expects Russia to continue using propaganda, false personas and other tactics to undermine the upcoming elections. 'There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts' to disrupt the 2016 presidential campaign 'as a success,' and it 'views the 2018 midterm elections' as another opportunity to conduct an attack, said Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats." linkThat's not some left-wing Democrat being quoted. It's former Indiana Republican Senator, and bona fide conservative, Dan Coates. Note that he not only warns about Russian interference this year, but concedes Russian "success" in 2016
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Post by goldenbucky on Feb 15, 2018 20:42:53 GMT -5
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 15, 2018 21:16:21 GMT -5
I've been waiting to hear that Gates was cooperating with Mueller. He was not likely to act as a fall guy for Manafort. Speaking of whom, Franklin Foer's Atlantic cover story on Manafort's sordid history is fascinating reading. The guy has no ideology, no principles, no morals at all. He joined the Trump campaign for one simple reason: he was going broke after losing his Ukrainian money train. He literally begged for the job. Once Gates starts talking, how long before Manafort decides to sell out Trump?
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 16, 2018 16:45:00 GMT -5
"The Justice Department’s special counsel announced the indictment Friday of a notorious Russian troll farm — charging 13 individuals with an audacious scheme to criminally interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg, was named in the indictment as the hub of an ambitious effort to trick Americans into following Russian-fed propaganda that pushed U.S. voters toward then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and away from Democrat Hillary Clinton. The indictment charges that some of the Russian suspects interacted with Americans associated with the Trump campaign, but those associates did not realize they were being manipulated...The charges include conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud and aggravated identity theft." linkOf course, these people all are in Russia, and their government never will allow them to be extradited to the US. But this indictment provides further evidence of the extent of Russian interference. One interesting detail confirms what many of us suspected: "By February 2016, the suspects had decided whom they were supporting in the 2016 race. According to the indictment, Internet Research Agency specialists were instructed to 'use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them.)' Prosecutors say some Russian employees of the troll farm were chastised in September 2016 when they had a “low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton” and were told it was 'imperative to intensify criticizing' the Democratic nominee in future posts." Yes, they supported both Sanders and Trump. It's not hard to understand why: both were proposing to scale back US international engagement, giving Putin a freer hand to expand Russian influence around the world. As we've seen, for example, under Trump Russia has become the key broker in the Middle East, reversing their almost complete removal from the region by the US in the 1970s, under Nixon. Putin knew damn well that Hillary never would have allowed that. More coming from Mueller in the coming months, I'm sure, and given who's cooperating with him these days expect future indictments to hit closer to home.
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 17, 2018 10:56:49 GMT -5
Even Paul Ryan is stepping away from Trump on this one: “We have known that Russians meddled in the election, but these indictments detail the extent of the subterfuge. These Russians engaged in a sinister and systematic attack on our political system. It was a conspiracy to subvert the process, and take aim at democracy itself. Today’s announcement underscores why we need to follow the facts and work to protect the integrity of future elections.” That's a far cry from Trump's insistence that: "It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?” “Since the first day I took office, all you hear is the phony Democrat excuse for losing the election, Russia, Russia, Russia.” “[Putin] said he didn’t meddle...Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it.”
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 17, 2018 17:49:50 GMT -5
From the 2018 Munich Security Conference earlier today:"U.S. national security adviser H.R. McMaster acknowledged Saturday that evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election is 'incontrovertible' but said Moscow’s campaign to divide the West through subterfuge was failing...U.S. authorities had been reluctant in the past to detail what they knew about the meddling because, he said, 'you didn’t want to divulge your intelligence capabilities.' But now, he said, it was in the public domain — and the United States was determined to fight future subterfuge. 'The United States will expose and act against those who use cyberspace, social media and other means to advance campaigns of disinformation, subversion and espionage,' McMaster said. 'We are already improving our ability to defeat these pernicious threats.'... "In a separate appearance, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats said the indictment represents 'the culmination of a gathering of a mass amount of facts' that were used to support last year’s intelligence assessment concluding that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election to help Trump. Coats said everything that had been learned since the assessment was issued in January 2017 had 'verified that assessment.'” Just a few days ago many Republicans were insisting that the whole Russian interference story was a "hoax" cooked up by Deep State operatives in the FBI, CIA, NSA, and elsewhere in the national security establishment. Rep. Devin Nunes was embarrassing himself and his party with a ludicrous "report" blaming it all on Hillary Clinton. (BTW, Nunes has been sidelined by Ryan, who has excluded him from decisions on the probe, even though he's the relevant committee chairman.) For more than a year they've been attacking the national security assessment that Coates now says has been "verified" by subsequent investigation. So, let's get rid of this "hoax" talk. All the "President's" Men now agree it's not a hoax.
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 18, 2018 22:58:10 GMT -5
Why the Russia investigation drives Trump crazy: "President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy. That is, either Trump’s real estate empire has taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin — so much that they literally own him; or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released; or Trump actually believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says he is innocent of intervening in our elections — over the explicit findings of Trump’s own C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. chiefs. In sum, Trump is either hiding something so threatening to himself, or he’s criminally incompetent to be commander in chief." linkOne thing is clear: it's not concerns about the election interference itself that is pushing his crazed response to each new development. Even his own advisors now publicly admit that Russia was working to get him elected, and that they believe they were successful. And the US public also believes it. It's possible that the Mueller investigation will find some collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, but whether it would rise to the level of a crime is another matter. And it's pretty clear that Republicans in Congress aren't about to impeach Trump over any such collusion, anyway; even if Democrats take the House next year and do impeach, it's hard to imagine the Senate convicting him and tossing him out of office. Hell, a Republican Senate couldn't even come up with 50 votes to convict Bill Clinton, much less the 67 needed for conviction. So, what's he really got to worry about? I think it's all about the money. That's why Mueller has a leading financial crimes attorney on his staff, and that's how they've gone after Manafort and Gates. "Follow the money" is good advice here.
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 20, 2018 17:12:38 GMT -5
This man is nuts, but then we've long known that. Latest insanity:WASHINGTON — Attempting to shift the blame for Russian interference in the 2016 election, President Trump suggested in Twitter posts on Tuesday that the previous administration did not do enough to prevent the Kremlin’s influence campaign and that President Barack Obama was dismissive of the threat. Donald J. Trump Verified account @realdonaldtrump [quoting Obama] “There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s elections, there’s no evidence that that has happened in the past or that it will happen this time, and so I’d invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and make his case to get votes.” ..... At the time of Mr. Obama’s remarks, his administration was deep into investigating the Russian interference. Two days before Mr. Obama’s remarks in October 2016, the F.B.I. had obtained a secret search warrant on a former Trump campaign associate, and some of the Russians who were charged last week used one of their social media accounts to discourage Americans from voting for Mrs. Clinton. “particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL,” the court documents said in offering an example of the social media dialogue.
In another Twitter post on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said his administration has been “much tougher” on Russia than the Obama administration, even though in his 13 months in office he has done little to confront the threat of election interference. Mr. Trump has said that he does not believe Russia meddled during the 2016 election, contradicting the conclusion of his own national security team. And some state election officials say they are not getting what they need from the Trump administration to protect the integrity of the votes..."
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 20, 2018 17:19:21 GMT -5
The noose is tightening on Manafort:"WASHINGTON — An attorney whose firm was accused of whitewashing abuses by the former president of Ukraine in cooperation with Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to lying to the special counsel investigating Russian election interference. The attorney, Alex van der Zwaan, worked in London for the prominent New York law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He was accused of making false statements regarding communications he had with Rick Gates, a longtime associate of Mr. Manafort and a former Trump campaign aide, about work they did in 2012 for the Ukrainian government, according to court papers... "Mr. Manafort’s relationship with Skadden dates to years before his work on the Trump campaign. He enlisted the firm in his effort to shield a client, Viktor F. Yanukovych, the Russia-aligned president of Ukraine, from international condemnation. Mr. Manafort asked Skadden to draft a report that critics have said essentially whitewashed Mr. Yanukovych’s human rights record. One day after its release, a State Department official called it 'incomplete,' saying that it 'doesn’t give an accurate picture' and that the State Department was concerned that 'Skadden Arps lawyers were obviously not going to find political motivation if they weren’t looking for it.' The law firm’s work was being investigated by Ukraine’s top prosecutor, which asked the Department of Justice for help in questioning eight lawyers who the Ukrainians believed were involved, including Mr. van der Zwaan, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times." That second paragraph reveals something new: Mueller is coordinating to some degree with prosecutors in Ukraine, where Manafort did much of his business before joining the Trump campaign. This looks like a legal pincers attack. I assume they're trying to break Gates to get to Manafort.
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Post by goldenbucky on Feb 20, 2018 23:11:17 GMT -5
First rule of fight club..."Russian police have reportedly arrested a man who has claimed to be a worker at a so-called troll factory in St. Petersburg, Russia, hours after he gave interviews to foreign journalists and lifted the lid on a secretive organization the U.S. Department of Justice last week accused of trying to undermine the 2016 presidential election....Since the indictment, Marat Mindiyarov, a 43-year-old former teacher who said he worked for the operation from 2014 to early 2015, has been giving interviews to multiple foreign news outlets, including The Associated Press and The Washington Post, describing its inner workings. He was then detained Sunday by police who accused him and a friend of making a false report about a bomb near his village outside St. Petersburg, he told The Moscow Times. Mindiyarov has since been released, Russian radio station Echo of Moscow reported." I suspect we won't be hearing anything more from Mr. Mindiyarov. In case you missed it, his description of his job was interesting.
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 21, 2018 10:16:30 GMT -5
Crazy Donald tweets insanity again: "President Trump on Wednesday lashed out at Attorney General Jeff Sessions, suggesting the president’s supporters should pressure Sessions to focus the investigation into Russian election meddling on President Barack Obama’s administration. Taking to Twitter, Trump said that the meddling occurred while Obama was in office and asked why his predecessor didn’t intervene. 'Question: If all of the Russian meddling took place during the Obama Administration, right up to January 20th, why aren’t they the subject of the investigation?' Trump said in his tweet. 'Why didn’t Obama do something about the meddling? Why aren’t Dem crimes under investigation? Ask Jeff Session!' he concluded, misspelling the last name of his attorney general. (Trump later sent a new version of the tweet with the correct spelling.)" Watch for Members of Congress eager to get a White House dinner invitation take up the challenge and publicly pressure Sessions to "investigate" Obama's ties to Russia. We are more like a Third World country every single day Crazy Donald is in office.
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 21, 2018 10:31:18 GMT -5
Oh, wait! There's more! "Van der Zwaan is the son-in-law of German Khan, a billionaire and an owner of Alfa Group, Russia’s largest financial and industrial investment group. Khan...is a native of Kiev, Ukraine...Steele’s reports had included allegations about Alfa Bank and its ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin." Connect the dots: Putin . . . . . Alfa Bank . . . . . Khan . . . . . van der Zwaan . . . . . Gates . . . . . Manafort . . . . . [Guess Who] What this is about is money-laundering: "prosecutors alleged that van der Zwaan falsely told federal investigators that he last communicated with Gates in mid-August 2016 through an innocuous text message. Prosecutors said van der Zwaan was lying, and that he spoke to Gates and another unnamed person in September 2016 using encrypted communications — conversations that he recorded. Prosecutors did not identify the second person with whom van der Zwaan spoke other than to say that the person was a longtime business associate of Manafort who was principally based in Ukraine at the time and spoke to van der Zwaan in Russian. Prosecutors said van der Zwaan also deleted emails rather than turning them over to Skadden, which was gathering documents for the special counsel. One document he deleted, prosecutors said, was an email requesting that he use encrypted communications... "The subject of the 2016 recorded phone call, prosecutors said, was a 2012 report prepared by van der Zwaan’s law firm about the jailing of former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Yanukovych had imprisoned Tymoshenko, a political rival, after a gas supply controversy in 2009 involving Russia. The Skadden report has been controversial in Ukraine in part because its findings seemed to contradict the international community’s conclusion that Tymoshenko had been unjustly jailed. "In addition, the Ukrainian government claimed to have paid only $12,000 for the report, an amount that put it just below the limit that would have required competitive bidding for the project under Ukrainian law. Prosecutors have alleged that Manafort and Gates used an offshore account to secretly pay $4 million for the report." link
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 22, 2018 21:49:17 GMT -5
Another 32 counts against Manafort and Gates: "Even as he was managing Donald J. Trump’s campaign for president, Paul Manafort lied to banks to secure millions of dollars in cash loans as part of a decade-long money laundering scheme, according to charges unsealed by the special counsel on Thursday. Mr. Manafort exaggerated his income by millions of dollars to take out mortgages on homes in SoHo and the Hamptons that he had purchased years earlier in part with income illegally funneled through offshore bank accounts, according to the indictment. The laundered money — which totaled $30 million — came from Mr. Manafort’s work as a lobbyist and political consultant to Viktor F. Yanukovych, the Russia-aligned former Ukrainian president. But after Mr. Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 and fled to Russia, Mr. Manafort’s income quickly dwindled. The 32-count indictment describes a complex plot that Mr. Manafort then undertook to leverage money from his real estate with the help of his longtime business partner and campaign deputy, Rick Gates... "The original indictment did not explicitly bring tax charges, an omission that experts had predicted that Mr. Mueller would ultimately correct. The first indictment also relied heavily on accusations that Mr. Manafort violated foreign lobbying laws, which have rarely been used at trial. The new indictment gives prosecutors more options. Unlike the original indictment, which was filed in Washington, the one unsealed on Thursday was brought in a federal court in Alexandria, Va. Prosecutors said they had filed the charges there because the crimes had occurred in the Eastern District of Virginia and Mr. Mueller did not have authority to bring them in Washington. The fact that the two men are now facing similar indictments in two federal courts means that Mr. Manafort’s case will probably be moved to Alexandria." linkI assume Manafort and Gates knew these charges were coming as soon as Mueller could get them before a grand jury on this side of the Potomac. These are based on the same facts as those from October, but in a sense they're more dangerous for the defendants because tax evasion is more likely to be prosecuted than violations of lobbying law. Gates is understood to be negotiating a deal with Mueller, and this likely puts more pressure on him to complete that soon. As I've been saying for a while, this case is going to be about money-laundering.
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 23, 2018 9:55:15 GMT -5
"A former top adviser to Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign indicted by the special counsel was expected to plead guilty as soon as Friday afternoon, according to two people familiar with his plea agreement, a move that signals he is cooperating with the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election...It was unclear exactly what Mr. Gates might have to offer the special counsel’s team, whether about Mr. Manafort or about other members of the Trump campaign. Neither indictment indicated that either Mr. Gates or Mr. Manafort had information about the central question of Mr. Mueller’s investigation — whether President Trump or his aides coordinated with the Russian government’s efforts to disrupt the 2016 election. "But Mr. Gates was present for the most significant periods of activity of the campaign, as Mr. Trump began developing policy positions and his digital operation engaged with millions of voters on platforms such as Facebook...The work the two men did for their firm, Davis Manafort, connected them to numerous people with ties to the Kremlin. One was Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate and an ally of Mr. Putin. Mr. Deripaska has been denied a visa to travel to the United States because of allegations that he is linked to organized crime operations, claims he has denied. In 2008, Mr. Gates took over the firm’s duties in Eastern Europe, where he worked on business development and contract negotiations." linkDoes anyone really believe that Mueller's interest ends with the tax evasion charges filed yesterday? The noose around the White House is tightening, and with each guilty plea it gets harder and harder for Trump to fire Mueller, or anyone else connected with the investigation.
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Post by goldenbucky on Feb 23, 2018 13:33:33 GMT -5
Gates pleads guilty to two counts today. It was pointed out that Gates pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI on Feb 1, 2018?! I wonder if this was when he was (presumably) negotiating a deal? Don't f@#$ with Robert Mueller, eh?
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 23, 2018 13:50:48 GMT -5
Wow! He was lying this month? That's nuts.
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 23, 2018 18:44:55 GMT -5
"On Feb. 1, according to the records, Mr. Gates misled investigators about a conversation he had with Mr. Manafort in March 2013, after Mr. Manafort had met with a congressman discuss the situation in Ukraine. The documents do not name the lawmaker, but press accounts have identified him as Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, the Republican long known for his pro-Russia views. Mr. Gates falsely told investigators that Mr. Manafort had told him that the subject of Ukraine had not come up at the meeting, even though Mr. Gates had helped draft a report to Ukraine’s leadership after the meeting about what had transpired, according to the court papers." linkGeezus, did Gates think the FBI asked him about that meeting without knowing he'd written a memo to the Ukrainian government about it? He's sounds somewhat amateur. I love Manafort's reaction (well, now doubt his lawyers'): “Notwithstanding that Rick Gates pleaded today, I continue to maintain my innocence. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled up charges contained in the indictments against me.” Yeah, Gates was too weak to accept five years in prison for helping Manafort hide $75 million in offshore accounts, then lie about it: "Two months after Mr. Manafort left the campaign, according to the court documents, his accountant emailed him a question about whether he had any foreign bank accounts. 'None,' he replied."
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 23, 2018 19:52:14 GMT -5
"New charges were filed late Friday against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in the special counsel investigation. Prosecutors allege that Manafort, with the assistance of longtime business partner Rick Gates, 'secretly retained a group of former senior European politicians to take positions favorable to Ukraine, including by lobbying in the United States.' "The new indictment came less than two hours after Gates pleaded guilty to two criminal charges in federal court and pledged to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russia and the 2016 presidential election. Prosecutors say Manafort orchestrated a group of former European politicians, called the "Hapsburg group," to pose as independent voices. Yet they covertly pushed positions favorable to Ukraine as paid lobbyists. Manafort used offshore accounts to pay the former politicians 2 million euros. Manafort also allegedly used $4 million from an offshore account to fund a report on the trial of a political opponent jailed by his clients. A lawyer involved in the report -- Alex van der Zwaan -- pleaded guilty to lying to investigators earlier this week." linkYou know this info came from Gates as part of his plea bargain. Manafort's gonna settle eventually or spend much of the rest of his life in a federal pen.
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 24, 2018 11:03:32 GMT -5
A handy update and scorecard on the overall investigation: link.
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Post by goldenbucky on Feb 24, 2018 15:04:16 GMT -5
Interesting (and fairly brief) writeup on Robert Mueller is also worth a look. Certainly lines up with what has been said about him (by both R's and D's) when he was appointed to his current position. One of my favorite passages: "Mueller, now 73, began his Department of Justice career in 1976 as an assistant US attorney in San Francisco, and during the decades that followed took only two breaks to try out the private sector, each lasting no more than a couple of years. The stints were so short-lived because of a simple fact, according to Graff: Mueller couldn't stand defending those he felt were guilty. "He'll meet with the client, they'll explain the problem and he'll say 'Well, it sounds like you should go to jail then,'" Graff said. "There is not a lot of gray in Bob Mueller's worldview."
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 24, 2018 21:21:12 GMT -5
"He'll meet with the client, they'll explain the problem and he'll say 'Well, it sounds like you should go to jail then,'" Graff said. "There is not a lot of gray in Bob Mueller's worldview." This is what makes him so dangerous to Trump and his cronies.
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Post by goldenbucky on Feb 25, 2018 22:53:11 GMT -5
Hey I don't watch Fox News or listen to Alex Jones so help me out - is the Nunes memo still worse than Watergate and has it sunk the Mueller investigation? The minority memo responding to Nunes' flight of fancy was finally released over the weekend after some redactions that lays out exactly how the Nunes memo is, as they say, fake news. All I'm aware of as a response is another batsh!t crazy tweetstorm by POTUS and some weak, non-denial denials from congressional Republicans. If things were really as bad as Nunes alleged, it would be worth pursuing further. Instead Trey Gowdy (who helped Nunes write it) decides not to run for re-election and seems to have backed off the whole thing. I won't be holding my breath waiting for Fox News to walk back their disinformation campaign on the matter. This whole debacle is a fine example of why their viewers tend to be less well-informed than those who ignore the news entirely. I look forward to seeing how all this fits together as the Mueller investigation proceeds.
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Post by Old Badger on Feb 27, 2018 12:21:07 GMT -5
Here's another piece that helps explain the Trump-Russia entanglement story: Thanks to Mueller’s indictments and some revelatory journalism, we have a decent picture of the desperate straits Manafort was in when he joined Team Trump. In the charges unsealed last week, Mueller’s team described a two-part criminal scheme by Manafort and Gates. First, they laundered tens of millions of dollars while working for Viktor Yanukovych, then the Kremlin-aligned president of Ukraine, and his political allies. In 2014, Yanukovych fled into exile in Russia, and according to Mueller’s indictment, Manafort and Gates’s “Ukraine income dwindled.” That’s when the second part of their scheme began. From 2015 to 2017, in what looks like a frantic scramble for cash, the indictment says, they “fraudulently secured more than $20 million” in bank loans by lying about their finances. We don’t know why they needed all this money. But we do know that in 2014, lawyers for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska filed a petition in the Cayman Islands claiming that Manafort and Gates couldn’t account for almost $19 million that a company controlled by Deripaska had given them to invest. Deripaska, who is reportedly very close to President Vladimir Putin, has been denied entry to the United States because of his suspected ties to Russian organized crime. One would not, presumably, want to owe him a debt that could not be paid. By 2015, Manafort was in despair; according to Franklin Foer’s exhaustive profile of him in The Atlantic, one of his daughters feared he would commit suicide. But in 2016, he seems to have glimpsed salvation in Trump’s presidential campaign. Manafort wrote to Trump offering to work free, and Trump, famously tightfisted, accepted. He joined the campaign in March, and in May was promoted to campaign chairman, with Gates as his deputy. Immediately, Manafort sought to use his role in the campaign to repair his relationship with Deripaska. In April, as The Washington Post reported, he emailed an employee in Kiev about his new job, and wrote, apparently in relation to Deripaska, “How do we use to get whole?” In July, Manafort offered to give Deripaska private briefings about the campaign. Of course, Manafort wasn’t the only figure in Trump’s campaign with questionable Russian connections...According to Schiff’s memo, when the Justice Department sought a warrant to surveil p[Carter] Page in 2016, it presented the court with contextual information about Russian election interference. The court was told that Russian agents “previewed their hack and dissemination of stolen emails” to George Papadopoulos, another Trump foreign policy adviser. Papadopoulos has since pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his Russian contacts, and we knew he’d been told that Russia had emails that could embarrass Hillary Clinton. But this is the first public confirmation that Papadopoulos had advance notice of a Russian plan to release these emails... Perhaps Trump didn’t realize that his campaign was being run by alleged Russian money launderers, that at least two of his foreign policy advisers had entanglements with Russian intelligence, and that his campaign had a heads up about Russian plans to dump stolen Clinton emails online. None of last week’s new information proves that Trump is too disloyal to his own country to be president. But the only alternative is that he’s too clueless.
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