Russian To Judgment, Con't

Karen Yourish and Larry Buchanan at the NY Times helpfully chart out the fact that Trump campaign officials had contact with Russian nationals more than 100 times before Trump's inauguration, and Donald Trump lied about every single one of them at one time or another, including the half-dozen times Trump himself came in contact with Russians.

During the 2016 presidential campaign and transition, Donald J. Trump and at least 17 campaign officials and advisers had contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, a New York Times analysis has found. At least 10 other associates were told about interactions but did not have any themselves.

Knowledge of these interactions is based on New York Times reporting, documents submitted to Congress, and court records and accusations related to the special counsel investigating foreign interference in the election.

Among these contacts are more than 100 in-person meetings, phone calls, text messages, emails and private messages on Twitter. Mr. Trump and his campaign repeatedly denied having such contacts with Russians during the 2016 election.

The special counsel has also investigated connections between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, which released thousands of Democratic emails that were hacked by Russia before the election.

Aras Agalarov, a Russian billionaire who hosted a Miss Universe pageant with Mr. Trump in Moscow, and the billionaire’s son, Emin, reached out to Mr. Trump several times. (Separately, both men helped arrange the now-famous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-linked attorney about getting information that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton.) Mr. Trump was also pursuing a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Mr. Cohen was deeply involved in the plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. His partner in the effort was Felix Sater, a Trump business associate with deep contacts in Russia. Mr. Cohen admitted lying to Congress about the duration of the project’s discussions and the extent of Mr. Trump’s involvement in them. And Mr. Cohen is also now known to have met with a Russian oligarch on a separate matter.

Mr. Trump Jr. had various contacts with Russians and a Russian intermediary regarding the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, as well as the possibility of setting up a campaign page on a Russian social media site. He also exchanged private messages with WikiLeaks.

And the list goes on.  For a witch hunt, there's enough here for an eighth Harry Potter book and possibly a sequel to Hocus Pocus.

Trump was up to his neck in Russians.  We know the Russians interfereed with the 2016 election process on behalf of Trump.  Don't let the GOP gaslight you on these facts.

Mueller has the receipts, and when he delivers, it's up to us to act upon that information and force the Trump regime out.

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

We've got a lot to cover, ranging into the "absolute crapton" of information on the Mueller investigation front today, it was a busy day indeed.  First, fomer Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos reported to prison this week to serve out his two-week prison sentence, but as The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand and Scott Stedman report, his troubles are far from over.

George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about his interactions with a Russia-linked professor in 2016, went to jail on Monday after fighting, and failing, to delay the start of his two-week prison sentence. But a letter now being investigated by the House Intelligence Committee and the FBI indicates that Papadopoulos is still in the crosshairs of investigators probing a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The letter, obtained last week by The Atlantic, was sent to Democratic Representative Adam Schiff’s office on November 19 by an individual who claims to have been close to Papadopoulos in late 2016 and early 2017. The letter was brought to the attention of Schiff and House Intelligence Committee staff, according to an aide who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. The letter was also obtained by federal authorities, who are taking its claims “very seriously,” said two U.S. officials who also requested anonymity due to the sensitivities of the probe.

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.)

Again, if the FBI and Schiff are looking into this, then there must be some evidence backing this up.  But again, we know that the Russians like to plant fake stories in order to get journalists to bite, and it's very possible that this is one of them, along with yesterday's Manafort/WikiLeaks story.

Luke Harding and Dan Collyns, the reporters behind the Guardian story, do not name their sources, although they claim to have multiple, and they write that they have seen an internal document from Ecuador’s intelligence service listing “Paul Manaford [sic]” as a visitor to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Manafort, for his part, has called the Guardian’s report “totally false and deliberately libelous.” And White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “Certainly I remain confident in the White House’s assertion that the president was involved in no wrongdoing, was not involved in any collusion.”

While the immediate reaction to the story was a collective “Wow!”, it is fair to take a step back and remain wary. Rather than being the bombshell smoking gun that directly connects the Trump campaign to WikiLeaks, perhaps the report is something else entirely: a disinformation campaign. Is it possible someone planted this story as a means to discredit the journalists?

A number of parties in the Trump-Russia circus have an interest in discrediting the media. Russia President Vladimir Putin has solidified his power in Russia by systematically quashing the free press and controlling the message through friendly media outlets, including the likes of RT and Sputnik. Trump, too, has consistently shouted “Fake News!” at any story he doesn’t like and has made it a theme of late to refer to the media as “the enemy of the people,” a term that has been used by dictators throughout time, including to devastating effect by Joseph Stalin.

Harding is likely a major target for anyone wrapped up in Russia’s intelligence operation against the West’s democratic institutions. He has written a book about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia—literally titled Collusion, as well as numerous articles related to the case, including about the Steele Dossier, Russia’s plans to help rescue Assange from London and spirit him away to Moscow, Russia’s novichok poisoning operation against Sergei Skripal, and a slew of other “Russia-is-up-to-no-good” stories.

If this latest story about Manafort and Assange is false, that is, if, for example, the sources lied to Harding and Collyns (or if the sources themselves were lied to and thus thought they were being truthful in their statements to the journalists), or if the Ecuadorian intelligence document is a fake, the most logical explanation is that it is an attempt to make Harding look bad. This, in turn, would put into question any of Harding’s past reporting and could be raised any time someone mentions his reporting as evidence of wrongdoing. Any mention of Harding going forward would include the caveat, “according to a reporter who was once duped.” The underlying question would always be: How can anything he writes be trusted?

Still, if this is true, then that's only the beginning of Trump's troubles this week.  Not that anybody doubted it, but now we know for sure that Paul Manafort was feeding information about his cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller directly to Trump's lawyers in an attempt to serve as a mole for Trump and to undermine the investigation.

A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president’s onetime campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.

The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed. Such information could help shape a legal defense strategy, and it also appeared to give Mr. Trump and his legal advisers ammunition in their public relations campaign against Mr. Mueller’s office.

For example, Mr. Giuliani said, Mr. Manafort’s lawyer Kevin M. Downing told him that prosecutors hammered away at whether the president knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting where Russians promised to deliver damaging information on Hillary Clinton to his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. The president has long denied knowing about the meeting in advance. “He wants Manafort to incriminate Trump,” Mr. Giuliani declared of Mr. Mueller.

While Mr. Downing’s discussions with the president’s team violated no laws, they helped contribute to a deteriorating relationship between lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors, who accused Mr. Manafort of holding out on them despite his pledge to assist them in any matter they deemed relevant, according to the people. That conflict spilled into public view on Monday when the prosecutors took the rare step of declaring that Mr. Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying to them about a variety of subjects.

Mr. Manafort’s lawyers insisted that their client had been truthful but acknowledged that the two sides were at an impasse. Mr. Manafort will now face sentencing on two conspiracy charges and eight counts of financial fraud — crimes that could put him behind bars for at least 10 years.

Of course as I mentioned yesterday, the reality is that now Donald Trump knows the end is near as Mueller knew all along that Manafort was feeding Trump information from the probe, and he knew Manafort was lying to him straight up.

Paul Manafort’s alleged misstatements to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators include comments about his personal business dealings and about his contacts with a former associate in Ukraine, say people familiar with the matter.

Those statements—among those described by Mr. Mueller as “lies” and Mr. Manafort as “truthful information” in a court filing Monday—are what led the special counsel this week to take the unusual step of ending the former Trump campaign chairman’s plea agreement 2½ months after it was reached, the people said.

The content of those statements don’t appear to be central to the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election that Mr. Mueller is investigating. It is unclear if prosecutors plan to accuse Mr. Manafort of additional lies.

But Mr. Mueller’s move to end the cooperation deal reflects more broadly a combative relationship that has developed between Mr. Manafort and Mr. Mueller’s investigators, as well as the special counsel’s conclusion that Mr. Manafort fell short of his cooperation agreement, court filings show.

In interviews with Mr. Mueller’s team, Mr. Manafort allegedly made inaccurate statements about his communications with Konstantin Kilimnik, said the people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Kilimnik, who Mr. Mueller charged earlier this year along with Mr. Manafort with trying to influence the testimony of two witnesses against Mr. Manafort, had worked for Mr. Manafort’s lobbying firm in Ukraine. Messrs. Manafort and Kilimnik communicated earlier this year about contacting others who worked with them in an alleged effort to coordinate their stories, according to an indictment Mr. Mueller filed against them.

Mr. Kilimnik, whom the FBI has assessed to have ties to Russian intelligence, according to a filing by the special counsel’s office, isn’t in custody and hasn’t responded to the charges in court.

SO it's a pretty safe bet that if Manafort was lying all along, the information Mueller's people gave to Manafort was a test that both Manafort and Trump failed and that Trump almost certainly lied on his questionnaire to Mueller. 

President Donald Trump told special counsel Robert Mueller in writing that Roger Stone did not tell him about WikiLeaks, nor was he told about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his son, campaign officials and a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, according to two sources familiar with the matter. 

One source described the President's answers without providing any direct quotes and said the President made clear he was answering to the best of his recollection. 

This is the first insight into how the President responded to the Mueller team's written questions -- a key unknown as Mueller aims to wrap up his investigation and prepare his final report. 

These two points -- WikiLeaks and the Trump Tower meeting -- are critical to Mueller's central mission: investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians during the 2016 campaign. 

The President's lawyers previously told CNN the answers would match his public statements. Still, these written answers could be subject to criminal charges if false. 

A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment. CNN did not get a full readout of all of the President's answers to Mueller's questions.

Again, if Mueller has evidence to prove these answers wrong, then that's lying to federal investigators, and that's not going to be good for Trump.  He's toast, he knows it, and he's doing everything to rally his cult for war.

President Donald Trump appeared to accuse his own deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, of treason on Wednesday, posting a meme to his twitter feed that shows an image of Rosenstein and a slew of Trump critics behind bars.

The image also included special counsel Robert Mueller, former FBI Director James Comey, former national intelligence director James Clapper, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Their picture was overlaid with the words, “Now that Russia collusion is a proven lie, when do the trials for treason begin?”

Trump retweeted the image after separately ripping Mueller, whose investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election appears to be closing in on several Trump associates, including longtime ally Roger Stone and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.

Trump has ramped up his attacks on Mueller in recent days, after a quiet few weeks ahead of the November midterm elections.

It's far from the first time Trump has tweeted nonsense from one of his follower accounts, and as Steve M. tells us, Trump has been preparing his base for war against reality for two years now.  Tens of millions of Trump fans will go to their graves thinking Trump never did anything wrong.  But when the person in the Oval Office tweets about putting his critics and his Deputy AG behind bars for treason, well, that's a whole new level of authoritarianism.

Trump is committing obstruction of justice out in the open now, he's priming his base to take to the streets to defend him, and he's preparing to pardon Paul Manafort to start with.

President Donald Trump declined in a new interview to rule out the possibility that he could pardon Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman. 

"It was never discussed, but I wouldn't take it off the table. Why would I take it off the table?" Trump told the New York Post. 

The President's comments come following special counsel Robert Mueller's accusation that Manafort violated his plea agreement and lied to Mueller's team after being found guilty on eight counts of financial crimes in August. 

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said there had been no conversations about a potential presidential pardon for Manafort. 

Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani told CNN on Tuesday that he and Trump had discussed a Manafort pardon in the spring and decided it was not a proper move at this time, he added. 

"The last time we talked pardon was April or May, when I first came on," Giuliani said. "We decided it should be off the boards -- not exercised now and no one should make a decision based on any expectation."

It's clearly not "off the boards" there Rudy.  Trump clearly wants to pardon Manafort and start putting his enemies in jail. It's only a matter of time before he calls for mass arrests of his enemies.  The only question is whether he'll actually start doing it as Mueller closes in.

Donald Trump's behavior isn't doing much to bolster White House assurances that he's got nothing to worry about from Robert Mueller's probe, after a series of potentially ominous turns in the Russia investigation. 

The President's recent barrage of tweets and comments and testimony from sources close to him -- coinciding with thickening intrigue around the special counsel -- hint instead at deep concern on Trump's part. 

"While the disgusting Fake News is doing everything within their power not to report it that way, at least 3 major players are intimating that the Angry Mueller Gang of Dems is viciously telling witnesses to lie about facts & they will get relief. This is our Joseph McCarthy Era!" Trump tweeted Wednesday, a day after blasting the special counsel as a "conflicted prosecutor gone rogue." 

Despite this outburst of fury, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders painted a portrait of a President who was serenely awaiting Mueller's findings.
"I don't think the President has any concerns about the report because he knows that there was no wrongdoing by him and that there was no collusion," Sanders told reporters at her first daily briefing in a month. 

The explanation for Trump's angst over his predicament seems to lie in a flurry of startling and potentially significant developments and reports swirling around his jailed ex-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and other associates. 

Trump, the most powerful man in the world who crafted a self-flattering image as the ultimate strongman boss, is in a deeply vulnerable spot and appears to feel cornered and in increasing peril. 

He has no choice but to watch as Mueller, an adversary whose discrete public profile makes him an elusive target, grinds away, apparently getting ever closer to Trump's inner circle and perhaps even to the President himself. 

We're deep into "Nixon in the bunker" mode now.  What Trump's response will be remains to be seen, but if you think he's going to go quietly, that's never going to happen.

When he starts giving orders to have people arrested or worse -- and he will -- there will be some willing to follow those orders.

Stay tuned.

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

Three for the Friday Night Mueller News Dump™ file, first up, George Papadopoulos got a light sentence plea deal for his role in the Trump collusion mess for lying to the FBI.

A once low-profile foreign policy campaign adviser whose offhand remark in a London bar in May 2016 helped trigger an FBI counterintelligence investigation into President Trump’s campaign was sentenced to 14 days incarceration Friday by a federal judge in Washington.

George Papadopoulos, 31, pleaded guilty in October to lying to the FBI about key details of his conversations with a London-based professor who had told him the Russians held dirt, in the form of thousands of emails, on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Papadopoulos tried futilely for months to arrange a meeting between top campaign aides and Russian officials.

In asking the court for leniency, Papadopoulos said he made “a terrible mistake, for which I have paid a terrible price, and am deeply ashamed,” and that he was motivated to lie to the FBI try to “create distance between the issue, myself, and the president.”

In hindsight, he said in court, he recognizes that was wrong and “might have harmed the investigation.”

Papadopoulos’s attorney, Thomas M. Breen, went further, saying “the President of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever could,” by calling the investigation fake news and a witch hunt.

It seems like small potatoes, but in reality George was a small potato.  Like it or not, Mueller has bigger fish to deal with, like Paul Manafort.

Paul Manafort’s lawyers have talked to U.S. prosecutors about a possible guilty plea to avert a second criminal trial set to begin in Washington this month, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted of bank and tax fraud last month in a Virginia federal court. He’s accused in Washington of financial crimes including conspiring to launder money, as well as acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Ukraine and obstructing justice.

The negotiations over a potential plea deal have centered on which charges Manafort might admit and the length of the sentence to be recommended by prosecutors working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the person familiar with the matter said. Manafort, 69, already faces as long as 10 years in prison under advisory sentencing guidelines in the Virginia case.

By pleading guilty, Manafort could avoid the risk of a longer prison term if he’s convicted at a second trial, as well as the threat of forfeiting several properties and financial accounts. He could also save the cost of paying lawyers to defend him at trial. Such white-collar criminal cases can cost defendants millions of dollars.

The talks may break down without a deal, but if they succeed, they could prompt Mueller to request a reduced sentence in both the Washington and Virginia cases. It’s not clear whether Manafort might cooperate in Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to the person. Trump, who said he was “very sad” after Manafort’s conviction, could still pardon him.

This could be Manafort fishing for a pardon now, but it's a dangerous game, ask Michael Cohen, who's going to be in jail for quite some time, about that.  Still, Republicans probably want the Manafort trial to go away ASAP rather than a long drawn out trial smack in the middle of midterm campaigns, and Manafort knows it.

We'll see if the deal happens soon.

And speaking of Cohen, the campaign finance probe is apparently far from over.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating whether anyone in the Trump Organization violated campaign-finance laws, in a follow-up to their conviction last month of Michael Cohen, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The inquiry, not previously reported, shows that the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office doesn’t intend to stand down following the guilty plea from Trump’s longtime personal lawyer. Manhattan prosecutors are working on a parallel track to U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is tasked with examining Russian interference in the presidential election and who is referring other matters as they arise to appropriate sections of the Justice Department.

Representatives of the prosecutors in New York declined to comment, while officials for the Trump Organization didn’t immediately respond to several requests for comment.

Among other crimes, Cohen admitted to violating campaign finance laws. He acknowledged that he paid off a woman who claimed to have had an affair with the president, saying he did it at the direction of the candidate himself and that Trump’s company then repaid him. Notably, the president said the next day that Cohen’s acts weren’t a crime. Whether others in Trump’s orbit were complicit -- steering money to benefit his campaign without making proper disclosures or by exceeding federal limits -- is not yet clear. No one else has been charged.

Again, more charges ill be coming from this, and it won't be Mueller running the probe.  Trump can't shut down everything without proving his guilt and causing a massive headache for Republicans going forward.

Stay tuned.  This is all far, far from over.

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

Over the weekend the news broke that Rick Gates has flipped and is willing to testify against former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort.  If you want to know how terrified the Trump regime is of the Mueller investigation right now, and of Mueller's indictments on Friday of 13 Russian nationals in a conspiracy to influence to 2016 election, it seems once again that Trump supporters are floating trial balloons of mass pardons to derail the Mueller probe once and for all.

After months of criticizing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, President Donald Trump’s supporters are issuing increasingly bold calls for presidential pardons to limit the investigation’s impact. 

“I think he should be pardoning anybody who’s been indicted and make it clear that anybody else who gets indicted would be pardoned immediately,” said Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and senior vice president at the conservative Center for Security Policy.

The pleas for mercy mainly extend to the four former Trump aides who have already been swept up in the Russia probe: former campaign manager Paul Manafort, former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos. But they don’t stop there. 

“It’s kind of cruel what’s going on right now and the president should put these defendants out of their misery,” said Larry Klayman, a conservative legal activist. “I think he should pardon everybody — and pardon himself.” 

Klayman and Fleitz spoke before Mueller indicted thirteen Russian nationals on Friday for staging an elaborate 2016 election interference operation in the United States. Democratic leaders said the hard evidence of Russian meddling underscores the importance of letting Mueller’s investigation run its course. 

But many conservatives note that the new indictment shows no evidence of collusion between Trump associates and the Kremlin. That reinforces their view that Mueller’s real target, if any, should be Russian President Vladimir Putin — not Trump’s circle. “[H]ow long will the leftist witch hunt against @RealDonaldTrump continue,” the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted hours after the indictment’s release.

Trump's running out of time.  Once Gates starts singing on Manafort -- and Trump -- things get a lot more complex.  It shows how utterly terrified Trump's people are over the events of the weekend.  The only out they see is mass pardons for everyone involved, including Trump himself.  It's self-serving and awful, but it worked for Dubya and Scooter Libby and kept him out of prison.

The fact that the Trump people wasted no time going straight to pardons this week shows how shaken they are by this.  They know full damn well more indictments are coming.  Lots of them.  Trump's people are going down and hard.

So why the pardon talk now?  Trump may be more receptive to it.  After all, people are beginning to openly question the legitimacy of his presidency after this weekend.

Mueller’s indictment details a well-financed propaganda campaign, undergirded by identity theft, wire fraud, and illegal subversion of U.S. election law, which involved the recruitment of unwitting American political activists, and the creation of thousands of troll accounts on social media. We know that this is just one compartment of the Russian government’s efforts to help Trump win, because it excludes charges related to the theft of Democratic emails, and it is silent on the multiple other channels Russia had available to them to harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, including propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik, and a partnership with Wikileaks. 

Whatever Trump’s specific awareness at the time of the facts alleged in the indictment, we know Trump and his most senior aides were aware that the Russian government was involving itself in the campaign on his behalf, and endeavored to encourage and conceal the meddling. 

The fact that the election turned out to be so close is perhaps the crowning achievement of the conspiracy. With a budget of over $1 million a month to target swing state voters with disinformation on social media, multiple troves containing thousands of stolen emails, “news” outlets at your fingertips, the complicity of a major party political nominee, and impunity from American law, could you move 80,000 votes in three states? 

It’s clearly not crazy to believe the answer is yes, and thus that the crimes that made the election unfair also determined its outcome. In an election so close that many individual factors were decisive, a major foreign espionage attack surely could have been as well. The difference is that the other factors were seemingly legal, and internal to American politics. 

There is no mechanism in American politics to annul a corrupted election, and a congressional majority determined to prop up a president who cheated his way to power can assure he serves out his term. But a question mark like the one that now hangs over Trump’s victory is a potent political fact unto itself, and acknowledging it is perhaps our best means of stigmatizing the bad deeds Trump engaged in to win the presidency. We can’t ignore it because it feels uncouth, or even because those who want to undermine American democracy are surely thrilled that an argument over whether the election was stolen for Trump is now inevitable.

You have to admit, issuing blanket pardons would definitely change the narrative, because right now the narrative is becoming lethal for Trump and the 2018 chances for the GOP in the midterms.

Stay tuned.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

Trump's defenders, leading the attack on Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation of Trump's Russian collusion, are fixated on the Steele dossier, the opposition files put together by Trump's GOP primary opponents and handed over to the Clinton campaign and the DNC.  The Trumpies are convinced that since the dossier is political and was somehow responsible for the Trump/Russia investigation, the investigation is political as well.

The reality, as the NY Times reveals today, is that the Mueller probe came about because former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos can't keep his mouth shut.

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton. 

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign. 

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role. 

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired. 

If Mr. Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. and is now a cooperating witness, was the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration, his saga is also a tale of the Trump campaign in miniature. He was brash, boastful and underqualified, yet he exceeded expectations. And, like the campaign itself, he proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation. 

While some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have derided him as an insignificant campaign volunteer or a “coffee boy,” interviews and new documents show that he stayed influential throughout the campaign. Two months before the election, for instance, he helped arrange a New York meeting between Mr. Trump and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt. 

The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election? 

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.

That should slam the door on the attacks on Mueller, and indeed, Republicans are starting to get skittish as they realize just how much trouble Trump is in, and how much damage he'll do bringing everyone down with him.

A growing campaign by President Trump’s most ardent supporters to discredit the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and the law enforcement agencies assisting his investigation is opening new fissures in the Republican Party, with some lawmakers questioning the damage being done to federal law enforcement and to a political party that has long championed law and order. 

A small but vocal group of conservative lawmakers, much of the conservative media and, at times, the president himself have launched a series of attacks to paint not only Mr. Mueller but institutions once considered sacrosanct to Republicans like the F.B.I. and Justice Department as dangerously biased against Mr. Trump. One of them, Representative Francis Rooney of Florida, called on Tuesday for top F.B.I. and Justice Department officials to be “purged.”

Now some Republican lawmakers are speaking out, worried that Trump loyalists, hoping for short-term gain, could wind up staining the party, dampening morale at the F.B.I. and Justice Department, and potentially recasting Democrats as the true friends of law enforcement for years to come. 

Straddling both camps is Mr. Trump, who in an interview on Thursday with The New York Times lavished praise on Republican congressmen who have defended him from a “witch hunt” and expressed confidence that Mr. Mueller would “treat me fairly.” 

It is not uncommon for members of the president’s own party to defend their leader against investigations. When President Bill Clinton was investigated and impeached in the 1990s, Mr. Clinton’s associates and many left-leaning Democrats on Capitol Hill waged war on Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel.

But Republican moderates in both the House and Senate with little loyalty to Mr. Trump and a Republican cadre of former law enforcement officials fear that their colleagues have reacted to specific and credible concerns about the F.B.I. with indiscriminate attacks. 

“As an institution we have to make it clear that we are dealing here with a scalpel not a sledgehammer,” said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who sits on the Intelligence and Homeland Security committees. “Because you can’t have a situation where people say, ‘Oh, you can’t trust the F.B.I.’ That creates a spirit of anarchy.” 

Of his fellow Republicans pressing a public case against the agencies, Mr. King said, “I think some of them have been too strong on that.”

If even Peter King is running from this, the internal polling numbers for the GOP must be pointing towards a complete wipeout in 2018.

And they know it.  But it also means that the Papadopoulos angle of the story is far more important than has previously been reported. It also means that Mueller has been on to the truth for months now, and that the reckoning is coming.

It also means that Papadopoulos knew the Russians had hacked the DNC emails two months before that information went public, and that the Trump campaign was well aware of it, and yet took no action whatsoever to inform anybody about it.

Stay tuned.  2018 is going to be a wild ride.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Just another set of reminders that in the end, the Trump regime collusion villains may have gotten elected, but they're bad at not being caught anyway.  The information included in the Papadopoulos indictment is pretty damning.

Former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos made a significant claim in an email: Top Trump campaign officials agreed to a pre-election meeting with representatives of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The message, if true, would bolster claims that Trump’s campaign attempted to collude with Russian interests. But it’s unclear whether Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was merely boasting when he sent the July 14, 2016, email to a Kremlin-linked contact. There’s also no indication such a meeting ever occurred.

The email is cited in an FBI agent’s affidavit supporting criminal charges against Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy volunteer on Trump’s campaign. But it’s not included in court documents that detailed his secret guilty plea and his cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The evidence gleaned during Papadopoulos’s three months of cooperation could further advance Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion by Trump’s aides. This latest email, one of many unsealed on Monday, runs counter to the steadfast denials by Trump and his supporters that anyone attempted to work with the Russians. Trump tweeted on Tuesday that Papadopoulos, a low-level adviser that few people on the campaign knew, “has already proven to be a liar.”

Prosecutors didn’t explain why the email wasn’t included in the detailed admissions of Papadopoulos’s wrongdoing, and it’s possible they concluded the assertions weren’t true.

Writing to the Russian contact a week before the Republican National Convention, Papadopoulos proposed a meeting for August or September in the U.K. that would include “my national chairman and maybe one other foreign policy adviser” and members of Putin’s office and Russia’s foreign ministry.

“It has been approved by our side,” Papadopoulos wrote.

This is where the collusion story gets bad for the Trump regime.  Papadopoulos's supervisor was Jeff Sessions, who is now of course Attorney General.  Young George here has also been cooperating with Mueller for months.  If this was planned and approved with the intent of getting the dirt on Clinton, as it very well looks like, then things are going to get untenable for them and fast.

Of course, it's not helping that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates are complete clowns, either.

A new court filing Tuesday showed exactly what Manafort and Gates told banks and investigators about their net worths and travel histories over the past few years.
Among the highlights: 

* Manafort currently has three US passports, each under a different number. He has submitted 10 passport applications in roughly as many years, prosecutors said. 

* This year, Manafort traveled to Mexico, China and Ecuador with a phone and email account registered under a fake name. (The name was not disclosed in the filings.) 

* Over the past year, Manafort traveled to Dubai, Cancun, Panama City, Havana, Shanghai, Madrid, Tokyo and Grand Cayman Island. 

* Both Manafort and Gates were frequent travelers to Cyprus. "Extensive travel of this nature further evidences a risk of flight," the prosecutor's filing said. 

* Manafort wrote on loan applications and other financial documents that his assets were worth between $19 million in April 2012 and $136 million in May 2016. 

* In some months, like while he served as Trump's national campaign chairman in August 2016, Manafort's assessment of his total worth fluctuated. In August 2016 he said his assets were worth $28 million, then wrote he had $63 million in assets on a different application. 

* Gates "frequently changed banks and opened and closed bank accounts," prosecutors said. In all, Gates opened 55 accounts with 13 financial institutions, the prosecutors' court filing said. Some of his bank accounts were in England and Cyprus, where he held more than $10 million from 2010 to 2013. 

Manafort's and Gates' attorneys have asked the judge to release them from house arrest.

These guys are going down on money laundering and conspiracy charges so hard that they might not hit the bottom before they die in prison.

Unless they roll over, that is.  Pay attention to the Cyprus connection, too.  Trump's Commerce Secretary is Wilbur Ross, who was vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, the island's biggest bank.  You'd better bet that Manafort and Gates and their money-laundering trail came across Wilbur Ross's desk at some point.

Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was vice-chair and leading investor in the Bank of Cyprus, the island’s largest bank, which was “one of the key offshore havens for illicit Russian finance," according to an extensive investigative report by financial journalist James Henry of DCReport.org. "Ross has been Vice Chairman of this bank and a major investor in it since 2014. His fellow bank co-chair evidently was appointed by none other than Vladimir Putin.”

“Ross’ involvement in the Bank of Cyprus raises many questions about his judgment, but also about the Trump Administration’s seemingly endless direct and indirect connections with friends and associates of Vladimir Putin, who all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies say conspired to interfere in the November 2016 U.S. election on behalf of Donald Trump,” Henry continued. “Whether or not these connections involve any criminality, these are the kind of relationships that most American business people would not tolerate for 30 seconds.”

“After all, as discussed below, since the 1990s Cyprus has served as one the top three offshore destinations for Russian and former Soviet Union flight capital, most of it motivated by tax dodging, kleptocracy, and money laundering,” Henry said, giving multiple citations. “As of 2013, just before the banking crisis, Russian depositsaccounted for at least a third of all bank deposits in Cyprus. As one leading newspaper put it, 'Russian money is in fact at the heart of the island’s economy.' Nor is Ross’ Bank of Cyprus in particular—now probably at least half owned by Russians any stranger to money laundering, tax dodging, or odious finance. With a market share of 30 percent, Bank of Cyprus has long been the market leader in Cypriot financial chicanery.”

If Mueller is following the money, Ross could be next on the list along with Sam Clovis, Jeff Sessions, and Mike Flynn.

Or maybe the next contestant is Jared Kushner. Vanity Fair's Gabe Sherman:

Until now, Robert Mueller has haunted Donald Trump’s White House as a hovering, mostly unseen menace. But by securing indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and a surprise guilty plea from foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, Mueller announced loudly that the Russia investigation poses an existential threat to the president. “Here’s what Manafort’s indictment tells me: Mueller is going to go over every financial dealing of Jared Kushner and the Trump Organization,” said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg. “Trump is at 33 percent in Gallup. You can’t go any lower. He’s fucked.” 

The first charges in the Mueller probe have kindled talk of what the endgame for Trump looks like, according to conversations with a half-dozen advisers and friends of the president. For the first time since the investigation began, the prospect of impeachment is being considered as a realistic outcome and not just a liberal fever dream. According to a source, advisers in the West Wing are on edge and doing whatever they can not to be ensnared. One person close to Dina Powell and Gary Cohn said they’re making sure to leave rooms if the subject of Russia comes up. 

The consensus among the advisers I spoke to is that Trump faces few good options to thwart Mueller. For one, firing Mueller would cross a red line, analogous to Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox during Watergate, pushing establishment Republicans to entertain the possibility of impeachment. “His options are limited, and his instinct is to come out swinging, which won’t help things,” said a prominent Republican close to the White House. 

Trump, meanwhile, has reacted to the deteriorating situation by lashing out on Twitter and venting in private to friends. He’s frustrated that the investigation seems to have no end in sight. “Trump wants to be critical of Mueller,” one person who’s been briefed on Trump’s thinking says. “He thinks it’s unfair criticism. Clinton hasn’t gotten anything like this. And what about Tony Podesta? Trump is like, When is that going to end?” According to two sources, Trump has complained to advisers about his legal team for letting the Mueller probe progress this far. Speaking to Steve Bannon on Tuesday, Trump blamed Jared Kushner for his role in decisions, specifically the firings of Mike Flynn and James Comey, that led to Mueller’s appointment, according to a source briefed on the call. When Roger Stone recently told Trump that Kushner was giving him bad political advice, Trump agreed, according to someone familiar with the conversation. “Jared is the worst political adviser in the White House in modern history,” Nunberg said. “I’m only saying publicly what everyone says behind the scenes at Fox News, in conservative media, and the Senate and Congress.” (The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment by deadline.)

Stay tuned.  It's going to move quickly now.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Hell of a day so far from Robert Mueller.  Two major indictments and a guilty plea with cooperation by the witness. Lawfare's Ben Wittes and Susan Hennessey recap where we're at now:

The first big takeaway from this morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III, and George Papadopoulos is this: The President of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department. 

The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team now admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some them. 

Before we dive any deeper into the Manafort-Gates indictment—charges to which both pled not guilty to today—or the Papadopoulos plea and stipulation, let’s pause a moment over these two remarkable claims, one of which we must still consider as allegation and the other of which we can now consider as admitted fact. President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had "nothing to do with Russia." 

The release of these documents should, though it probably won’t, put to rest the suggestion that there are no serious questions of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the latter’s interference on the former’s behalf during the 2016 election. It also raises a profound set of questions of its own about the truthfulness of a larger set of representations Trump campaign officials and operatives have made both in public, and presumably, under oath and to investigators. 

And here’s the rub: This is only Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s opening salvo. 

As opening salvos go, it’s a doozy.

Every indication is that Papadoupolos was flipped to get Manafort and Gates, and that the two of them are going to be pressured to flip on everyone else: Michael Flynn and Carter Page, then Jared Kushner, then Jeff Sessions, and finally Donald Trump himself. 

Considering the charges being laid out for Manafort and Gates, there's zero doubt in my mind that indictments are sealed and waiting for Flynn and Page at the minimum.  The big tip-off is the FARA charges against Manafort and Gates: violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. We know Flynn and Page both lied about working for foreign powers, and being willing to prosecute on that means Flynn and Page are certainly in the crosshairs.  You can make the case that Kushner is facing similar charges considering all the times he's lied about foreign contacts.

It also means Jeff Sessions is most likely facing perjury charges.  Remember, he lied to Congress under oath on a number of occasions.  Sessions was at that same March 2016 meeting that Papadopoulos and Trump were at as part of the Trump foreign policy squad.  Sessions has tesified under oath that nothing happened there, but Papadopoulos's confession means otherwise.

And that leads us to Trump.  At the very least, as the Lawfare team points out, the collusion story is very, very real.  A lot of Trump regime folks, current and former, are in dire trouble right now.  Who and how much trouble, we're going to see over the next few weeks and months.

We're now in the next phase of the game, and everything is now playing for keeps.