Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

Special Counsel Robert Mueller continues to connect the dots, and the people those dots represent ought to be really scared.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is focusing intensely on alleged interactions between former top Trump campaign official Rick Gates and political operative Roger Stone, one of President Donald Trump's closest confidants, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter. 

Stone, a longtime advisor to Trump, is apparently one of the top subjects of the Mueller investigation into potential collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, sources told CNBC on condition of anonymity. 

The questions have been largely about what was discussed at meetings, including dinners, between Stone and Gates, before and during the campaign, said the sources, who have knowledge of the substance of the recent interviews.

In February, Gates pleaded guilty to two counts stemming from the Russia investigation, and he is cooperating with Mueller's probe. 

The new developments indicate that Mueller's team is interested in Stone beyond his interactions with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange during the campaign. 

An attorney for Stone, Robert Buschel, did not deny the relationship between his client and Gates, but sought to downplay its importance. 

"Roger Stone did not have any substantive or meaningful interaction with Rick Gates during or leading up to the 2016 campaign," Buschel told CNBC in a statement. 

An attorney for Gates declined to comment. The special counsel's office declined to comment. 

The link between Gates and Stone goes back to their work at what had been one of the most powerful lobbying firms in Washington, which was founded by Stone along with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. The special counsel's probe has yielded two indictments against Manafort, who is accused of several crimes, including bank fraud and conspiracy against the United States.

I've been wondering when Roger Stone would find himself in Mueller's direct crosshairs, and it seems we have our answer.  Don't be surprised if Stone is Mueller's next target, because as with the weeks before the Manafort and Flynn indictments, the grand jury subpoena game is heating up rapidly.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday filed a request for 70 blank subpoenas in the Virginia court presiding over one of two criminal proceedings involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. 

The two-page filing doesn’t offer much in the way of details, but each subpoena orders the recipient to appear at the federal courthouse in Alexandria on July 10 at 10 a.m. to testify at Manafort’s trial on charges stemming from Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. 

Although Manafort faces no charges related to the Trump campaign, he is accused in cases filed both in Alexandria, Virginia and Washington, D.C. of hiding the work he did for and the money he made from a Russia-friendly political party in Ukraine and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. 

In Virginia, he is also accused of concealing foreign bank accounts, falsifying his income taxes and failing to report foreign bank accounts. 

In Washington, Manafort faces counts of conspiracy to launder more than $30 million, making false statements, failing to follow lobbying disclosure laws and working as an unregistered foreign agent.

May brings the spring flowers and the seeds of justice.

The Great Wall Bean Ball Downfall

Trump's trade war with China has its first major casualty, and it's America's soybean exporters here in Ohio and other farm states.

The world’s biggest oilseed processor just confirmed one of the soybean market’s biggest fears: China has essentially stopped buying U.S. supplies amid the brewing trade war. 

“Whatever they’re buying is non-U.S.,” Bunge Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Soren Schroder said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “They’re buying beans in Canada, in Brazil, mostly Brazil, but very deliberately not buying anything from the U.S.” 

In a move that caught many in U.S. agriculture by surprise, China last month announced planned tariffs on American shipments of soybeans. As the market waited for the measure to take effect, there was some hope among traders and shippers alike that relations between the nations could ease in the meantime and the trade flow would continue. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least for now, according to Bunge.

It’s “very clear” that the trade tensions have already stopped China from buying U.S. supplies, Schroder said. “How long that will last, who knows? But so long as there is this big cloud of uncertainty, that’s likely to continue.”

Soybeans are a billion dollar crop in Ohio.  Lot of farmers here depend on those exports and China is by far the largest buyer.  Now they have stopped buying.

Gonna be a fun November around here.

Teaching Some Global Economics

If you want to know why teachers are on strike in Arizona and are considering striking in other states, consider this:  Red state education cuts have gotten so bad that we treat the teaching profession like we currently treat coders in IT or engineers in tech.  States want to fill teaching positions with qualified people, but they want to pay retail cashier salaries so they're looking to hire from outside the US. 

The latest wave of foreign workers sweeping into American jobs brought Donato Soberano from the Philippines to Arizona two years ago. He had to pay thousands of dollars to a job broker and lived for a time in an apartment with five other Filipino workers. The lure is the pay — 10 times more than what he made doing the same work back home.

But Mr. Soberano is not a hospitality worker or a home health aide. He is in another line of work that increasingly pays too little to attract enough Americans: Mr. Soberano is a public school teacher.

As walkouts by teachers protesting low pay and education funding shortfalls spread across the country, the small but growing movement to recruit teachers from overseas is another sign of the difficulty some districts are having providing the basics to public school students.

Among the latest states hit by the protests is Arizona, where teacher pay is more than $10,000 below the national average of $59,000 per year. The Pendergast Elementary School District, where Mr. Soberano works, has recruited more than 50 teachers from the Philippines since 2015. They hold J-1 visas, which allow them to work temporarily in the United States, like au pairs or camp counselors, but offer no path to citizenship. More than 2,800 foreign teachers arrived on American soil last year through the J-1, according to the State Department, up from about 1,200 in 2010.

“In these times, you have to be innovative and creative in recruiting,” said Patricia Davis-Tussey, Pendergast’s head of human resources. “We embrace diversity and really gain a lot from the cultural exchange experience. Our students do as well.”

Public school teachers are the new migrant workers in America.  We don't even give them a path to being citizens here.  Has teaching really become the new face of "jobs Americans won't do" in the Trump era?

Sure looks like it.

StupidiNews!

• An Air National Guard C-130 cargo plane on its way to be decommissioned crashed shortly after takeoff into a highway near Savannah, Georgia, killing all nine on board.
• Arizona teachers remain on strike for a fifth day as state lawmakers consider a deal to get teachers back to work and to restore a decade of steep education budget cuts.
• Donald Trump reportedly will scrap the Iran nuclear deal, but wants an exit that doesn't alienate French President Emmanuel Macron, who urged Trump to keep the deal in a state visit last week.
• Trump legal adviser Rudy Giuliani says that Trump reimbursed lawyer Michael Cohen for $130,000 in money reportedly paid to Stormy Daniels, something Trump has previously denied.
• Oakland is joining a growing number of California cities passing local laws creating community oversight boards as a check on surveillance technology and privacy issues.