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Cue the Dragnet music: "Dum-da-dum-dum!"
Mueller got some answers but he's not done with Trump
Politico, Nov 20 2018
President Donald Trump today finally submitted a set of written responses to Robert Mueller, signaling that he was done for good with the special counsel's questions. But Mueller is far from done with him. The special counsel still wants to question the President over his actions while in the White House. Today's answers covered only Russian hacking during the 2016 election. It's a fight that could result in a historic subpoena and eventual Supreme Court ruling, pulling a defiant Trump into a legal squabble that could set groundbreaking precedent for presidential investigations for years to come.
Things could get explosive fast. Next comes the perilous round of negotiations between Trump's lawyers and Mueller's prosecutors covering topics such as Trump's intentions when firing FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. That line of questioning — which Trump says he shouldn't have to answer — is tied to Mueller's ongoing obstruction-of-justice investigation.
If Mueller can't get the answers he wants, he will have to decide whether he’s ready to test his power to issue a subpoena for the President's testimony. Mueller's prosecutors reportedly have made the threat before but now the step comes with the added wrinkle that it could spark an internal Justice Department riff with his new supervisor, acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who previously has been critical of the special counsel's investigation.
Should the special counsel win DOJ approval and pull the subpoena trigger, he would still have to face off against a President who has relished taunting Mueller and enter into a legal battle that could quickly elevate to the Supreme Court, where a newly enmeshed conservative majority is widely seen as friendlier to Trump's arguments.
However, legal experts say the special counsel might have enough information from documents, Presidential tweets and witnesses to wrap up the obstruction-of-justice portion of his investigation and file a report to his DOJ supervisors — all without forcing a court showdown just to nail down an interview with the President.
For now, it's unclear what path the dispute will take. Mueller today stuck to the same no-comment posture he's had throughout the 18-month-long Russia investigation, refusing to show any of his cards in public beyond what's required in legal filings.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...Vnx0?ocid=AMZN
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Republicans on the House Judiciary Committe have subpoenaed former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch to give private depositions next month regarding alleged political bias at the FBI and Department of Justice -- allegations made by Republicans, of course. Lynch has not publicly responded but Comey wrote on Twitter, "Happy Thanksgiving. Got a subpoena from House Republicans. I’m still happy to sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a 'closed door' thing because I’ve seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion. Let's have a hearing and invite everyone to see."
James Comey subpoenaed, willing to 'answer all questions' if hearing is open and public
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/subp...ry?id=59364236
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The investigation that the President keeps calling a "witch hunt" has caught another witch.
Roger Stone associate Jerome Corsi is in plea negotiations with special counsel
The Washington Post, Nov 23 2018
Conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi is in plea negotiations with special counsel Robert Mueller. The talks with Corsi — an associate of President Trump and GOP operative Roger Stone — could bring Mueller's team closer to determining whether Trump or his advisers were linked to WikiLeaks' release of hacked Democratic emails in 2016, a key part of his long-running inquiry.
Corsi provided research on Democratic figures during the campaign to Stone, a longtime Trump adviser. For months, the special counsel has been scrutinizing Stone's activities in an effort to determine whether he coordinated with WikiLeaks. Stone has said Corsi also has a relationship with Trump, built on their shared interest in the falsehood that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
The deal is not yet complete and could still be derailed. Last week, Corsi said he had spoken to prosecutors for 40 hours and expected to be indicted on a charge of allegedly lying. Since then, Corsi has resumed talks with Mueller's team about a possible deal that could result in him agreeing to plead guilty in exchange for leniency.
Prosecutors are focused on whether he had developed a source with inside information about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans. If Mueller could prove that Corsi learned about Paul Podesta's emails from Assange or another person in contact with him, he could try to link WikiLeaks' releases to Stone or others in Trump’s world. Podesta did not work for the DNC and the emails were stolen from his private Gmail account, not an address linked to the Democratic Party. Stone is under scrutiny because he made a series of comments during the campaign that suggested he was in contact with Assange and knew of WikiLeaks' plans.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...17MZ?ocid=AMZN
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For lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Russians, Trump's former campaign manager will serve 14 days in jail and one year on probation. He will also pay a $9,500 fine and do 200 hours of community service. Papadopoulos will be the third defendant in the Mueller investigation to do prison time. In other words -- the squawking orange parrot's mantra to the contrary -- the Mueller probe is not a "witch hunt."
Judge orders George Papadopoulos to report to prison on Monday
https://www-m.cnn.com/2018/11/25/pol...on/index.html?
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"I know I lied before -- but now when I say I'm not lying, I'm telling the truth. I'm not lying. Honest! You believe me, don't you?" No, Paul, we do not.
Mueller's team says Paul Manafort lied to investigators, breaking plea deal
NBC News, Nov 26, 2018 4:50 PM
Federal prosecutors asked a judge today to sentence former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, saying he broke his plea agreement by lying to the FBI and investigators for special counsel Robert Mueller. Manafort, 69, was convicted of eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud in a trial in February. In September, he agreed to cooperate with Mueller's investigation when he pleaded guilty to two new counts and admitted his guilt to 10 counts outstanding from his earlier trial in Virginia.
Prosecutors with Mueller's office told the court that "after signing the plea agreement, Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel's Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement." Mueller's office made the assertion in a status report filed in US District Court in Washington, DC.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...gators-n940406
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"All these phony accounts were created by people with names such as Dmitri, Andrei, Alexei, Boris, Ivan, Vladimir, Pyotr, Nikita, Ilya, Pavel, Vanya, Yuri and Yakov -- but we had no reason to suspect they were Russians. Honest!"
Facebook engineer warned in 2014 of Russian intrusion, UK lawmaker says
CBS News, Nov 27 2018 10:59 AM
A Facebook engineer discovered in October 2014 that "an entity with Russian IP addresses" was harvesting more than three billion data points per day, a British member of Parliament revealed today. Communications related to the engineer's discovery were among a trove of documents seized from an American businessman by Damian Collins, who leads an unprecedented coalition of lawmakers from nine nations investigating the social media giant and its role in spreading disinformation.
Collins' "grand international committee" grilled Richard Allan, Facebook's vice president for public policy, and Collins gave the first hints of what the seized documents contain. Though he said the committee won't be publishing the documents, he said one in particular might be of significant public interest.
"An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October of 2014 that an entity with Russian IP addresses had been using a Pinterest API key to pull over three billion data points a day," Collins said at the hearing. "Was that reported to any external body at the time?"
Allan — who was seated next to an empty chair reserved for Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who declined to attend — did not directly answer the question. However, a Facebook spokesperson contacted by CBS News said, "The engineers who had flagged these initial concerns subsequently looked into this further and found no evidence of specific Russian activity."
Allan and Facebook criticized the committee's decision to use the documents, which were given to the committee by the founder of Six4Three, an app development company involved in litigation with Facebook. The documents were ordered sealed by a Superior Court judge in San Mateo, California, after months of legal wrangling between Facebook, Six4Three and media organizations, but the court has no jurisdiction in Britain.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/faceboo...t-member-says/
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Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone met with Russians in 2016, hoping to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Jerome Corsi, a conspiracy theorist and the Washington DC bureau chief for InfoWars, is an associate of Stone. Both men knew WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was going to release hacked emails that would hurt the Clinton campaign. Both men lied about knowing. Assange, fearing criminal charges, is hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. And the drama continues.
Mueller documents indicate Roger Stone associate Jerome Corsi knew WikiLeaks' release of hacked emails was coming
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-...ks-email-dump/
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The Tweeter-In-Chief was in fine form this morning, attacking the news media, the Mueller investigation and Democrats and bringing up Joseph McCarthy -- all in a single tweet. By the way, Robert Mueller is a conservative Republican who was appointed FBI director by conservative Republican President George Bush in 2001 and served until 2013.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
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!
5:39 AM · Nov 28, 2018
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Roger Stone calls the Mueller investigation a "witch hunt" and denies discussing WikiLeaks with Donald Trump. Donald Trump calls the Mueller investigation a "with hunt" and says he can't remember discussing WikiLeaks with Roger Stone. Well, golly gee, these men certainly have no reason to lie, do they?
Trump's night-owl calls to Roger Stone draw scrutiny in Mueller probe
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...dXC9?ocid=AMZN
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Cohen pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges and is facing prison time. Now he's pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the time period of negotiations for a proposed Trump Tower in Moscow. Trump's response was to call Cohen a "weak person" who is "not smart" and is making up stories in the hope of getting a lighter sentence. In other words, Trump is saying Cohen's admission of lying is itself a lie. Cohen said he lied out of loyalty to Trump. That was a mistake on top of a mistake.
Michael Cohen admits negotiations for Trump Tower in Russia occurred well into Presidential campaign
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...fsVn?ocid=AMZN
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White House aides are reporting that Trump is now feeling "distracted." Yeah, I guess he is, considering he doesn't know how much incriminating evidence Michael Cohen has revealed in 70 (so far) hours of interviews with Mueller's team investigating Trump-Russia connections. We're just starting to find out some of the details:
The Trump Organization planned to give Vladimir Putin the $50 million penthouse In Trump Tower Moscow
During the presidential campaign, Michael Cohen discussed the matter with a representative of Putin's press secretary, according to two US sources.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...imir-putin-the
Trump Tower Moscow and Michael Cohen’s lies about it, explained
Everything you need to know about Trump’s efforts to do business in Russia.
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/11/29...moscow-mueller
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Keep in mind that this is only one man's opinion -- and most of us know the old saying about "opinions." If you don't know, well, I won't repeat it here. But Toobin's prediction could turn out to be correct.
CNN's Jeffrey Toobin believes Trump might not make it to 2020
Raw Story, Nov 29 2018 9:17 PM ET
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said today he thinks Donald Trump may not make it to 2020. "Today is the first day I thought Donald Trump might not finish his term in office," Toobin said in response to the shocking news dropped earlier in the day regarding the guilty plea of Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen.
"Really?" an incredulous Anderson Cooper asked the analyst. It's "enormous," Toobin said, that Cohen was reportedly in talks with representatives for Russian President Vladimir Putin to give the head of state the penthouse in the proposed Trump Tower Moscow — a bombshell broken by BuzzFeed earlier in the day.
The analyst said it's "preposterous" that Trump and those in his corner claimed Cohen never discussed the negotiations for Trump Tower Moscow for six months. Toobin said it is equally unbelievable that Trump never spoke to his confidant Roger Stone about WikiLeaks even though the two were "obsessed" with the leak organization and spoke regularly to each other, as both have claimed.
All the scandals surrounding the president are equally "preposterous," Toobin said, and it leads him to wonder when Republicans will begin turning on Trump.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/11/cnn...not-make-2020/
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If Donald gets arrested, I'm pretty sure his BFF Vladimir will gladly make bail for him -- and if not Vladimir, then Crown Prince bin Salman.
'Individual 1': Trump emerges as a central subject of Mueller probe
The Washington Post, Nov 29 2018
In two major developments this week, President Trump has been labeled in the parlance of criminal investigations as a major subject of interest, complete with an opaque legal code name: "Individual 1."
New evidence from two separate fronts of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation casts fresh doubts on Trump's version of key events involving Russia, signaling potential political and legal peril for the President. Investigators have now publicly cast Trump as a central figure of their probe into whether Trump's campaign conspired with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign.
Together, the documents show investigators have evidence that Trump was in close contact with his lieutenants as they made outreach to both Russia and WikiLeaks — and that they tried to conceal the extent of their activities.
Today, Trump's longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress when he insisted that Trump was not pursuing plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow after January 2016, casting Trump's repeated claims that he had no business interests in Russia in a new light. A draft special counsel document revealed Tuesday also indicates that prosecutors are closely scrutinizing Trump's interactions with longtime adviser Roger Stone, as Stone was allegedly seeking information about WikiLeaks' plans to release hacked Democratic emails.
Legal experts said it's still unclear how much peril the President might face as a result of the new evidence Mueller has gathered about the Moscow project and WikiLeaks, but his prominence in the prosecutors' papers puts the President in an awkward starring role.
"It's deeply troubling. It's not a place that anybody wants to be, or where you would want your friends or family to be," former federal prosecutor Glen Kopp said. "And it's certainly not a place that you would want your President to be."
Trump, identified as "Individual 1" in Cohen's guilty plea, was said to have received direct updates from Cohen as he pursued a Moscow Trump Tower project with the Kremlin, up until June 14, 2016. The President also appears in the draft charging document for Trump ally Jerome Corsi, who allegedly told Stone about WikiLeaks' plans to release damaging Democratic emails in October of that year because he knew Stone was in "regular contact" with Trump. Trump spoke with Stone the day after he got the alert from Corsi.
In the draft documents, prosecutors sought to have Corsi plead guilty to lying when he said he didn't know about WikiLeaks' plans and urging others to visit WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to obtain emails damaging to Democrats.
Trump has given slightly differing accounts of his Moscow business ties over time. In July 2016, he tweeted: "For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia." A day later he claimed, "I have nothing to do with Russia." In January 2017, he told a reporter: "I have no deals that could happen in Russia because we've stayed away."
"This is part of the fact pattern that gets to the heart of whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the campaign," said Trump biographer Tim O'Brien. "I think the unforgiving grinding force of the US justice system, which he has tried to undermine since he became President, is encircling him. I don't think we know where he will land but he is certainly mired in something that he is ill-equipped, legally and personally, to handle."
The prosecutors' filings show they have corroborated and buttressed Cohen's account with contemporaneous emails and people familiar with the probe say they have also obtained corroborating testimony from other witnesses.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...h9iZ?ocid=AMZN
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This Washington Post analysis of Cohen's admission that both he and Trump lied about their dealings with Russia concludes that Trump tried to cover up Russia-related matters and Russia tried to cover up Trump-related matters. Does Putin have potentially damaging information about Trump? Is that why Trump refuses to say anything negative about Putin?
4 key takeaways from Michael Cohen's new plea deal
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...gsto?ocid=AMZN
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Trump continues to attack the Mueller investigation, calling it a "disgrace" and a "rigged witch hunt" and an "illegal Joseph McCarthy style witch hunt." Today he came up with a new attack: "illegal hoax." He also continues to say Mueller should investigate "the other side," meaning Hillary and the Democrats. No President has ever attacked the United States justice system as vehemently and as continuously as Trump does. He is a disgrace to the office.
Trump after Cohen plea deal: Mueller's 'illegal hoax' should be stopped 'immediately'
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...hqHg?ocid=AMZN
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CNN's Don Lemon played several clips of Donald Trump lying about having no business interests in Russia and lying about the 2015-16 proposal for Trump Tower Moscow. Trump said the proposal was "very open" and "everybody knew about it" but actually almost nobody knew about it until the New York Times reported it -- on February 17, 2017. Trump had never publicly spoken about it. Here is the video:
Don Lemon: Trump seems rattled by Cohen's reveal
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/...gation-vpx.cnn
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Russians, directed by Vladimir Putin, created thousands of phony accounts on Facebook and other social media sites and spread thousands of phony stories aimed at getting Clinton defeated and Trump elected in 2016. Russians also created phony accounts on Twitter and sent out an estimated 1,400,000 automated election-related tweets. Twenty-six Russians (so far) have been indicted by Robert Mueller for meddling in our Presidential election. So does White House puppet Sarah Sanders denounce Putin and the Russians? Nope, she attacks Robert Mueller by parroting the words of the orange-skinned puppeteer:
Sarah Huckabee Sanders issues wild statement claiming 'Russian witch hunt hoax' is undermining US-Russia relations
https://www.businessinsider.com/sara...t-hoax-2018-11
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Erin Burnett took issue with Donald Trump blaming the Mueller investigation, and not Russian election meddling. for undermining US-Russia relations. Here is the video:
Burnett: 'Hoax' says you're siding with Russia
CNN's Erin Burnett points out how frequently President Donald Trump calls the Robert Mueller investigation a "witch hunt" or a "hoax" and what that really means.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/...e-ebof-vpx.cnn
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Santa Claus has his helpers -- and Robert Mueller has his helpers:
Warner says Senate Intelligence Committee has made 'a number of referrals' to Mueller
CBS News, Dec 2 2018 1:18 PM
Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his committee has made "a number of referrals" to special counsel Robert Mueller's office for prosecution and vowed to do the same for anyone who lies to Congressional investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election. "If you lie to Congress, we're going to go after you. We're going to make sure that gets referred," Warner said today on Face The Nation.
On Thursday, Michael Cohen, President Trump's former personal lawyer, pleaded guilty to lying to the Senate and House intelligence committees about his involvement in an effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and the extent to which then-candidate Trump and his family were involved. Warner said Cohen's plea contradicts Trump's multiple denials during the campaign in which he said he did not have any business links to Russia.
Warner did not specify who else has been the subject of criminal referrals but said the committee has an "ongoing relationship" with Mueller's office and is still probing the question of whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, which Trump has repeatedly denied. Warner said, "That is something both Chairman Burr and I are reserving judgment on until we see all of the witnesses and we've got more folks to see."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mark-wa...ls-to-mueller/
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"I plead the Fifth." -- Donald Trump -- 97 times! -- during his 1990 divorce proceedings when questioned about his fidelity.
"The Mob takes the fifth. If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?" -- Donald Trump, September 28, 2016, referring to three former Hillary Clinton staff members who refused to testify about setting up her email server.
And now we come to December 4, 2018. Roger Stone is not innocent. Donald Trump is not innocent. If they were, they would not be "taking the Fifth Amendment," right, Donald?
Trump associate Roger Stone to plead the Fifth Amendment in Senate Russia probe
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tru...e-russia-probe
