Judge Rules Manafort Lied to Prosecutors…And a meeting at the Grand Havana cigar room goes to the heart of Russian collusion! And the lying was not just to Special Counsel, but Manafort lied in his statements to the FBI & grand jury, so the judge’s ruling results in his cooperation deal with Mueller going kapoof & likely lengthens his prison sentence. Obviously, there was dealmaking going on at that meeting, which Mueller’s team is tasked to discover if it rises to the level of collusion, which legally would be criminal conspiracy: mueller-probe-russian-conspiracy-trump-manafort. The answer may reside within all the hidden redacted parts in the Manafort court documents.
So now that it’s been clearly established Manafort lied, the big unanswered question is why did he lie? That’s also a good question for Trump & many among his campaign staff, if there was no collusion & they did nothing illegal, why did they consistently lie about their many contacts with many Russians? What were they hiding? It also looks extremely suspicious that several Trump officials & Russians have already been charged &/or convicted for crimes. No witch hunt or hoax have ever been this productive! These links take us to reports on the judge’s ruling Manafort lied:
It seems Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska indicated to Manafort he had important info to share, sending his contact Kilimnik to New York to meet with Manafort & Gates at that cigar bar on August 2nd, 2016, during the heart of the Russian campaign starting their interference shortly before the November election. Remember, it was Deripaska’s companies that Trump mysteriously insisted just recently to lift sanctions on them, much to the chagrin of a bipartisan Congress & the suspicions of anyone following this. Again we can ask, who is Trump serving & what do the Russians have on him? Is our president acting mainly of behalf of the American people or the Kremlin?
More Articles on Manafort’s Court Appearances & Russia Probe Updates
More News on the Manafort Court Appearances & the Ruling Manafort Lied
We covered the news out of last week’s Manafort closed court hearing extensively in our Part 1 section from last weekend, since a Mueller prosecutor answered a question by the judge by stating this case runs to the heart of their investigation. But the news from this week the judge found that Manafort lied adds to the credibility of this incriminating evidence. It all points directly towards deal-making being done between the Trump campaign & Russia, commonly referred to in media reports as collusion. In conjunction with the plethora of additional evidence which has been made public, the giant jigsaw puzzle keeps coming more into focus & closer to completion.
We already know Russia interfered in the 2016 election, with many Russians engaged in repeated communications with Trump campaign officials, as Trump consistently pushed policies favorable to Russia & Putin, while figures like Trump, Manafort & Flynn had personal financial interests in their dealings with Russia, plus Trump & his campaign staff continued to deny, lie & cover up any of their dealings with Russia. There’s also some incriminating meetings we know of, such as the spring of 2016 when Papadopoulos in a meeting with top campaign staff including Trump touted the Russians having the stolen dirt on Hillary, the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting where Manafort, sonny-boy Donnie Jr. & sonny-in-law Jared sought the Hillary dirt from Russians, plus this August 2016 meeting between Manafort & Kilimnik (who had close ties to Russian intelligence) who were discussing deals including a Ukraine peace plan (giving Russia more influence & NATO less control over Ukraine?) & removing sanctions on Russia, with Manafort providing private polling info (to help the Russians micro-target the U.S. with their disinformation?).
There’s plenty of other suspicious signs which have been made public, but Mueller is still hiding his aces up his sleeve, so we can fully expect what’s yet to come out will be far more illuminating. The Senate Intel Committee says they haven’t found direct evidence of collusion (more on that below), but as we can clearly see that’s far from the full story. We can read into those signals from the recent Manafort court hearings, not only because prosecutor’s long memo was heavily redacted, but more hints come in these posts below which are most of the verbiage from the NYT article in-closed-hearing-a-clue-about-the-heart-of-muellers-russia-inquiry. As we see in the last line, Mueller’s prosecutor Weissmann told the judge “that’s as far as I can go,” suggesting the most damning evidence at the heart of their collusion case is yet to be revealed:
Of the few hints to emerge from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, about evidence of possible collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russia, one of the most tantalizing surfaced almost in passing in a Washington courtroom last week. Comments by one of Mr. Mueller’s lead prosecutors, disclosed in a transcript of a closed-door hearing, suggest that the special counsel continues to pursue at least one theory: that starting while Russia was taking steps to bolster Mr. Trump’s candidacy, people in his orbit were discussing deals to end a dispute over Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and possibly give Moscow relief from economic sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies. The theory was offered almost as an aside by the prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, during a discussion of contacts between Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and a longtime Russian associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom investigators have linked to Russian intelligence.
A closer look at the transcript, released late Thursday, shows that the prosecutors have been keenly focused on discussions the two men had about a plan to end the conflict that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Persuading the United States to ease or end the American-led sanctions imposed to punish Moscow for its aggression has been a primary goal of Russian foreign policy. According to the transcript, which was heavily redacted, Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik repeatedly communicated about a so-called peace plan for Ukraine starting in early August 2016, while Mr. Manafort was still running Mr. Trump’s campaign, and continuing into 2018, months after Mr. Manafort had been charged by the special counsel’s office with a litany of crimes related to his work in the country. The prosecutors claim that Mr. Manafort misled them about those talks and other interactions with Mr. Kilimnik.
Pressed by the judge at Monday’s hearing to say why Mr. Manafort’s alleged lies mattered, Mr. Weissmann gave a broad hint about the thrust of the investigation. “This goes to the larger view of what we think is going on, and what we think is the motive here,” Mr. Weissmann said. “This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” Mr. Weissmann did not elaborate. The hearing’s purpose was narrow — determining whether Mr. Manafort had breached his plea agreement by misleading the prosecutors about Mr. Kilimnik and other matters. Mr. Kilimnik was charged last June with conspiring with Mr. Manafort to obstruct justice by trying to shape the accounts of prospective witnesses in Mr. Manafort’s case. Yet Mr. Weissmann’s cryptic comments suggest that the special counsel’s investigation — which Mr. Trump has sought to dismiss as a witch hunt and which the acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, has said will wrap up soon — is still pursuing the central question of whether there was some kind of deal between Russia and the Trump campaign.
To date, prosecutions by the special counsel have skirted that question. They have laid out Russia’s hacking, leaking and social media manipulation, most of it in favor of Mr. Trump. They have charged multiple Trump aides with lying, including the president’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, who admitted misleading the F.B.I. about his discussions with the Russian ambassador about sanctions. Mr. Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr. was indicted last month on charges of lying to Congress about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks, which released tens of thousands of Democratic emails stolen by the Russians. But the essential question of why the Kremlin bet so heavily on Mr. Trump, and whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had any indication that Mr. Trump would give him what he desired, has remained unresolved.
The sanctions have inflicted substantial pain on the Russian economy. As a candidate and a new president, Mr. Trump seemed skeptical that such punishment was necessary or effective. “Trump’s unusual sympathy and receptivity to Putin and the Kremlin was evident throughout the campaign” and the first few months of his presidency, said John E. Herbst, a former United States ambassador to Ukraine. That pattern, he said, fueled the notion that Mr. Trump might seek a “grand bargain” that would end sanctions, possibly on terms deeply unfavorable to Ukraine. The sanctions also limited business opportunities with Russia. Mr. Trump had long sought a marquee Trump Tower project in Moscow, and at least two aides were pursuing separate nuclear power projects that would have benefited from an end to the sanctions. As Mr. Trump took office, some State Department officials described worrying inquiries that suggested the White House might be preparing to precipitously drop the sanctions. And various intermediaries floated proposals they said would end the sporadic combat in eastern Ukraine between Russian-funded separatist fighters and Ukrainian forces trying to hold back the loss of more territory. Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s longtime fixer, told The New York Times that he left a sealed envelope containing one such plan on Mr. Flynn’s White House desk.
Mr. Kilimnik, meanwhile, was trying to use his extensive ties to Mr. Manafort to advance another. It envisioned the return of Viktor F. Yanukovych, a pro-Russia politician who had risen to the presidency of Ukraine in 2010 with the help of Mr. Manafort, who was paid tens of millions of dollars for his efforts. Mr. Yanukovych was forced from office by a popular uprising in 2014 and fled to Russia. Mr. Kilimnik wanted to resurrect him as a semiautonomous leader in eastern Ukraine, a division of the country fiercely opposed by most Ukrainians. In a February 2017 interview with The Times, Mr. Kilimnik described Mr. Manafort as a possible negotiator for the deal. He said that Mr. Manafort had told him that “there is only one enemy — the chaos.” “If there is a serious project that can bring peace to Ukraine, Manafort will be back,” Mr. Kilimnik said at the time.
The first discussion between Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik cited by the prosecutors took place on Aug. 2, 2016, at the Grand Havana Room in Manhattan, and also included Rick Gates, Mr. Manafort’s deputy on the Trump campaign and during his Ukraine work. Mr. Weissmann noted that Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates tried to avoid drawing attention at that meeting, leaving separately from Mr. Kilimnik. “That meeting and what happened at that meeting is of significance to the special counsel,” Mr. Weissmann said at the hearing. During the hearing, prosecutors suggested that Mr. Manafort was to be a spokesman in the United States, apparently for Mr. Kilimnik’s plan to divide Ukraine. “If he were the spokesperson, and denominated as such within the United States,” Mr. Weissmann said, “he would also have access to senior people.” He then broke off, saying, “That’s as far as I can go.”
Rudy has a Tough Job
When PR/TV lawyer Rudy sometimes crawls out of his hole & makes a buffoon of himself on television, there can be possible explanations for that. It might just be he’s been placed in an impossible situation, as revealed in these excerpts pulled from the beginning & near the ending of trumps-lawyers-have-a-tough-job-and-its-probably-going-to-get-harder:
It’s like “Groundhog Day.” At the end of January, Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker opined that the Mueller probe was wrapping up. Then, a few days after that, the feds announced that they’d recovered terabytes of data, an almost unimaginable amount, from Roger Stone’s seized electronic devices. Which means we’ll have Robert Mueller with us, in one form or another, for a long while. Which, in turn, means we’ll have Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s lawyer. If that prospect sounds dispiriting, please muster up some understanding. In fact, let’s observe a moment of silence for poor Giuliani — and for the 17 other lawyers the White House recently hired to defend Trump against the coming onslaught by the special counsel and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. True, some people will find these attorneys hard to feel sorry for. But they are going to run into many, many troubles, general and specific. Because here’s the problem with being a defense lawyer: It’s hard — not impossible, but hard — to be better than your client.
This time, in contrast, we have a president whose reactions to such rules are massively unknown and unknowable, with a record that includes attacks on the U.S. judiciary. His lawyers may have to exert executive privilege in the face of legal problems that Nixon’s lawyers could not have imagined. So, when you watch Giuliani’s circumlocutions and seeming confusion, be charitable. People have taken to saying that his legal skills are rusty. Some of them clearly are. But other litigators’ instincts don’t fade. Among them is the instinct for triangulation: Knowing where the inconsistencies and intransigence are and talking in a way that seeks to avoid them or make them plausible. That’s a lot of what we see Giuliani doing: trying to follow and justify presidential statements and positions that make no legal — or even factual — sense.
Which House will Trump Occupy in 2020, the White House or the Big House?
Here we see Elizabeth Warren punching back against Trump’s racial slurs against her. I concur with her sentiments that in 2020, Trump may not still be president or even a free person. That’s found here in the opening to elizabeth-warren-2020-trump:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Sunday said that President Donald Trump “may not even be a free person” by 2020, suggesting the president might become ensnared by the special counsel’s investigation before she has a chance to face him in a general election. “Every day there is a racist tweet, a hateful tweet — something really dark and ugly,” Warren said during a campaign event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “What are we as candidates, as activists, as the press going to do about it? We’re going to chase after those every day?” She added: “Here’s what bothers me. By the time we get to 2020, Donald Trump may not even be president. In fact, he may not even be a free person.” The jab marks Warren’s first foray into campaign-trail skirmishing with Trump since entering the Democratic presidential fray with a Saturday announcement event in Lawrence, Mass. During her kickoff speech, Warren, a consumer protection advocate and former Harvard Law School professor, attacked Trump as being part of a “rigged system that props up the rich and the powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else.”
Short Bits
After some contradictions & deflections, Nadler wants Whitaker back to clarify (and Barr was just confirmed to replace Whitaker): nadler-whitaker-testimony-trump
Interesting Polling
My Reaction from Senate Intel, Say What?
Trump, Fox fake news & the rest of the echo got a lot of mileage out of the statement from Richard Burr, that the Senate Intel Committee found no direct evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign & Russia. Let’s unpack that statement. While that Senate committee seemed to take their investigation more seriously than their House counterparts when the GOP was in the House majority, still there’s a pronounced lack of motivation & enthusiasm from a GOP-run committee to really uncover all the pertinent facts related to the Russian probe.
Burr’s Dem counterpart Mark Warner took issue with Burr’s statement, saying while it’s true there’s no direct evidence of collusion, Burr’s conclusion lacked context & the clues uncovered so far are open to interpretation. We’ve already seen substantial circumstantial evidence of collusion, which can be clearly seen just reading the commentary from this Part 1 blog above. Experienced prosecutors would tell us most conspiracy cases don’t produce direct evidence, as the parties under investigation made sure they covered their tracks, but there’s been many a conviction just by patching together the preponderance of circumstantial evidence. When we examine how Trump officials were eager to work with Russians, had numerous Russian contacts they kept lying about, plus we’ve already gotten numerous indictments & convictions from Mueller, it sure appears something was going on.
Keep in mind Mueller has more power to uncover crimes than the Senate does. They’re experienced prosecutors, with the tools to be able to pin down witnesses & follow the international money trail. If Trump is operating a criminal enterprise as credible signs seem to indicate, he’s about to get hit from all sides, not just from Mueller, but multiple investigations based on credible evidence from various House committees & the Southern District of NY. So don’t be alarmed by the assertions from the chair of Senate Intel, since he doesn’t get the last word & the puzzle pieces continue to be put in place by the other investigations.
Just from all the circumstantial evidence we know of, I’m confident when all the facts come out we’ll see proof of criminality. That’s not just the hope I personally have along with other anti-Trumpers, it also seems the desire of the majority of Americans who are sick & tired of having a lying corrupt con man as our president. Of course, the roughly 1/3 of the Trumpeter base out there who are peachy keen with Trump, apparently they’re fine with having that lying corrupt con man as their president. So I’ll repeat for emphasis, Burr doesn’t have the last word as his Senate Intel Committee just didn’t go far enough or dig deep enough. For more perspectives on what all this means, here are several article links below. Because there’s so many, they’re not live, but you could copy/paste to search any you’d like to read:
washingtonpost/trump-claims-no-collusion-with-russia-as-leading-democrat-says-conclusion-is-premature
thehill/warner-burr-split-on-committee-findings-on-collusion
cnn/warner-burr-senate-russia-collusion-question
vox/trump-richard-burr-russia-collusion-explained
motherjones/senate-intelligence-committee-democrats-dispute-claims-russia-probe-found-no-collusion
thedailybeast/senate-intel-chief-richard-burr-covered-for-trump-while-russia-attacked-2016-election
slate/richard-burr-russia-interference-collusion-lies
lawandcrime/hes-not-an-attorney-legal-experts-say-senate-intel-cmte-chairs-collusion-comments-are-misleading
alternet/legal-experts-refute-senate-intelligence-chairs-comments-on-russia-probe
salon/senate-investigation-finds-no-direct-evidence-of-a-conspiracy-between-trump-campaign-and-russia
salon/did-the-senate-find-no-direct-evidence-of-collusion-that-doesnt-mean-what-trump-wants-it-to
alternet/republicans-defense-of-trump-looks-increasingly-suspicious-as-they-deny-obvious-evidence-of-collusion
rawstory/gop-intel-chairman-richard-burr-prejudging-trump-collusion-probe-ends-cnn-legal-analyst
rawstory/john-brennan-drops-truth-bomb-senate-intel-committee-finding-criminal-investigations-not-job
investigaterussia/senate-intel-no-direct-conspiracy-so-far
dailykos/Senate-Intelligence-panel-found-no-direct-evidence-of-conspiracy-it-would-be-surprising-if-it-had
palmerreport/joke-senate-intel-report-trump
Foreign Dangers
THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS!!! Trump is slashing Homeland Security assigned to prevent meddling in our elections from bad foreign actors, including protecting cybersecurity & voting infrastructure. What is he trying to hide & who is he protecting? And it could open up the 2020 elections for a disaster. This is a far greater national emergency than the southern border. And this move is in the best interests of Russia & any of our other adversaries, not America!: thedailybeast.com/trumps-dhs-guts-task-forces-protecting-elections-from-foreign-meddling
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