🔍 All things Mueller - What we know he has on Trump 'n Co

dragonfly9 · December 12, 2018, 12:48pm

A few maddening details about what we/Mueller may know and what we/Mueller may suspect. This short article poses what we do know…but also makes another round of conjectures that perhaps the reason that Manafort does not want to reveal too much about why he lied about or talked to K Kilimnik (@Keaton_James ) is that K is a spy…Is Manafort then one too…??

Could be …we will get a brief delay on sentencing until March 5th 2019 for Manafort.

Everything we know about Paul Manafort also suggests that he would never stop working the angles. If there was a prospect of a presidential pardon, no matter how distant, he would make a play for one. Still, I don’t think this sort of legal gamesmanship fully explains why Paul Manafort would have continued to lie to Robert Mueller, when he obviously knew the risks of misleading the Special Counsel’s Office—and when Manafort had ample personal evidence of Trump’s flakiness and indifference to the fate of loyal servants.

Of course, it’s hard to see exactly where Mueller intends to take his investigation; we must take into account the redactions in his filings and his necessary silence about matters he continues to investigate. But I think there’s a reason that he seems to care so much about Kilimnik—and Manafort’s alleged lies about him.

To recap some of the crucial plot points in the Paul Manafort story, based on my own reporting and lawsuits filed against him:

He owed millions of dollars to Oleg Deripaska, who invested in a fund that Manafort created for buying up assets in Russia and Ukraine.

Manafort was so deep in debt to Deripaska that he avoided him when the oligarch came asking for his cash in 2010.

When Manafort went to work for the Trump campaign, he suggested giving Deripaska “private briefings,” with the hopes of the Russian forgiving his debts. (All this is obliquely explained in emails obtained by The Atlantic last year.)

Perhaps Manafort’s messages about campaign access never reached Deripaska; it’s possible that this was another one of his harebrained schemes. But we know that Manafort was attempting to use Kilimnik as his interface with Deripaska.

As I have read back over Mueller’s past references to K.K. in his sundry filings, there’s one mention that stands out. Last March, almost as an aside, Mueller noted that Kilimnik “has ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016.” Manafort would have recognized this instantly as a description of K.K., and yet he repeatedly misled the prosecutor about his relationship with him, according to Mueller.

One reason that Manafort might have lied about his contacts with K.K. could be that he doesn’t want to be vulnerable to charges greater than the ones that Mueller has already leveled against him. It’s one thing to admit to a failure to adhere to the Foreign Agents Registration Act; it’s quite another to implicate yourself in an effort to collude with a hostile regime, to admit that your closest aide is a Russian spy.

There’s been talk that Robert Mueller has reached the point in his investigation where he’s tying together loose threads. But reading through both of the special counsel’s filings yesterday, it’s striking how many threads there are. And even as we get greater evidence of contact between Trump aides and Russians, there’s still so much that remains vague or maddeningly elliptical. The bigger picture fills in, pixel by pixel, but we still don’t quite know what we’re seeing yet.

In a heavily redacted court filing Friday, Mueller laid out five lies Manafort is alleged to have told after he signed the plea agreement.

Keaton_James · December 12, 2018, 5:53pm

This paragraph jumps off the page:

Describing their take on the case Wednesday, Jeannie S. Rhee from the Special Counsel’s Office said Cohen provided “credible” and “valuable information” regarding “any links between a campaign and a foreign government.”

I’d give anything to know what Mueller’s team knows about these “links between a campaign and a foreign government.” Which members of the campaign were involved? How far up the chain of command did this extend? Which foreign government were they coordinating with?

It’s reassuring to know that prosecutors already have this information – I guess we just need to keep calm and soldier on while awaiting their findings.

dragonfly9 · December 12, 2018, 8:40pm

More on the NRA connection with Alexander Torshin presiding over a lot of NRA gatherings where a LOT of money has been raised, although he only admitted to $2500. We see a lot of Senators there, and John Bolton, our current NSC head.

Makes for uncomfortable bedfellows…and the NRA angle is very much a suspicious one, particularly that Butina is charged with more than being ‘friendly’ with members.

As questions mounted last spring about two Russian operatives with ties to the National Rifle Association who tried to cultivate the Trump presidential campaign, the NRA made a rare public disclosure: The gun group said it had received about $2,500 from Russian sources. That included a single contribution “of less than $1,000” from one of the operatives, Alexander Torshin—a high-level official from Vladimir Putin’s party who federal prosecutors say directed a conspiracy by Russian agent Maria Butina to influence American politics. The NRA said the money was dues for a “life membership” paid by Torshin, who years earlier had forged connections with NRA leaders.

After the United States sanctioned Torshin and other Russian officials in April, the NRA reiterated in response to a Senate inquiry that Torshin had made no other contributions and was “not a member of any major donor program.”

…

The House Intelligence Committee, soon to be chaired by California Rep. Adam Schiff, plans to scrutinize “two major threads” regarding the NRA, a committee aide said. Those include whether Torshin and Butina were part of efforts to establish a backchannel to the Kremlin, and “whether Russian money was flowing into the NRA for the purpose of supporting Trump’s election.”

Butina, who was charged in July with conspiracy by federal prosecutors, is about to finalize a plea deal and has agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. Investigators on Capitol Hill will be watching closely to see if she shares information contradicting any NRA claims in documents the group has provided to Congress, a second Senate source said.

As Mother Jones previously documented, Torshin cultivated ties with NRA leaders for years, attending six NRA annual conferences between 2011 and 2016. Now, additional photos we uncovered show Torshin hanging out with top NRA leaders both publicly and privately during the group’s annual conference held in Houston, Texas, in May 2013—including during lucrative fundraising events. Torshin posted the photos online around the time of the conference, though it is unclear who took them. They show Torshin at a gathering with NRA leaders in a hotel suite, at an NRA fundraising dinner and auction, and attending a ceremony for elite “Golden Ring of Freedom” donors giving at least $1 million, whose trappings include custom gold jackets and an NRA “liberty bell.”

…

Among other NRA leaders, Torshin is pictured in Houston with then-outgoing president and current board member David Keene, who traveled to Moscow later that fall and again in 2015 to attend events hosted by Butina’s own fledgling gun group, the Right to Bear Arms. Also appearing with Torshin in the Houston photos are incoming NRA president James W. Porter and then-NRA operations director Kyle Weaver, who worked under NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, as the Trace reported, including overseeing grassroots fundraising. Torshin also hobnobbed with top Ring of Freedom donor Joe Gregory and former Republican House Majority Leader and longtime NRA ally Tom DeLay.

dragonfly9 · December 12, 2018, 10:44pm

We’re getting a lot of these recaps…which synthesize the known facts and implications for these other players. We just want to know how this whole dragnet may go down…Read on.

The pace of developments shows no sign of slowing, either. Thursday apparently will see a guilty plea from alleged Russian spy Maria Butina, whose role in the 2016 election and ties to gun-rights groups like the National Rifle Association remain perplexing.

CNN’s John Berman has described it as the “12 days of Mueller.” The filings thus far, taken together, have clarified where Mueller is heading, and appear to help delineate who is likely on the special counsel’s “naughty list” this holiday season. The past two weeks of rapid-fire filings, court appearances, and news reports show several people and entities potentially in Mueller’s sights.

Here are the reasons you should be concerned if you’re:

Jared Kushner

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s original plea deal made clear that he called Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the direction of a “very senior” transition official, which media reports have identified as presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. Subsequent court filings have made clear that Flynn’s early cooperation encouraged others to cooperate as well. That likely includes at least K.T. McFarland, another national security aide, whose memory reportedly evolved after Flynn’s plea. Her revised memory likely also ratchets up the scrutiny of Kushner’s role on the campaign, where he was in the room for the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, and the transition, where he reportedly tried to create a communications backchannel with Russia and met with the head of the Russian development bank, Sergei Gorkov. Mueller has outlined in recent court filings his view that “senior government leaders should be held to the highest standards,” which sounds like an as-yet-unfired warning shot against other “senior government leaders.” Kushner, as a senior White House adviser, now fits that bill.

Donald Trump, Jr.

Michael Cohen’s plea agreement never mentions the presidential son by name, but it potentially implicates Don Jr. in at least two critical areas. First, vis-à-vis the Trump Tower Moscow deal, Cohen says he kept the Trump Organization and family members up to date on the conversations with Russia, which appears to undercut Don Jr.’s testimony to Congress that he didn’t know much about the proposed development and, besides, the deal never went very far anyway. Cohen, and thus the special counsel, appears to possess evidence that both halves of that dismissal were false. With the Cohen plea agreement 10 days ago, Mueller has made clear that he considers lying to Congress within his purview.

Second, and more intriguing, is how Cohen discusses the November 2015 approach by a Russian intermediary offering “political synergy” with the campaign. One of the most confounding puzzle pieces of the investigation remains publicist Rob Goldstone’s email initiating the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, at which Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with Russians who had promised to help the campaign. Goldstone’s email said, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” We’ve never known what “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” meant specifically, but the way Goldstone phrased it seems to imply that such help wouldn’t come as a surprise to Don Jr. The Cohen plea agreement now lays the groundwork that such help might have been quite well known inside Trumpworld, given that 2015 overture. The offer of “political synergy,” a synonym that sounds a lot like “collusion” or “conspiracy,” makes it much harder to imagine a naive acceptance of the Russian help come June 2016.

President Donald Trump aka Individual-1

While the president tried to brush off recent developments as “peanut stuff” Tuesday night, the potential criminal liability focused on the White House seems to grow with nearly every court filing. Prosecutors have now made clear their belief that the president himself, aka “Individual-1,” directed Michael Cohen to commit campaign finance violations, a felony. Given Cohen’s general slipperiness in court, they’re almost certainly basing that allegation on precise documentary evidence, potentially even the covert recordings that Cohen liked to make. On Wednesday, SDNY reached a deal with National Enquirer publisher AMI that explicitly states that the Cohen payments were intended to prevent a story about Trump’s alleged affair with Karen McDougal from “influencing the election.”

The court filings contain growing signs, too, that Mueller could be building not just a case around conspiracy during the 2016 campaign, but also about “expansive obstruction.” A case like that could include the possible coordination of lies following Russia revelations, such as Cohen’s in front of Congress. A specific line from the special counsel’s filing in Cohen’s case also jumps out: “By publicly presenting this false narrative, the defendant deliberately shifted the timeline of what had occurred in hopes of limiting the investigations into possible Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.” It’s not hard to imagine that same line cut-and-pasted into a future obstruction case regarding Donald Trump’s personal handling of a false narrative put out by the White House after reports first surfaced of the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower. Maybe the firing of FBI director James Comey—which has seemed central to any obstruction investigation—will ultimately end up just part of a larger, longer, more coordinated attempt to mislead and misdirect attention around the Russia investigation. After all, there’s historical precedent for this: Part of the Watergate articles of impeachment charged Richard Nixon with “making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States.”

The Trump Organization

There are increasing signs that the Trump Organization—the family business built around the Trump brand—might be in its crosshairs. Corporate malfeasance expert Kurt Eichenwald, who literally wrote the book on Enron, points out how closely the Trump Organization appears to be implicated in Cohen’s hush money payments, and the apparently narrow circle of people who could have participated in them. Cohen’s plea deal also alleges that the Trump Organization’s business was closely tied into the Trump Tower Moscow project; BuzzFeed broke word that the company had floated the idea of offering the $50 million penthouse to Putin himself. It’s been known, too, for some time that Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg has been cooperating with investigators. Between him and Cohen—and Cohen’s voluminous seized records—a clear trail may appear for prosecutors to follow.

Jerome Corsi and Associates

The alleged criminal liability of conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi has already been laid out in the aborted plea agreement that he leaked after the deal with Mueller’s office fell apart.

Michael Cohen

Even after Wednesday’s prison sentence, which settles the nine (nine!) felonies he has currently pleaded guilty to, there’s some reason to believe that Cohen might not be out of the woods. The Southern District of New York in its sentencing filing made clear its unhappiness that Cohen didn’t fully cooperate, providing a full and complete list of the crimes he’d participated in over the years. As they wrote, “Cohen repeatedly declined to provide full information about the scope of any additional criminal conduct in which he may have engaged or had knowledge.”

Business partners of Michael Flynn

Given that the court filings reference Flynn’s business work—not the Trump campaign—and that part of Flynn’s plea agreement focused on his plotting with the Turkish government, it appears one of the undisclosed criminal investigations he has helped with involves those interactions.

Konstanin Kilimnik

The Ukrainian businessman who served as Paul Manafort’s onetime business partner—and alleged Russian intelligence asset—is all over the Manafort court filings in a way that makes clear the special counsel has a unique, focused interest in him and his role in the campaign. He’s already been implicated in Manafort’s alleged witness tampering scheme, but there’s no reason to think Mueller is done with him. Franklin Foer, who has written the most in-depth coverage of Manafort’s world, says Kilimnik’s appearance in the new documents “foreshadow[s] an ominous return.”

Alexander Torshin

The Russian politician and banker has been linked in court documents to Maria Butina, the alleged spy likely to plead guilty on Thursday. Torshin appeared to “handle” Butina, building ties to the NRA; her guilty plea will likely shed additional light on Torshin’s role, particularly if she provides active cooperation with investigators.

dragonfly9 · December 13, 2018, 12:51am

Won’t that be an interesting discussion…#FormerLawyerSeekingRedemption

Michael Cohen, the former lawyer and fixer for President Donald Trump, is willing to reveal publicly what he knows about his former client once Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is complete and findings are released, Cohen’s lawyer said Wednesday.

“There will come a time after Mr. Mueller is done with his work that Michael Cohen will be sitting in front of a microphone before a congressional committee and what he has to say about the truth will be judged by the members of Congress listening and then will be up to people to decide whether he has got the facts or not,” Cohen attorney and spokesman Lanny Davis said in an interview on Bloomberg Radio’s “Sound On.”

Cohen, who was sentenced today to three years in prison, expects to testify about what he knows in front of Congress at some point, said Davis, who was unwilling to detail what Cohen knows about Trump and Russian election meddling.

The special counsel’s team interviewed Cohen for about 70 hours, but little is known about what he shared. Cohen has admitted to lying to Congress and Mueller’s investigators about the timing of a proposed Trump tower in Moscow and Trump’s involvement in the project. Davis said that false testimony was shared with the White House before Cohen submitted it to Congress and it is possible Trump was aware at the time that Cohen would make false statements.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/cohen-will-talk-after-mueller-probe-is-complete-lawyer-says

dragonfly9 · December 13, 2018, 1:52am

He is #1 in my book.

Keaton_James · December 13, 2018, 6:46am

Lanny Davis, an attorney representing Cohen in his ongoing legal battles with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, told Bloomberg Radio’s “Sound On" that while Trump did not direct Cohen specifically to lie to Congress, he knew his lawyer’s plans and did not direct him to tell the truth.

"Mr. Trump and the White House knew that Michael Cohen would be testifying falsely to Congress and did not tell him not to," Davis told Bloomberg News.

Davis is saying Trump knew ahead of time that Cohen would lie to Congress on his behalf. He did nothing to stop it. And afterwards, he continued to keep Cohen’s crime of lying to Congress a secret.

I’m not sure here – and maybe someone with a legal background can weigh in – but if this is true, does it make Trump an accessory to Cohen’s crime of lying to Congress? – in the same way that it would make me an accessory to a crime if I knew a friend was going to rob a bank and I did nothing about it and then after he robbed the bank, I continued to keep the crime a secret.

That’s the full extent of my legal expertise here based on watching 127 episodes of “Law & Order.”

dragonfly9 · December 13, 2018, 2:56pm

No real legal experience but worked as paralegal briefly …BUT my analytic side recalls that this could be considered ‘witness tampering’ on T’s part, and therefore obstruction of justice.

And haven’t they said, that many of the T n’ Co people who went before the Senate and Congressional Intel groups all lied on paper, and in front of Congress, as if to get their story straight - on whether Flynn had indeed spoken to Kislyak to offer repeal of sanctions, (KT McFarlane, Kushner, Junior…) and Mueller essentially knew this was a lie, and sort of has them in a big one. It was T that held out the pardon power to set this up.

This also is considered ‘witness tampering’ and obstruction of justice because ultimately a pardon would be held out to save them in the end.

They definitely have T on this obstruction of justice.

It was Cohen who did not give a straight story right off the bat, because it was felt T was going to pardon him. When T started shaming Cohen in public, Cohen had a ‘come to Jesus’ moment and decided to be the patriot and save his family. Cohen was never given a plea as a cooperating witness because he lied at first (for T) and then walked that back.

Cohen has still not given all he knows on a LOT of subjects, one of them being, did he indeed travel to Prague to negotiate or pay Russian operatives on the hacking. This was at a time when Manafort had to leave the campaign quickly when it was discovered he was paid royally by the Ukrainian leader on paperwork found in the rubble (my condensed version of it.) If you follow this Steele Memo version of it, Cohen did act as an emissary for this treasonous crime.

This is my version of it…legal or not @Keaton_James

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article208870264.html

anon95374541 · December 13, 2018, 5:32pm

US vs Mariia Butina Plea agreement doc

It would appear as though she was reporting or intending to report directly to the Russian President.

anon95374541 · December 13, 2018, 5:53pm

It would appear that Alexander Torshin is the Russian Offical in this plea agreement.

As part of her plea, Butina admitted seeking to establish and use “unofficial lines of communication with Americans having influence over U.S. politics” for the benefit of the Russian government, through a person fitting the description of sanctioned Russian central banker Alexander Torshin, prosecutor Erik Kenerson said.

anon95374541 · December 13, 2018, 5:55pm

NRA members also received her invitation to visit Moscow and meet with high-ranking Russian politicians. Torshin and “US Person 1”, whom CNN identified as Butina’s boyfriend Paul Erickson, a GOP political operative, helped her prepare for the trip. After the trip in December 2015, she said to her Russian backer, “We should let them express their gratitude now, we will put pressure on them quietly later.”

anon95374541 · December 13, 2018, 6:01pm

If prosecutors bring the charges named in the letter, Erickson would be the first American embroiled in the 2016 Russia investigation charged under a statute that Justice Department lawyers describe as “espionage-lite.”

“Charging an American under 951 in the context of the Russia investigation is especially serious because that statute is generally reserved for espionage-like cases, such as intelligence-gathering on behalf of a foreign government,” said Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department attorney who now teaches at the New York University School of Law.

anon95374541 · December 13, 2018, 8:59pm

Re-Up
Good thing @matt put together an archive.

A conservative operative offered the Trump campaign a “Kremlin Connect” by using an NRA convention to make “first contact.” Russia, Paul Erickson wrote, was “quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S.” (New York Times)

Keaton_James · December 13, 2018, 10:00pm

…the Special Counsel’s Office is ready to outline what cooperating witnesses have told them about foreigners’ plans to help Trump win the presidency. Two sources with knowledge of the probe said Mueller’s team has for months discussed the possibility of issuing new charges on this side of the investigation.

“If this is going to be unveiled, this would be like the surfacing of the submarine but on the other plank [sic – flank?] which we haven’t seen,” said Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney. “I guess what Mueller has to date has turned out to be pretty rich and detailed and more than we anticipated. This could turn out to be a rich part of the overall story.”…

Flynn was also involved in conversations with representatives and influential individuals from other foreign governments, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel—encounters The Daily Beast has reported over the last several months. Flynn’s cooperation with Mueller could bring new details about the scope of the special counsel’s probe into how individuals from those countries offered not only to help Trump win the presidential election, but also how they sought to influence foreign policy in the early days of the administration.

Maybe now we’ll find out why Trump is so eager to help Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman, cover up his role in the heinous torture and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.

dragonfly9 · December 13, 2018, 10:13pm

Who knows where the best legal angle to get T out will be…but this Campaign Finance issue does have a lot of back up corroboration.

Regardless if T goes on Fox News and plays it back…playing to his base of course, this is incriminating information **.

The “statement of admitted facts” says that AMI admitted making a $150,000 payment “in concert with the campaign,” and says that Pecker, Cohen and “at least one other member of the campaign” were in the meeting. According to a person familiar with the matter, the “other member” was Trump.

Trump was first identified as attending the meeting by The Wall Street Journal.

Donald Trump Played Central Role in Hush Payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal
Federal prosecutors have gathered evidence of president’s participation in transactions that violated campaign-finance laws

**

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g4cAskc-Jk

dragonfly9 · December 14, 2018, 3:16am

Senate Intel Committee co-chairs Sen Burr and Sen Warner are prepared to call in those witnesses who have been indicted, provided of course it is ok with Mueller.
This Committee has stood their ground as far as being a fair bi-partisan group.

Let’s do some more digging then.

Now that President Donald Trump’s former “fixer,” Michael Cohen, has been sentenced to prison, leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence committees are preparing to haul him back before Congress before he begins serving time.

He’s not the only one.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is also seeking to speak to other officials in Trump’s orbit who have been charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his former deputy Rick Gates and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, according to committee leaders and sources familiar with the probe.

“I think it’s safe to say if they were indicted, they were on our list,” Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, told CNN. “We potentially will talk to a lot of folks.”

dragonfly9 · December 14, 2018, 3:38am

George Conway strikes again (KellyAnne’s other half)

George Conway
gtconway3d

Given that Trump has repeatedly lied about the Daniels and McDougal payments—and given that he lies about virtually everything else, to the point that his own former personal lawyer described him as a “f****ing liar”—why should we take his word over that of federal prosecutors?
7:09 PM - 13 Dec 2018

Keaton_James · December 14, 2018, 6:40pm

Special counsel Robert Mueller appeared to be locked in a subpoena battle with a recalcitrant witness Friday in a sealed federal appeals courtroom, the latest development in a mystery case that has piqued the curiosity of Mueller-obsessives and scoop-hungry journalists.

Oral arguments in the highly secretive fight played out behind closed doors under tight security. Officials at the U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C. even took the extraordinary measure of shutting down to the public the entire fifth floor, where the hearing was taking place.

More than a dozen reporters who had been staked out in the hallway adjacent to the courtroom — in the hopes of eyeballing attorneys for Mueller or the mystery appellant’s lawyers — were kicked off the floor and lost their best chance to spot anyone involved in the months-long legal dispute as they were entering or exiting the chambers.

Journalists relocated to other stakeout spots, but few new details emerged after several hours of waiting.

dragonfly9 · December 14, 2018, 7:36pm

Butina’s connection to the NRA was solidified by a signed agreement, pulling in both into the den of legal trouble.

Maria Butina Claimed to Have a “Signed Cooperation Agreement” With the National Rifle Association – Mother Jones

Confessed Russian agent Maria Butina claimed more than five years ago that her gun rights group had entered into a “signed cooperation agreement” with the National Rifle Association, according to a contemporaneous account of a talk Butina gave to an Israeli organization.

Butina, who pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday for her role in a wide-ranging conspiracy to covertly influence American politics, founded the Right to Bear Arms in Moscow in 2010 with support from high-ranking Russian official Alexander Torshin. Prosecutors detailed how Butina used her profile as a gun rights advocate to build a relationship with NRA officials and other influential political figures in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Keaton_James · December 14, 2018, 8:13pm

This is a very big deal because it reveals that David Pecker’s value as a cooperating witness may be far greater than previously known.

A couple days ago the news broke that Pecker, Trump’s long-time friend who publishes the National Enquirer, has become a cooperating witness for prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. (BTW, although Pecker was flipped by the SDNY, I’m posting this in the Mueller thread because I’m confident that Mueller will now also be interviewing this cooperating witness – if he hasn’t already.)

The focus so far has been on Pecker’s corroboration of Michael Cohen’s testimony regarding the hush money payments made by Cohen, allegedly at Trump’s direction and allegedly done so with Trump’s full knowledge that the payments were a violation of campaign finance laws (this is one of the crimes for which Cohen himself will be serving prison time). So Pecker’s cooperation is already big news. However, this breaking story from The Daily Beast shows that Pecker may have knowledge that is far more damaging to the Trump administration and Jared Kushner in particular. No specific allegations have been made. However, the fact that Pecker was in close contact with Kushner during the early days of Trump’s presidency and is now spilling everything he knows, has got to be devastating news for Kushner and the Administration.

Another angle here is that we now have reason to believe that Mueller is expanding his investigation into the shady (to say the least) ties between Trump and the Middle East. Kushner is Trump’s point man there and Pecker has close ties there as well, especially with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, accused of ordering the murder of Jamal Kashoogi – Pecker even facilitated a massive publicity blitz for the prince.

Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was handed a task considered critical to the president’s operations. In addition to serving as a senior adviser in the White House, he would also be playing the role of the main conduit between Trump and his friend David Pecker, the National Enquirer publisher and chief executive of AMI, who prosecutors said on Wednesday admitted to making a $150,000 hush-money payment “in concert with” the Trump campaign.

During the early months of the Trump era, Kushner performed the task admirably, discussing with Pecker various issues over the phone, including everything from international relations to media gossip, according to four sources familiar with the situation. Pecker, for his part, bragged to people that he was speaking to the president’s son-in-law and, more generally, about the level of access he had to the upper echelons of the West Wing, two sources with knowledge of the relationship recounted…

Pecker, after all, was no bit player. He has been a valuable asset within Trump’s orbit, at least until federal investigators came knocking. His ties to Trump began well before the president was elected to office. But before Kushner was his main conduit, that role was played by Michael Cohen, the president’s former attorney and fixer…

Pecker had banked on Cohen remaining in Trump’s political inner sanctum after the election. But during the presidential transition, it became clear that Trump’s then-fixer wouldn’t be landing a plum job in the administration…

But Cohen’s slow-burning troubles and exile from Trumpworld nevertheless meant that Pecker needed a new point person in the White House. And according to four sources, he settled on Kushner.

It was an easy choice, given that the two men had a pre-existing relationship. Two people with direct knowledge of their acquaintance say that Kushner and Pecker got to know each other years before Trump’s election, when Pecker was thinking about forging a business relationship with Kushner, who at the time owned The New York Observer…

AMI [Pecker’s media company], like Kushner, cozied up to the despotic Saudi government, which included the production of a glossy propaganda magazine boosting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

In July 2017 … Pecker visited both Trump and Kushner at the White House, bringing along with him Kacy Grine, a French businessman with ties to the Saudi business elite and royal family, as The New York Times reported early this year…

“This is beyond the scope of David Pecker’s collusion or cooperation in snuffing out bad stories,” said Jerry George, a former Enquirer Los Angeles bureau chief and assistant managing editor of all the AMI titles. “It goes to the core of Trumpworld."