Russian To Judgment, Con't

For like the thirtieth time, yes the Russian collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was real, yes it affected the outcome of the election, and yes Trump's margin of victory in five states that gave him the electoral college win was less than the thrid party vtes stripped from Hillary Clinton, in 2016, Jesus hell.

In an interview with Insider, Paul Manafort, who served as Donald Trump's campaign chairman, made his first public admission that in 2016 he shared polling data from the Trump campaign with Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate with suspected ties to Russian intelligence.

Kilimnik then passed the data on to Russian spies, according to the US Treasury Department, which has characterized the data as "sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy."

Manafort's acknowledgment contradicts his earlier denials, during the investigation into election interference conducted by the special counsel Robert Mueller, that he had anything to do with the transfer of sensitive campaign data. It also differs from the account he gives in his forthcoming memoir, "Political Prisoner," in which he concedes only that he presented Kilimnik with "talking points" on polling data that was already public.

In his interview with Insider, Manafort reiterated that at least some of the data was public. "The data that I shared with him," he said, "was a combination of public information and stuff for the spring that was — it was old." It's one of Manafort's primary lines of defense — that the data he funneled to Kilimnik was essentially worthless.

In fact, in an email seized by Mueller, Manafort ordered his deputy Rick Gates, just a few hours before the two men met with Kilimnik in person, to print out four pages of internal campaign polling data showing Trump's city-by-city strength in 18 swing states. Contrary to Manafort's claim, that data was not from the spring. It was collected by the campaign in mid-July — two weeks before the meeting with Kilimnik.

Manafort denied to Insider that the printouts were given to Kilimnik. But he said he directed Gates to feed Kilimnik polling data via email, to "keep Konstantin informed." He also worked hard to keep his dealings with Kilimnik a secret. In its report on Russian interference in the election, the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote that it "had limited insight into Kilimnik's communications with Manafort" because the men relied on "sophisticated communications security practices." These included encryption, burner phones, and "foldering" — writing emails as drafts in a shared account.

Gates told the FBI that, at Manafort's direction, he began sending Kilimnik internal polling data in the spring of 2016 over WhatsApp and continued updating it periodically. He deleted his messages to Kilimnik daily. All told, according to court filings, he sent 75 pages of polling data to Kilimnik. Other than the four pages from August 2, the data itself has never been made public.

Manafort told Insider the purpose of sending the polling data to Kilimnik was not to help elect Trump by aiding the Russians in their attempts to undermine the election but rather to lay the groundwork for future business deals. "It was meant to show how Clinton was vulnerable," he said. By his account, he was trying to use his influence with the future US president to extract money from pro-Russia oligarchs.

 

Yes, Manafort and Gates broke the law, yes they were convicted, yes Donald Trump pardoned them for it, yes Manafort is openly bragging about breaking the law, no, nobody can do anything about that because it would be double jeopardy.

 

That's where we are. 

Manafort and Gates got away with it.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Our old Russian friend and billionaire fixer Oleg Deripaska got a visit from the G-Men today, or at least two of his several US homes did, as the sanctions against the Putin pal oligarch begin to heat up again.

 

FBI agents on Tuesday swarmed the home of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska in Washington, D.C., an agency spokesperson confirmed to NBC News.

The reason for their presence wasn’t immediately clear. The spokesperson said the agency is conducting “law enforcement activity at the home” but wouldn’t elaborate.

The investigation is being led by federal investigators in New York City, according to two officials briefed on the matter.

A spokeswoman for Deripaska, a billionaire oil tycoon who was placed under U.S. sanctions three years ago, said the FBI also searched a home in New York City. She said both properties belong to Deripaska's relatives.

“The searches are being carried out on the basis of two court orders, connected to U.S. sanctions," the spokeswoman said. "The houses do not belong to Mr Deripaska."

Lawyers for Deripaska did not immediately return requests for comment. Asked about the spokeswoman's claim that the investigation is tied to sanctions, the FBI spokesperson declined to comment.

The 11,000-square-foot home sits on one of the most exclusive blocks in Washington.

Next-door neighbor George Conway, the husband of former President Donald Trump senior counselor Kellyanne Conway, walked over to the house Tuesday afternoon to snap a photo of the law enforcement activity. Conway said he has never seen Deripaska at the home.

Deripaska, who is a longtime associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, was among two dozen Russian oligarchs and officials who were sanctioned by the Treasury Department in April 2018.

 

Trump may have pardoned Manafort (he had to, you see) but it doesn't mean Deripaska is off the hook by any means. The Justice Department has waned Oleg for a very long time, and it looks like they're going to get him sooner rather than later.

 

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Two major Russiagate stories breaking this week, first, the Treasury Department has found that Russian collusion straight up happened between the Trump people and Russian intelligence, as I've been saying for years now.

 

The U.S. Treasury Department said Thursday that Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate and ex-employee of Paul Manafort, “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy,” during the 2016 election, an apparently definitive statement that neither Special Counsel Robert Mueller nor the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation made in their final reports.

“This is new public information that connects the provision of internal Trump campaign data to Russian intelligence,” Andrew Weissmann, who led the prosecution of Manafort for the Special Counsel, told Just Security on Thursday.

The eye-catching statement was included in an announcement of new sanctions related to Russian interference in U.S. elections. The Biden administration took a number of steps Thursday to punish Russia, not only for election interference, but also the SolarWinds cyberattack, its ongoing occupation of Crimea, and human rights abuses.

Kilimnik was one of 16 individuals the Treasury Department announced it was sanctioning for attempting to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election at the direction of the Kremlin. The Treasury Department is also imposing new sanctions on 16 entities, including several Russian disinformation outlets.

Kilimnik is, according to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, a Russian Intelligence Services officer who became central to investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election thanks to his close ties to Manafort, who served as Donald Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. After being indicted in 2018 on charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice related to his unregistered lobbying work on behalf of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Kilimnik is now being targeted by Treasury for “having engaged in foreign interference in the U.S. 2020 presidential election.” The FBI is offering a reward of $250,000 for information related to his potential arrest. He is currently residing in Russia.

The Treasury Department’s statement about Kilimnik and his role in the 2016 election definitively connects dots that previous investigations did not.

 

This should have been the definitive information that saw Trump removed from office and charged with treason. This is what he fashioned his entire cabinet to protect him from: the knowlege that his own campaign manager gave campaign data to Russian intelligence in order for the Russians to help him steal the election.

 

And Trump did prevail in 2016. 

The other story is that "Bountygate" most likely did not happen.

It was a blockbuster story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great Game” in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.

But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate” confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue.

“The United States intelligence community assesses with low to moderate confidence that Russian intelligence officers sought to encourage Taliban attacks on U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan in 2019 and perhaps earlier,” a senior administration official said.

“This information puts a burden on the Russian government to explain its actions and take steps to address this disturbing pattern of behavior,” the official said, indicating that Biden is unprepared to walk the story back fully.

Significantly, the Biden team announced a raft of sanctions on Thursday. But those sanctions, targeting Russia’s sovereign debt market, are prompted only by Russia’s interference in the 2020 election and its alleged role in the SolarWinds cyber espionage. (In contrast, Biden administration officials said that their assessment attributing the breach of technology company SolarWinds to hackers from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service was “high confidence.”)

“We have noted our conclusion of the review that we conducted on the bounties issue and we have conveyed through diplomatic, intelligence, and military channels strong, direct messages on this issue, but we are not specifically tying the actions we are taking today to that matter,” a senior administration official told reporters in reference to the bounty claims.

According to the officials on Thursday’s call, the reporting about the alleged “bounties” came from “detainee reporting”–raising the specter that someone told their U.S.-aligned Afghan jailers what they thought was necessary to get out of a cage. Specifically, the official cited “information and evidence of connections to criminal agents in Afghanistan and elements of the Russian government” as sources for the intelligence community’s assessment.

Without additional corroboration, such reporting is notoriously unreliable. Detainee reporting from a man known as Ibn Shaikh al-Libi, extracted from torture, infamously and bogusly fueled a Bush administration claim, used to invade Iraq, about Saddam Hussein training al Qaeda to make poison gas.

 

Pay attention to those who say these stories "cancel each other out" or even that the Bountygate assessment update actually nullifies the entire Russia story.

 

It does not.

 

Trump's campaign gave information to Russian intelligence through Kilimnik.

 

It was collusion.

 

That's the story.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Senate Intelligence Committee released their fifth and final counter-intelligence volume of their bipartisan report on Donald Trump's Russian collusion and finds that not only was the Mueller report right, but that it didn't go nearly far enough to describe the damning actions by Trump and his campaign.

A sprawling report released Tuesday by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russian government officials and other Russians, including some with ties to the country’s intelligence services.

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government undertook an extensive campaign to try to sabotage the 2016 American election to help Mr. Trump become president, and some members of Mr. Trump’s circle of advisers were open to the help from an American adversary.
The report drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional inquiries in recent memory, one that the president and his allies have long tried to discredit as part of a “witch hunt” designed to undermine the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s stunning election nearly four years ago.

Like the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who released his findings in April 2019, the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that Republicans seized on to argue that there was “no collusion.”

But the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

The Senate report for the first time identified Mr. Kilimnik as an intelligence officer. Mr. Mueller’s report had labeled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence.

Putin ordered the DNC hacking, and ordered an operation to help Donald Trump win. At the very least, Paul Manafort passed and received information from Russian intelligence, the report finds.

Democrats highlighted those ties in their own appendix to the report, noting that Mr. Manafort discussed campaign strategy and shared internal campaign polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, and later lied to federal investigators about his actions.

Democrats also laid out a potentially explosive detail: that investigators had uncovered information possibly tying Mr. Kilimnik to Russia’s major election interference operations conducted by the intelligence service known as the G.R.U.

“The committee obtained some information suggesting that the Russian intelligence officer, with whom Manafort had a longstanding relationship, may have been connected to the G.R.U.’s hack-and-leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” Democrats wrote. “This is what collusion looks like.”

The assertion was a sign that even though the investigation was carried out in bipartisan fashion, and Republican and Democratic senators reached broad agreement on its most significant conclusions, a partisan divide remained on some of the most politically sensitive issues.

The Senate report said that the unusual nature of the Trump campaign — staffed by Mr. Trump’s longtime associates, friends and other businessmen with no government experience — “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

And yes, that now infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Trump's campaign and Russian nationals was every bit as shady as we suspected.

The Senate investigation found that two other people who met at Trump Tower in 2016 with senior members of the Trump campaign — including Mr. Manafort; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son — had “significant connections to Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.”

The report said that the connections between the Russian government and one of the individuals, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, “were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.”

Since the release of Mr. Mueller’s report, Attorney General William P. Barr and numerous Republican senators have tried to discredit the special counsel’s work — dismissing the investigation into the 2016 election as “Russiagate.”

Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, lawmakers hope it will refocus attention on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated.

The report is the product of one of the few congressional investigations in recent memory that retained bipartisan support throughout. Lawmakers and committee aides interviewed more than 200 witnesses and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents, including intelligence reports, internal F.B.I. notes and correspondence among members of the Trump campaign. The committee convened blockbuster hearings in 2017 and 2018, but much of its work took place in a secure office suite out of public view.

The Senate Intel report concludes that the Russians were behind the DNC email theft, that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks were given that information, and that Roger Stone told WikiLeaks to release the DNC information to blow the Access Hollywood tapes out of the news cycle, which it did in the space of hours.

Oh, but it gets worse once we get to the appendices of the document. Specifically, Appendix A notes that were a number of criminal referrals made to the Justice Department of Trump campaign officials that were of course ignored by Jeff Sessions and later Bill Barr.  We now know who these referrals indicate.

The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and Sam Clovis to federal prosecutors in 2019, passing along their suspicions that the men may have misled the committee during their testimony, an official familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The official confirmed reports in the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, which reported on the matter last week. A criminal referral to the Justice Department means Congress believes a matter warrants investigation for potential violation of the law.

The committee detailed its concerns in a letter to the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C., in June 2019, the official said.

The Post reported that the letter was divided into two sections. One named those suspected of making false statements, The Post said: Bannon; Clovis, a co-chair of the Trump campaign in 2016; and Prince, a private security contractor.

A second section raised concerns about the testimony of other witnesses, including Trump Jr. and Kushner, whose statements were contradicted by Trump campaign aide Richard Gates, although it did not pointedly make a false-statements allegation, The Post reported.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the committee questioned whether Bannon lied about his interactions and conversations with Prince about a meeting in the Seychelles between Prince and a top Russian official. Prince told special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors that he briefed Bannon on the January 2017 meeting, but Bannon said the conversation never happened. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump's son and son-in-law, a former Trump adviser, and a former Trump campaign co-chair, and the brother of the Education Secretary. They were not prosecuted by the Justice Department, nor were they even investigated as a result.

It's obstruction of justice, all the way down.

The nearly 1000-page report confirms what I've been saying for years:

Trump took Russian help to win in 2016 and then lied about it at every opportunity to the American people.

Ahem.

This is the report that Robert Mueller should have released last year. This is the report that should have gotten Trump impeached. Several people in the campaign should be in prison, including Trump's own son and son-in-law.

And this is the report that should cost the GOP everything in 2020 at the polls.

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

BuzzFeed News's lawsuit to get unredacted Mueller report passages finds that yes, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Michael Cohen all told Mueller's team that Roger Stone absolutely knew WikiLeaks had the stolen 2016 DNC emails, and that yes, Roger Stone absolutely told Trump that the leaks were coming.

Donald Trump was told in advance that Wikileaks would be releasing documents embarrassing to the Clinton campaign and subsequently informed advisors that he expected more releases would be coming, according to newly unredacted portions of special counsel Robert Mueller's report into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
In July 2016, political consultant Roger Stone told Trump as well as several campaign advisors that he had spoken with Julian Assange and that WikiLeaks would be publishing the documents in a matter of days. Stone told the then-candidate via speakerphone that he "did not know what the content of the materials was," according to the newly unveiled portions of the report, and Trump responded "oh good, alright" upon hearing the news. WikiLeaks published a trove of some 20,000 emails Russians hacked from the Democratic National Committee on July 22 of that year.

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen told federal investigators that he overheard the phone call between Stone and Trump. Agents were also told by former campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates that Stone had spoken several times in early June of something “big” coming from WikiLeaks. Assange first mentioned having emails related to Clinton on June 12.

The new revelations are the strongest indication to date that Trump and his closest advisors were aware of outside efforts to hurt Clinton’s electoral chances, and that Stone played a direct role in communicating that situation to the Trump campaign. Trump has publicly denied being aware of any information being relayed between WikiLeaks and his advisors. 

Allegations of communications between Stone and Trump to discuss WIkiLeaks first surfaced early last year, when Cohen testified to a congressional committee about the June 2016 conference call. At the time, Stone denied any such involvement. “Mr. Cohen’s statement is not true,” he told BuzzFeed News.

But based on the interviews it conducted with those three men and other officials, Mueller’s report concluded it had "established that the Trump Campaign displayed interest in the WikiLeaks releases, and that former Campaign member Roger Stone was in contact with the Campaign about those releases, claiming advance knowledge of more to come."

The newly unredacted portions of the Mueller report also show that after the initial dump by WikiLeaks, Trump personally asked Manafort to keep in touch with Stone, who in turn told the then-campaign chairman to keep him “apprised of any developments with WikiLeaks.” Investigators were also told by Gates that Trump had multiple phone conversations with Stone during the campaign and that, following one call held en route to LaGuardia airport, “Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.”

In written testimony to Mueller’s team in November 2018, Trump denied being aware of any communications between Stone, Manafort, Gates, or Donald Trump Jr and WikiLeaks or Assange. Yet according to the newly public portions of the Special Counsel’s report, “Trump knew that Manafort and Gates had asked Stone to find out what other damaging information about Clinton WikiLeaks possessed, and that Stone's claimed connection to WikiLeaks was common knowledge within the Campaign."

Considering the contradictory evidence, the special counsel’s office weighed the possibility that Trump “no longer had clear recollections” of what happened two years earlier, but also wondered whether “the President's conduct could also be viewed as reflecting his awareness that Stone could provide evidence that would run counter to the President's denials and would link the President to Stone's efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks." The investigators stopped short of suggesting that the President may have lied or otherwise misled the special counsel, however.

It doesn't really change much, Stone has been convicted and will almost certainly be pardoned by Trump along with Flynn and Manafort, Trump's impeachment failed to garner a conviction, and Joe Biden will leave prosecuting Trump to the state of New York.

Of course after last night, maybe things are quite different in SDNY land.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Following up on this morning's news, this afternoon has been a Valentine's Day massacre on the rule of law in the US.  First of all, Donald Trump straight up decreed that he has the right to interfere in any Justice Department case as he sees fit.

President Trump asserted Friday that he had the legal right to intervene in federal criminal cases, a day after Attorney General William P. Barr publicly rebuked him for attacks on Justice Department prosecutors and others involved in the case of Roger J. Stone Jr., the president’s longtime friend.

In a morning tweet, Mr. Trump quoted Mr. Barr saying that the president “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.” The president said he had “so far chosen” not to interfere in a criminal case even though he insisted that he is not legally bound to do so.

“This doesn’t mean that I do not have, as President, the legal right to do so, I do, but I have so far chosen not to!” he said.
The assertion by the president, rejecting a request by Mr. Barr to stop tweeting about the department’s cases, adds to the mounting controversy over the decision by senior Justice Department officials to overrule prosecutors who had recommended a seven to nine year sentence for Mr. Stone, who was convicted of seven felonies in a bid to obstruct a congressional investigation that threatened the president.

That recommendation infuriated Mr. Trump, who called the department’s handling of the case “a disgrace” and later praised Mr. Barr after his top officials intervened to recommend a lighter sentence for Mr. Stone. The four prosecutors who were overruled resigned from the case in protest; one quit the department entirely.

The Justice Department and Bill Barr immediately followed up with...interfering in federal cases involving Trump.  Surprise!

Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned an outside prosecutor to scrutinize the criminal case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, according to people familiar with the matter.

The review is highly unusual and could trigger more accusations of political interference by top Justice Department officials into the work of career prosecutors.

Mr. Barr has also installed a handful of outside prosecutors to broadly review the handling of other politically sensitive national-security cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, the people said. The team includes at least one prosecutor from the office of the United States attorney in St. Louis, Jeff Jensen, who is handling the Flynn matter, as well as prosecutors from the office of the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen.

Over the past two weeks, the outside prosecutors have begun grilling line prosecutors in the Washington office about various cases — some public, some not — including investigative steps, prosecutorial actions and why they took them, according to the people. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

The intervention has contributed a turbulent period for the prosecutors’ office that oversees the seat of the federal government and some of the most politically sensitive investigations and cases — some involving President Trump’s friends and allies, and some his critics and adversaries.

Barr is clearly setting the stage not for a Trump pardon of Flynn, Stone, and Manafort, but outright overturning their convictions so that he doesn't have to.   The question then is what the Durham investigation means for prosecuting Trump's enemies list.

But it starts with the Flynn plea deal.

US Attorney Jeffrey Jensen of St. Louis has been tasked with taking a second look at some aspects of the sensitive cases, one of the officials said. It was not clear which other cases were under review, and what form the reviews had taken. 

Jensen is working together with Brandon Van Grack -- the former Mueller prosecutor who led the case against Flynn -- to review the case, according to a Justice Department official. It's possible that if the department continues to fight Flynn's attempts to withdraw his guilty plea, Van Grack could be a witness on the circumstances of his plea deal, according to several people familiar with the case.

Putting Justice Department prosecutors on the stand to justify their plea deals in a case involving a witness against the person in the White House.   Sure seems like Barr is opening the door for a massive purge.

Things are moving at a pretty rapid pace now, as expected after Trump was unshackled by his Senate GOP enablers.

It will not end well for our republic.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

The hammer fell today on former Paul Manafort partner turned government witness Rick Gates, who did not emerge from his sentencing hearing in front of Judge Amy Berman Jackson unscathed, and we learned that Manafort himself was the one who bribed Gates to not cooperate.

A federal prosecutor on Tuesday — at the long-awaited sentencing of former Trump campaign deputy chairman Rick Gates –elaborated on the previously non-specific detail that Gates was offered “monetary assistance” not to cooperate with the Mueller investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Molly Gaston said that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, whom Gates went on to testify against, offered Gates access to a legal defense fund if Gates agreed not to cooperate with the government.
The government’s motion for downward departure only said last week that Gates was pressured not to cooperate and that he was offered monetary assistance, but didn’t get more specific than that:

Finally, is important to note that the public nature of this case has made Gates and Gates’ family the subject of intense media scrutiny. Gates’ cooperation has been steadfast despite the fact that the government has asked for his assistance in high profile matters, against powerful individuals, in the midst of a particularly turbulent environment. Gates received pressure not to cooperate with the government, including assurances of monetary assistance. He should be commended for standing up to provide information and public testimony against individuals such as Manafort, Craig, and Stone, knowing well that they enjoy support from the upper echelons of American politics and society. Based on his substantial assistance, the government recommends a downward departure and does not oppose Gates’ request for a probationary sentence.

The government praised Gates for testifying against Manafort, Greg Craig, and Roger Stone, despite the fact that these individuals had friends in high places. They also asked Judge Amy Berman Jackson to sentence Gates to probation, citing his “extraordinary” cooperation with the government.

Instead, Jackson sentenced Gates on Tuesday to 45 days behind bars that will be served on weekends. The judge tacked on three years of probation and 300 hours of community service.

Six months' worth of weekends is better than no jail time, I suppose, and I really hope he ends up cleaning public toilets for a couple of months, but that's just me.

Still, he did help bury Manafort and Stone.  At least some justice came from the Mueller investigation.

It's Mueller Time Once Again

BuzzFeed News reporter Jason Leopold and his team sued the Justice Department over Mueller probe documents, specifically the FBI note, search warrants, and subpoenas that the Mueller squad used, and a federal judge agreed, with the first set of 500 documents out today.

Beginning last April, BuzzFeed News has pursued five separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to pry loose all the subpoenas and search warrants that Mueller’s team executed, as well as all the emails, memos, letters, talking points, legal opinions, and interview transcripts it generated. In short, we asked for all the communications of any kind that passed through the special counsel’s office. We also requested all of the documents that would reveal the discussions among Attorney General Bill Barr, former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, and other high-ranking officials about whether to charge President Donald Trump with obstruction.

Justice Department lawyers said the volume of records at issue could total 18 billion pages and could take centuries to produce.

At a hearing earlier this month, US District Court Judge Reggie Walton was not sympathetic. “It shouldn’t fall on the backs of the citizens to wait years to find out what the government is up to,” he said. If the Justice Department couldn’t handle the request in a more timely fashion, he added, it should ask Congress for money to hire more help.

Today, in response to a court order, the Justice Department has released the first installment of documents: 500 pages of summaries of FBI interviews with witnesses, available here for the first time. Another installment will be released every month for at least the next eight years.

Known as “302 reports,” these summaries of interviews — which have been conducted with people such as former White House counsel Don McGahn, former attorney general Jeff Sessions, and Trump’s former fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen — are some of the most important and highly sought-after documents from Mueller’s investigation. They reveal what key players in the campaign told FBI agents about Russia, Trump, his business dealings, and his attempts to impede the special counsel’s investigation.

Matt Topic, the lawyer who argued these cases for BuzzFeed News, said the controversies surrounding Mueller’s report made the fight for these documents particularly urgent. “The reason we have a Freedom of Information Act is to make sure that the government is accountable to the people,” he said. Without it, people are powerless “to determine whether the government is telling us the truth or lying to us, whether it is playing favorites or playing fair, whether, as the president claims, the Justice Department engaged in an illegal, treasonous witch hunt or, as others have claimed, the president engaged in obstruction of justice and was given a free pass by the attorney general.”

After years of speculation and accusation, these documents offer a chance for everyone to view a key function of American democracy. That opportunity — hard-won, but enshrined anew with each additional FOIA release — commences today. It will last long after all the players have departed.

The first batch of documents are posted here online, and while there's no bombshell level stuff yet, there are some very interesting new wrinkles, such as Bannon though Manafort should be "avoided like the plague" and that he though Michael Cohen was "the kind of guy who thought it was a good idea to send $130,000 to Stormy Daniels".

It's the gift that keeps on giving...

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

It seems every day there's new damning information coming out about the Trump regime, Ukraine, and the effort to create dirt on Joe Biden out of shadows and tweets, plus the effort to discredit and even prosecute the Mueller probe investigators.  

Former Trump campaign chairman and now convicted fraudster felon Paul Manafort represents the perfect merging of the Ukraine storyline and the Mueller probe, as Manafort was campaign runner for pro-Russian Ukrainian presidential candidate (and Putin stooge) Viktor Yanukovich. Wouldn't you know it, Trump "legal eagle" Rudy Giuliani apparently thought it would be a good idea to tap Manafort's "expertise" on Ukraine while he was behind bars.

In his quest to rewrite the history of the 2016 election, President Trump’s personal attorney has turned to an unusual source of information: Trump’s imprisoned former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Rudolph W. Giuliani in recent months has consulted several times with Manafort through the federal prisoner’s lawyer in pursuit of information about a disputed ledger that would bolster his theory that the real story of 2016 is not Russian interference to elect Trump, but Ukrainian efforts to support Hillary Clinton.

The alliance, which Giuliani acknowledged in an interview this week with The Washington Post, stems from a shared interest in a narrative that undermines the rationale for the special counsel investigation. That inquiry led to Manafort’s imprisonment on tax and financial fraud allegations related to his work in Kiev for the political party of former president Viktor Yanukovych.

Giuliani’s effort is gaining traction on Capitol Hill. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, have announced their renewal of an inquiry into any coordination between Ukraine and Democratic Party officials.

Manafort, who is serving a 7½ -year term in a federal prison in Pennsylvania, has continued to express support for Trump, and Trump has never ruled out giving him a pardon.

Trump’s push on a July 25 call to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the matter, and also probe former vice president Joe Biden, triggered an impeachment inquiry in the House. Many of the accusations Giuliani has been making about Ukraine recycle those that Manafort’s team first promulgated.
Giuliani joined Trump’s legal team in April 2018 to help defend the president against special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe, and the former mayor said he launched his own investigation into Ukraine late last year, which led him to consult with Manafort. He said he has not spoken directly to Manafort in two years.

“It was that I believed there was a lot of evidence that the [Democratic National Committee] and the Clinton campaign had a close connection to Ukrainian officials,” Giuliani said, noting that he was never advocating for a pardon of Manafort. “It was all about Trump. I don’t think I could exonerate Manafort.”

Manafort’s lawyer, Kevin Downing, did not respond to a request for comment.

This is the grand 2020 plan, to exonerate Trump now by blaming all the Ukraine stuff on Hillary, and to try to destroy Joe Biden so he can't win in 2020 and Trump gets a second term.

It won't work unless we let it.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

As Josh Marshall reports, we're now starting to see the full picture on Rudy Giuliani's efforts to manufacture a Ukraine scandal to try to sink Joe Biden.  FOX News contributors, the husband and wife team of Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, are apprently working with Rudy on Ukraine and they are two of the best ratfuckery agents the GOP has.

As I noted yesterday, material that has been surfacing from The Hill’s ‘opinion’ reporter John Solomon and then echoed by Giuliani seems to originate with one of Ukraine’s richest and most powerful oligarchs who is a former business partner of Paul Manafort and had to flee Ukraine after the overthrow of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. He is in Austria, fighting extradition to the United States to face bribery charges.

His name is Dimtry Firtash. 

Viktor Shokin is the ‘fired prosecutor’ at the center of all these stories. As part of Firtash’s effort to avoid extradition from Austria to the United States, he asked Shokin to swear out the affidavit in which Shokin accuses Biden of getting him fired to protect his son Hunter. (There is no evidence any of this happened. There was no investigation of Hunter Biden or the company on whose board he sat at the time Shokin was fired.) 

So to review, former Manafort business partner Firtash asks Shokin to swear out an affidavit in which he accuses Biden. The affidavit quickly gets into the hands of Giuliani and Solomon. And who just recently went to work for Firtash’s legal team? None other than diGenova and Toensing, as reported just this week by the Kyiv Post and other publications. 

So the duo who we now learned has been working on behalf of the President with Rudy Giuliani to extort the Ukrainian government just signed on to represent the oligarch behind the affidavit in which the disgraced prosecutor says Joe Biden got him fired. And yes, the oligarch who got booted from Ukraine in 2014 and is a former business partner of Paul Manafort.

And this is the scheme to literally fabricate evidence against Joe Biden.

Trump directed Giuliani, diGenova and Toensing to try to bring down Biden, with Paul Manafort's former business partner las the inside man in Ukraine giving a false affidavit against Biden in exchange for legal help from Trump's personal lawyers.

And let's recall, we know for a fact Joe Biden didn't get Shokin fired.

Ukraine’s top law enforcement official repeatedly rebuffed President Trump’s personal lawyer’s demands to investigate Joe Biden and his son, insisting he had seen no evidence of wrongdoing that he could pursue despite Trump’s allegations. 

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Yuri Lutsenko, former Ukraine prosecutor general, said he told Rudolph Giuliani that he would be happy to cooperate if the FBI or other U.S. authorities began their own investigation of the former vice president and his son Hunter but insisted they had not broken any Ukrainian laws to his knowledge. 

Lutsenko, who was fired as prosecutor general last month, said he had urged Giuliani to launch a U.S. inquiry and go to court if he had any evidence but not to use Ukraine to conduct a political vendetta that could affect the U.S. election. 

”I said, ‘Let’s put this through prosecutors, not through presidents,’ ” Lutsenko told The Times.

“I told him I could not start an investigation just for the interests of an American official,” he said. 

The revelations are at the heart of the House impeachment probe into whether Trump improperly delayed congressionally mandated military aid to Ukraine while urging leaders there to help find dirt on his political opponents to boost his 2020 reelection bid.

Do we understand just how screwed Trump is right now?

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

And overnight everything just got much, much worse for Team Crimer.

The intelligence officer who filed a whistle-blower complaint about President Trump’s interactions with the leader of Ukraine raised alarms not only about what the two men said in a phone call, but also about how the White House handled records of the conversation, according to two people briefed on the complaint.

The whistle-blower, moreover, identified multiple White House officials as witnesses to potential presidential misconduct who could corroborate the complaint, the people said — adding that the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, interviewed witnesses.

Mr. Atkinson eventually concluded that there was reason to believe that the president might have illegally solicited a foreign campaign contribution — and that his potential misconduct created a national security risk, according to a newly disclosed Justice Department memo.

An early portrait of the intelligence officer began to take shape on Wednesday as the White House released a rough log of a July 25 phone call between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the latest extraordinary revelation set off by the whistle-blower’s complaint.

This account is based on interviews with the two people and with lawmakers who were permitted to read the complaint late in the day, as well as on details revealed in a Justice Department memo explaining the Trump administration’s legal rationale for withholding the whistle-blower’s allegations from Congress before Mr. Trump relented this week. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

In other words, it's not just Trump who will go down over this.  The report is expected to be declassified and released on Thursday because Team Crimer thinks it will actually save them.

Mr. Atkinson also found reason to believe that the whistle-blower might not support the re-election of Mr. Trump and made clear that the complainant was not in a position to directly listen to the call or see the memo that reconstructed it before it was made public, according to the Justice Department memo, which referred only to a single phone call between Mr. Trump and an unnamed foreign leader.

Instead, the officer heard about the call secondhand from unidentified White House officials who expressed concern that Mr. Trump had “abused his authority or acted unlawfully in connection with foreign diplomacy,” the memo said. Still, Mr. Atkinson concluded after an investigation that the information in the complaint was credible.
In their first public comments, lawyers for the whistle-blower said their client hoped to remain anonymous but wanted to continue to cooperate with lawmakers conducting oversight.

The "hearsay" and "biased" arguments will play on FOX News State TV all day, for sure.  But the reality is that the IG found Trump was a credible national security risk, and that the Justice Department agreed with him.

And like Watergate, it's the clumsy cover-up that's going to do these idiots in.

The complaint also alleges a pattern of obfuscation at the White House, in which officials moved the records of some of Trump’s communications with foreign officials onto a separate computer network from where they are normally stored, this person said. The whistleblower alleges that is what officials did with Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky, an action that alarmed the intelligence community inspector general and prompted him to request that the White House retain records of the Zelensky call, the person who read the complaint said.

And that brings us to more big news from last night, that the whistleblower complaint and IG investigation also turned up a second phone call to Zelensky, from April, where Trump also asked him to work with Giuliani on attacking Joe Biden.  So why did Trump have such a hard-on for working with the Ukraine to fabricate something he could use against Joe Biden and the Democrats?

So he'd have cover to pardon Paul Manafort.

The effort by President Trump to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son had its origins in an earlier endeavor to obtain information that might provide a pretext and political cover for the president to pardon his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, according to previously undisclosed records.

These records indicate that attorneys representing Trump and Manafort respectively had at least nine conversations relating to this effort, beginning in the early days of the Trump administration, and lasting until as recently as May of this year. Through these deliberations carried on by his attorneys, Manafort exhorted the White House to press Ukrainian officials to investigate and discredit individuals, both in the US and in Ukraine, who he believed had published damning information about his political consulting work in the Ukraine. A person who participated in the joint defense agreement between President Trump and others under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, including Manafort, allowed me to review extensive handwritten notes that memorialized conversations relating to Manafort and Ukraine between Manafort’s and Trump’s legal teams, including Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

These new disclosures emerge as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s conduct. What prompted her actions were the new allegations that surfaced last week that Trump had pressured Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Trump’s potential 2020 campaign rival, Biden, and his son Hunter, placing a freeze on a quarter of a billion dollars in military assistance to Ukraine as leverage. The impeachment inquiry will also examine whether President Trump obstructed justice by attempting to curtail investigations by the FBI and the special counsel into Russia’s covert interference in the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor.

New information in this story suggests that these two, seemingly unrelated scandals, in which the House will judge whether the president’s conduct in each case constituted extra-legal and extra-constitutional abuses of presidential power, are in fact inextricably linked: the Ukrainian initiative appears to have begun in service of formulating a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.
From 2004 to 2014, Manafort had advised President Viktor Yanukovych, who advocated that his country sever ties with the United States and other Western nations, and align itself more closely with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. After Yanukovych fled the country in disgrace in 2014, a ledger was recovered from the burned-out ruins of his Party of Regions. Its records showed that Yanukovych and his political allies had made some $12.7 million in secret cash payments to Manafort. The disclosure led directly to Manafort’s resignation in August 2016 as chairman of the Trump presidential campaign.

The records I have reviewed also indicate that on at least three occasions, Rudy Giuliani was in communication with Manafort’s legal team to discuss how the White House was pushing a narrative that the Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian government officials had “colluded” to defeat Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. (This story has since been debunked as baseless, though that has not prevented Trump, Giuliani, and other surrogates in conservative media from repeatedly pushing the story.)

In particular, the records show that Manafort’s camp provided Giuliani with information designed to smear two people: one was a Ukrainian journalist and political activist named Serhiy Leshchenko, whom Manafort believed, correctly, of helping to uncover Manafort’s secret payments from Yanukovych; another was Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American political consultant and US citizen, whom Manafort suspected, mistakenly in this case, was also behind the exposé. The records also show that Giuliani and attorneys for Manafort exchanged information about the then US ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Giuliani believed had attempted to undercut his covert Ukrainian diplomacy and fact-finding; the records are unclear as to whether it was Giuliani or Manafort’s attorney who first initiated their discussion about her.

After his arrest in 2017, Manafort continued to encourage President Trump and his lawyers to engage in this effort when they joined Manafort in a joint legal defense agreement. Attorneys are allowed to enter into such agreements in order share information and coordinate legal, public relations, and political strategies—in this case regarding the investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, including that of the special counsel. Federal courts have long ruled that joint defense agreements are legal to protect the due process rights of those under investigation, as long as they are not used by potential defendants to coordinate providing cover stories or false information to prosecutors.

And there's the game.  Create the narrative on Biden, and use it to pardon Manafort and sink Mueller.

Enjoy, folks.  This is going to be fun.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

Convicted former Trump 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort apparently was getting advice for months from one of Trump's top aides during the Mueller probe, that adviser being one FOX News host Sean Hannity.

Court documents previously filed under seal with the government’s sentencing recommendations for Paul Manafort were made public on Friday.

The documents include a months-long text exchange between Manafort and a “Sean” who appears to be Fox News host Sean Hannity.

The texts show Manafort apparently complimenting Hannity on his coverage, with the Fox host telling Manafort to stay strong throughout the early stages of the Mueller investigation.

“I appreciate what you tried to do,” Manafort wrote in one August 2017 message.

“Mueller is trying to intimidate me,” he wrote. “The raid is just one example.”

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in an order that the exhibit was initially redacted due to privacy concerns.

In one late November 2017 exchange, Manafort appears to express interest in working on Trump’s 2020 campaign.

“Plus i plan on helping on the re elect !” he wrote.

Hannity repeatedly pleaded with Manafort that he should appear on the Fox News host’s show. Manafort complained about the constraints imposed on him by the gag order in his case, but according to the exchanges, Manafort’s attorney Kevin Downing sought to provide Hannity with information on “what we are doing and how it connects to your reporting.”

Hannity reported back to Manafort that an apparent January 2018 call with Downing went well and said that he asked Downing to “feed me everyday.” 

The only reason why Manafort wasn't nailed for contempt of court for violating Judge Amy Berman Jackson's gag order was because they couldn't pin down a follow-up by Manafort lawyer Kevin Downing that actually showed where Manafort broke the gag request.

That's it.

Meanwhile, Sean Hannity is working for the Trump regime as propaganda minister and has been for years.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

Turns out Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein isn't leaving the Justice Department (and oversight of the Mueller probe) this month after all.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is planning to stay on at the Justice Department "a little longer" than originally anticipated, according to a Justice official familiar with his thinking. 

Initially, he planned to leave in mid-March, but no firm date was ever set and after consulting with Attorney General William Barr, he will now stay in his position a bit longer. 

He has not given the White House his two weeks' notice. 

Rosenstein has been overseeing the Russia investigation and as CNN has reported, he has signaled to other officials that he would leave when he was satisfied that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation was either complete or close enough to completion that it was protected.

This jibes with last week's often overlooked news that while the Manafort part of the Mueller probe is winding down with Manafort's sentencing, the probe itself continues as Manafort's business partner Rick Gates continue to provide information.

Rick Gates, the longtime right-hand-man to Paul Manafort who had high-level roles on the Trump campaign and inauguration, is not yet ready for sentencing, Mueller’s team said Friday— because Gates “continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations.”

Gates struck a plea deal with Mueller’s team in February 2018 and testified against Manafort at his trial in August 2018.

What’s left tantalizingly unclear, as ever, is what’s going on with Mueller’s own investigation. For weeks, it’s been rumored in Washington that the special counsel is close to wrapping up — but no Mueller report has yet materialized.

However, Gates’s continued cooperation doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about the state of the special counsel probe because he isn’t only cooperating with Mueller.

There are at least two known investigations, beyond Mueller’s own, that Gates is believed to be cooperating with: an investigation into the Trump inauguration’s money and an investigation into lobbyists’ and lawyers’ unregistered work for Ukraine.

Since both of those investigations appear to remain active, it makes perfect sense that Gates isn’t yet ready for sentencing. Gates could also be providing assistance to other investigations we don’t know about.

Rosenstein leaving was probably the biggest single sign the Meuller probe was winding down.  Now he's staying on.

We have a lot more ground to cover, it seems.

Last Call For Paulie Walnuts' Bad Day

Paul Manafort's day was worse than yours.  It went from a truly bad day...

Paul Manafort was sentenced to 73 months in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday following his conviction on charges of unregistered foreign lobbying and witness tampering.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced the former Trump campaign manager to 60 months on the first count, running concurrently to 30 months of the 47-month sentence imposed in his Virginia case last week.

She also sentenced him to 13 months on the witness tampering count to be served consecutively with the count one sentence and his Virginia sentence.

That would mean an additional 43 months overall, bringing the total time he faces behind bars, including the nine months that he has already served in Virginia, to 81 months.

Put another way, the combined sentences of 90 months amount to seven-and-a-half years.

The judge also ordered Manafort to pay one-time restitution of $6.16 million to the Internal Revenue Service, the same amount he was sentenced to pay in the Virginia case.
As he left the courthouse, Manafort attorney Kevin Downing told ABC News that he was "disappointed" in the sentence. He called Judge Jackson "hostile towards Mr. Manafort," with a level of "callousness" he said he hasn't seen in his many years of white-collar prosecution.

...to exponentially worse as soon as his sentence was announced.

President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was indicted Wednesday by a state grand jury in New York on charges of residential mortgage fraud — the announcement coming just minutes after Manafort was sentenced in federal court in Washington to more than seven years in prison.

The charges filed against Manafort may stand as a kind of prosecutorial insurance policy against a possible presidential pardon — a scenario that Trump has refused to discuss as Manafort’s case worked its way through the federal court system. The president has called Manafort brave for fighting his case against special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Under the Constitution, presidents have wide authority to pardon, but that power applies only to federal convictions, not state cases.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James has urged the legislature to fix what Democrats call a “double-jeopardy loophole” in state law that could negate New York’s ability to prosecute anyone pardoned by the president.

State law protects people from repeat prosecutions for the same alleged crimes, and does not make an exception for instances where a pardon has been granted by the president.

“No one is beyond the law in New York,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a statement announcing the indictment. “Following an investigation commenced by our office in March 2017, a Manhattan grand jury has charged Mr. Manafort with state criminal violations which strike at the heart of New York’s sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market.”

To recap, even if Trump pardons Manafort tomorrow, he's stil;l facing state charges that Trump can do nothing about, and he's most likely going away for a very long time.

Bye, Paulie.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

As widely expected, the judge in Paul Manafort's sentencing hearing gave the convicted fraudster a fraction of what the Mueller team recommended, as Manafort will end up serving just over three more years in jail, plus time served.  However, Manafort still faces a second sentencing hearing on conspiracy convictions next week.

Paul Manafort, the political consultant and Trump presidential campaign chairman whose lucrative work in Ukraine and ties to well-connected Russians made him a target of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was sentenced on Thursday to nearly four years in prison in the financial fraud case that left his grand lifestyle and power-broker reputation in ruins.

The sentence in the highest-profile criminal case mounted by the special counsel’s office was far lighter than the 19- to 24-year prison term recommended under advisory sentencing guidelines. Judge T. S. Ellis III of the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., said that although Mr. Manafort’s crimes were “very serious,” following the guidelines would have resulted in an unduly harsh punishment.

A team of Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors sat glum-faced while Judge Ellis delivered his decision. Mr. Manafort, who suffers from gout and came to the hearing in a wheelchair with his foot heavily bandaged, had asked the judge for compassion. “To say I feel humiliated and ashamed would be a gross understatement,” he said in a barely audible voice, reading from a laptop.

Of the half-dozen former Trump associates prosecuted by Mr. Mueller, Mr. Manafort garnered the harshest punishment yet in the case that came to a conclusion on Thursday — the first of two for which Mr. Manafort is being sentenced this month. While prosecutors sought no specific sentence, they spent much of the three-hour hearing sparring with the judge over the evidence.

For nearly two years, prosecutors pursued Mr. Manafort on two tracks, charging him with more than two dozen felonies, including obstruction of justice, bank fraud and violations of lobbying laws. While they ultimately won Mr. Manafort’s agreement to cooperate, prosecutors said on Thursday that Mr. Manafort provided little information of value for their inquiry into Russia’s election interference and the degree of involvement by Trump associates.

Most of what Mr. Manafort told the office of the special counsel “we already knew or was already in documents,” Greg D. Andres, the lead prosecutor in the case, said in court. “It certainly wasn’t 50 hours of information that was useful.”

The evidence in the case tried last summer before Judge Ellis showed that Mr. Manafort hid millions of dollars of income in overseas accounts and lied to banks to obtain millions more in loans — a financial scheme that prosecutors said was rooted in greed and in Mr. Manafort’s sense that he was above the law.

They described him as a hardened, remorseless criminal who never fully accepted responsibility for his offenses and who continued to lie to federal prosecutors even after he pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts in a related case in Washington and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s office last fall.

Defense lawyers had asked for leniency, citing Mr. Manafort’s age, health problems and lack of a criminal record. He will turn 70 next month.

And they got it.  Here's the thing though: the judge in the Washington DC case is expected to be much less lenient.  We can only hope Manafort gets the rest of his natural life behind bars for helping Trump steal an election on behalf of Russia.

We'll see.  Trump won't be able to do much if additional state charges come through for Manafort, and I'm betting they will.

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.

Russian To Judgment: Endgame

A huge week in the Russian collusion front, and if there is one thing everyone in America can agree on, it's that Rudy Giuliani is absolutely horrible at his job of defending Donald Trump somehow not being a criminal Russian asset.

President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani backtracked on Thursday from a surprising assertion he had made a night earlier that left open the possibility that Trump campaign aides might have coordinated with Russia in its election interference in 2016.

“There was no collusion by President Trump in any way, shape or form,” Mr. Giuliani said in a statement on Thursday, reiterating the president’s longstanding defense against accusations that his campaign secretly coordinated with Moscow to help swing the election. “Likewise, I have no knowledge of any collusion by any of the thousands of people who worked on the campaign.”

He added, referring to discredited conspiracy theories that the president and his allies have long cited, “The only knowledge I have in this regard is the collusion of the Clinton campaign with Russia, which has so far been ignored.”

Mr. Giuliani was seeking to clarify an interview on Wednesday night in which he stopped short of defending Trump campaign aides, drawing speculation that he might have inside knowledge of possible coordination with Russia.

“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign,” he told CNN. He added: “I said the president of the United States. There is not a single bit of evidence the president of the United States committed the only crime you could commit here, conspired with the Russians to hack” the Democratic National Committee.

Mr. Giuliani’s backpedaling was the latest in a series of conflicting comments he has made about the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. The evolution of his statements have suggested shifts in the president’s defense strategy, often following developments in the investigations. On Tuesday, prosecutors for the special counsel filed a 200-page, mostly redacted court document related to the case against Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. Among the little information that was not blacked out were details about his relationship with a Russian whom prosecutors have said has ties to Russian intelligence.

The special counsel’s document was in response to a recent filing by Mr. Manafort’s legal team, which inadvertently disclosed that Mr. Manafort had provided his Russian associate with American polling data — details that offer the clearest example yet that the Trump campaign may have tried to coordinate with Russia before the 2016 election.

Mr. Giuliani has previously denied that there was coordination by Trump campaign aides.

“When I say the Trump campaign, I mean the upper levels of the Trump campaign,” Mr. Giuliani said during a July interview with Fox News. “I have no reason to believe anybody else did. The only ones I checked with obviously are the top four or five people.”

Mr. Giuliani also went a bit further on the collusion defense, telling Fox, “Even if he did it, it’s not a crime.”

This week has been abysmal for Trump, as of course the Manafort court filing last week and Mueller's court filing earlier this week absolutely shows collusion, and Giuliani has given the game away on national television.  Greg Sargent explains what comes next.

Bob Bauer, the White House counsel under former president Barack Obama, told me that Giuliani “must have some continuing hope” that Mueller cannot prove Trump knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, which Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Manafort attended in the expectation of gaining dirt on Hillary Clinton produced by the Russian government.

Yeah, Mueller's smarter than that.  Rudy clearly isn't.

If Mueller determines that the Trump Tower meeting constituted conspiracy, or if more comes out about that meeting or about other collusion we’ve already seen, or if still other conspiring that we don’t know about yet surfaces, Trump’s team will have to build a wall between that and Trump himself — which Giuliani is now doing.

“The insulation of Trump from the campaign is meant to remove him from the circle of any illegal conspiracy,” Bauer told me, adding that Giuliani is moving “to narrow the defense against collusion by arguing that the president is not responsible for what his campaign did.”

But this is a weak defense. It still remains to be seen what Trump knew about all the collusion, whether or not he actively participated in it. And we still don’t know what else Mueller has established. Giuliani’s defense signals he might be worried that still more is coming.

“If you’re the head of an organization, and you’re aware that your associates are conspiring, even if you weren’t the one doing the conspiring you could face criminal liability for it,” Katyal said. “Right now we have only the tip of the iceberg from Mueller. Giuliani may be starting to float a new defense in the event that there’s more damaging information on the conspiracy front coming out.”

Giuliani’s new comments also signal the coming political defense for Trump. Whether or not Mueller ends up indicting, should he clearly establish conspiracy by members of Trump’s campaign, it could prove politically devastating. Giuliani has now signaled this is a real possibility. He is “drawing a tight line around Trump,” Bauer noted. “Since Mueller is unlikely to indict, the defense is against impeachment.”

We'll see if that's true.  Because last night, BuzzFeed News dropped this bombshell.

President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.

Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.

And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.

Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying about the deal in testimony and in a two-page statement to the Senate and House intelligence committees. Special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Cohen’s false claim that the project ended in January 2016 was an attempt to "minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1” — widely understood to be Trump — "in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations.”

Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.

The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.
This revelation is not the first evidence to suggest the president may have attempted to obstruct the FBI and special counsel investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

But Cohen's testimony marks a significant new frontier: It is the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia.

This is what we all expected would come from Cohen's testimony and cooperation with Mueller, Cohen basically copping to a conspiracy to lie to Congress at the minimum, and if that's the case, then things are going to get very nasty soon.  Straight up, no-frills, full-stop obstruction of justice, period.

I know I keep saying how bad things are for the Trump regime, and how each new week seems more awful for them than the last, but this week is starting to look like a backbreaker. Mueller certainly has the documents and evidence to back up this assertion, so expect today to be quite the ride.  This isn't just impeachable, it's outright indictable.

And Trump's Attoney General nominee, William Barr, was nailed on this exact scenario earlier this week by Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

Senator Amy Klobuchar quizzing William Barr on exactly what he would consider an act of obstruction. pic.twitter.com/tibx2ud2ed

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) January 18, 2019

Endgame, folks.

It's here.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Special Counsel Robert Mueller certainly didn't take the holidays off, he's been hard at work and new court filings this week show that former Trump Campaign chair Paul Manafort and his Russian NRA contact Konstatin Kilimnik are definitely the keys to the kingdom.

Prosecutors working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III have intensively scrutinized Paul Manafort’s activities after President Trump’s election — including after Manafort was criminally charged — and indicated they have extensive details not yet made public about Manafort’s interactions with former Russian aide Konstantin Kilimnik and others, a Tuesday court filing showed.

Although heavily redacted, the documents state that Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, claimed he was trying to get people appointed in the new presidential administration. The filing also states that in another Justice Department investigation, Manafort provided information that appears related to an event while he was with the campaign in August 2016.

Prosecutors also showed keen interest in a $125,000 payment made in June 2017 that Manafort characterized in three ways that were contradicted, the filing says, by his tax filings and exchanges with his tax preparer.

Prosecutors filed a 31-page affidavit from an FBI agent, plus another 406 nearly fully blacked-out exhibits, after a federal judge last week ordered them to lay out the “factual and evidentiary basis” for their claims that Manafort lied repeatedly after his plea deal and has breached his cooperation agreement.

The filing in federal court in Washington asserts that Manafort shifted answers to questions posed by the FBI and Mueller probe investigators, prompting his lawyers to pull him aside on several occasions to review statements.

In one interview with investigators and prosecutors in October 2018, the filing states, Manafort’s attorneys requested a break to speak with Manafort after he contradicted his prior statement — even after his lawyers had shown him a typewritten summary of it.

The statement came in a separate criminal investigation by a U.S. attorney outside the District and described events around an incident that Manafort said occurred before he left the Trump campaign on Aug. 19, 2016, according to information in the new filing.

Manafort’s attorneys have previously said that any misstatements on his part after his plea agreement were unintentional.

Manafort, 69, pleaded guilty in September in federal court in Washington to charges that he conspired to cheat the Internal Revenue Service, violate foreign-lobbying laws and tamper with witnesses. Separately, a jury in federal court in Virginia convicted Manafort in August of bank and tax fraud.

To recap, Mueller knows everything.  Manafort lied and continued to lie about most of it, and Mueller knew he was lying to the point where the plea deal fell apart and Manafort most likely will never breathe air as a free man again.

Meanwhile Manafort's relationship with Russian fixer Kilimnik, who was working with convicted spy Maria Butina on using the NRA as a Russian slush fund to fund the GOP, has been painstakingly detailed by Mueller and the evidence presented to a grand jury and a federal judge.

The signals are unmistakable at this point.  The Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents during and after the 2016 campaign.  Mueller knows it all.  And when it drops, America will never be the same.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

So here's what we know about Paul Manafort and his lawyers right now: First, Manafort should immediately fire his legal team because they accidentally (or on purpose maybe at this point, who knows) forgot to make the redactions stick in his latest court filing with the Mueller team, and second, because of those missing redactions, we know get to see that  Robert Mueller believes Paul Manafort has been a very, very bad boy.

Paul Manafort shared 2016 presidential campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former employee whom the FBI has said has ties to Russian intelligence, according to a court filing.

The apparently inadvertent revelation indicates a pathway by which the Russians could have had access to Trump campaign data.

The former Trump campaign chairman on Tuesday denied in a filing from his defense team that he broke his plea deal by lying repeatedly to prosecutors working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III about that and other issues.

In his rebuttal to the special counsel’s claims of dishonesty, Manafort exposed details of the dispute, much of which centers on his relationship with Kilimnik. The Russian citizen, who began working for Manafort’s consulting firm starting in 2005, has been charged with helping his former boss to obstruct Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 election. He is believed to be in Moscow.

The special counsel alleged Manafort “lied about sharing polling data with Mr. Kilimnik related to the 2016 presidential campaign,” according to the unredacted filing, and discussed Ukrainian politics with Kilimnik during that time.

“Manafort ‘conceded’ that he discussed or may have discussed a Ukraine peace plan with Mr. Kilimnik on more than one occasion,” his attorneys quote the special counsel as saying, and “’acknowledged’ that he and Mr. Kilimnik met while they were both in Madrid.”

In his filing, Manafort’s lawyers said any inconsistencies in those interviews were unintentional.

“Issues and communications related to Ukrainian political events simply were not at the forefront of Mr. Manafort’s mind during the period at issue and it is not surprising at all that Mr. Manafort was unable to recall specific details prior to having his recollection refreshed,” they wrote. 

Mueller also said Manafort lied about contacting Trump administration officials after Trump took office. Manafort had told investigators he had no direct or indirect contact with White House officials since Trump’s inauguration, but Manafort had been in touch with officials as recently as the spring, according to the filing.

Manafort told a colleague in February — four months after he was indicted — that he was in contact with a senior administration official through that time, prosecutors said. And in a text message, he authorized another person to speak with a White House official on May 26, they alleged.

In Tuesday’s filing, Manafort’s attorneys said that person was “asking permission to use Mr. Manafort’s name as an introduction in the event the third-party met the President,” which “does not constitute outreach by Mr. Manafort to the President.”

Sorry Don.  Your campaign chairman gave internal campaign data to a foreign power in exchange for help.  That's collusion, period.  At this point, Marcy Wheeler figures, Manafort is going to keep letting redactions slip until Trump pardons him.

I have no idea whether this non-redaction was a colossal mistake or whether this was a cute way to disclose what evidence Mueller has shared with Manafort (remember: these five lies were not the only ones that Manafort told; just the only ones that Mueller wanted to describe).

But even ignoring the redaction fail, the filing feels very contemptuous, as if they’re still playing for a pardon.

Effectively, they’re admitting their client maybe lied or just conveniently forgot to minimize his ongoing conspiracy with someone even Rick Gates has said has ties to Russian intelligence — the same Russian intelligence agency that hacked Democrats. But they don’t think that’s a big deal. They’re just going to double down on obtaining more information on the evidence Mueller has while they wait for the pardon.

Seems about right.