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

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#150

Just announced…Mueller’s report is close to being ready.

:boom::boom::boom:

The Washington Post: Mueller investigation is ‘close to being completed,’ acting attorney general says
Mueller investigation is ‘close to being completed,’ acting attorney general says

Acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker said Monday that he has been “fully briefed” on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election and that, “right now, the investigation is close to being completed.”
This is a developing story. It will be updated.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/mueller-investigation-is-close-to-being-completed-acting-attorney-general-says/2019/01/28/6bcf09b4-2349-11e9-81fd-b7b05d5bed90_story.html?utm_term=.bca0b95b7bc1

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#151

More evidence to explore…what could be on the electronics of Roger Stone. Takes some time to get at all of it, so the question of the end of Mueller’s investigation may be premature.

The clear implication is that any truly incriminating communications would have been conducted in encrypted form — and thus could be obtained only directly from Mr. Stone’s own phones and laptops. And while Mr. Stone likely has limited value as a cooperating witness — it’s hard to put someone on the stand after charging them with lying to obstruct justice — the charges against him provide leverage in the event his cooperation is needed to unlock those devices by supplying a cryptographic passphrase.

Of course, Mr. Mueller is likely interested in his communications with Trump campaign officials, but the detailed charges filed against the Russian hackers alleged to have broken into the Democratic National Committee’s servers also show the special counsel’s keen interest in Mr. Stone’s communications with the hacker “Guccifer 2.0,” an identity said to have been used as a front for the Russian intruders. By Mr. Stone’s own admission, he had a brief exchange with “Guccifer” via private Twitter messages. On Mr. Stone’s account, Guccifer enthusiastically offered his assistance — at the same time we now know Mr. Stone was vigorously pursuing advance knowledge of what other embarrassing material stolen from Mr. Trump’s opponents might soon be released — and Mr. Stone failed to even dignify the offer with a reply. With no easy way of getting hold of “Guccifer’s” cellphone, searching Mr. Stone’s devices might be the only reliable way for the special counsel to discover whether the conversation in fact continued on a more “secure line.”

Yet if Mr. Mueller is indeed less interested in Mr. Stone than the potential evidence on his phones and computers, the conventional wisdom that the special counsel probe is wrapping up — and could issue a final report as soon as next month — seems awfully implausible. Digital forensics takes time, and a single device could easily hold many thousands of messages to sift through. And if this really is the first time Mr. Mueller’s office is seeing the most sensitive communications from a key figure like Mr. Stone, it’s likely they’ll come away with new leads to follow and new questions to pose to other witnesses.

We may ultimately look back on Mr. Stone’s arrest not as the beginning of the special counsel’s endgame, but the point when the investigation began to really heat up

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#152

If this is true, it’s hard to imagine the investigation is “close to being completed.”

A defense attorney for Andrew Miller, who’s fighting a subpoena from Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, learned Monday afternoon that the special counsel still wants witness testimony for a federal grand jury.

Paul Kamenar, the defense attorney, says the assertion from Mueller’s team made clear to him that Mueller and the Justice Department are considering an additional indictment of Roger Stone or have plans to charge others.

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#153

Anyone who lied before Congress last year is now looking at the very real possibility of being indicted. Trump Jr. is a case in point as Senator Blumenthal of the Senate Judiciary Committee makes abundantly clear (see 6:35).

And here Congressman Mike Quigley of the House Judiciary Committee calls out Erik Prince and Trump Jr. – he’s careful with his language, but there’s no doubt he is convinced they both lied while testifying (see 4:00).

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#154

Here’s a succinct snapshot of the investigations involving Trump. Sometimes my mind boggles with all the investigative threads I’m trying to keep track of – a piece like this helps clear my head as it maps out the big picture clearly and simply.

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#155

The emails between Felix Sater and Michael Cohen are so damning…I keep looking for the most consequential evidence that nails T…and while these are behind-the-scenes chattering, these two are obviously linked to T, and it seems this could be ‘it.’

The NYT’s was on this story a couple of years ago.

The associate, Felix Sater, wrote a series of emails to Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, in which he boasted about his ties to Mr. Putin. He predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would highlight Mr. Trump’s savvy negotiating skills and be a political boon to his candidacy.

“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

and the Buzzfeed drop of the actual emails (see WTF entry -Day 733 )

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#156

Breaking…

The document coming for a closed-door hearing on what Manafort had lied about…here are some of the keys to where investigation is going.

A lot of corroborating information from cooperating witness, Rick Gates is providing more about collusion, obstruction…Gate is dishing on a LOT of things that Manafort had done, and letting be known that there is polling data.

There is mention of Kilimnik and a quid pro quo scenario for trading influence for sanctions removial.

Wait for further analysis…it is a LONG document.

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#157

143 pages - yikes! I’m grateful for our free press – at this moment there are surely a host of highly qualified eyes doing their best to peer behind the redactions. They will soon be reporting their analyses to us. Rachel Maddow’s show tonight should be most intriguing! :mag: :eyes:

BTW, I would have loved to be the proverbial fly on the wall during the wholly redacted bench discussion on p. 94.

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#158

HA! yes…all veeeeeerrrry mysterious, isn’t it.

Yes, wait for some legal-eagles to come through…but I do like the cat-and-mouse aspect of it, with the Judge asking Manafort’s lawyers ever so tactful with Mr. Westling (Manafort’s lawyer…)

pg 48 re: Manafort lying about Kilimnik

Judge: Well, and I think I detailed, at one hearing or another, all the various ways, if he made false statements, it could bear on sentencing.

Uh, yes it would…

and then Mueller’s group…pg 50 in a hammerhead way…

Mr. Weissman: The other is that if you look at what the defendant said, this is not the defendant saying - you know, I have to just intuit what is in his head, and, you know, he got it wrong… In one instance he was, like: Okay, yes. And now I remember, having gone through it with counsel, why is it that I believed he knew.

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#159

Profile on Mueller from USA Today -

We know that Mueller does not seek the limelight or seek anyone’s approval. His diligence, lack of ego, and his nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic may make some feel disappointed once the Russian Investigation is finalized that Mueller may not make a statement. Pundits are saying that his indictments do tell the story, and to read those for the direction of the probe.

“A public narrative has built an expectation that the special counsel will explain his conclusions, but I think that expectation may be seriously misplaced,” said John Pistole, Mueller’s longtime top deputy at the FBI. "That’s not what the rules provide, and I really don’t see him straying from the mission. That’s not who he is."

…

People who know Mueller say that unless his bosses tried to derail his work, they would be surprised if the former FBI director did more than issue a brief statement indicating that a report had been submitted to the attorney general before quietly departing.

Just as the FBI, maligned in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was transformed into his own image as a meticulous investigator, the Russia investigation has come to embody Mueller’s unflagging, buttoned-up personality.

“He’s not a warm and lovable guy,” Swecker said. “If you work for him, you are never going to feel appreciated. Things move too fast for that. He believes that you signed up to do a job. And it’s your mission to get it done. He doesn’t like drama.”

Mueller’s team embraced that approach.

His prosecutors have brought charges against 34 people and three companies, including Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort; his first national security adviser, Mike Flynn; and his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Outside of court filings, prosecutors have had nothing to say about any of them.

When the team won a jury verdict after a three-week trial against Manafort, prosecutors retreated to their offices rather than appear at a clutch of microphones outside the courthouse. Asked by email if they had any comment, Mueller’s spokesman responded with a single word:

“Nope."

Pistole, who served for six years as Mueller’s deputy at the FBI, describes his former boss as “totally apolitical,” with an unmatched work ethic.

“For him, it was about what is right for the country,” Pistole said. “Nothing else.”

…

Mueller exited the FBI in 2013 as the longest-serving director since J. Edgar Hoover – amassing a legacy best defined by a grind-it-out style that kept the FBI intact.

Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of Homeland Security, described Mueller in an interview with USA TODAY marking the FBI chief’s departure as “the most transformative director in the history of the FBI since Hoover.’’

"And I mean that in a good way," Chertoff said.

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#160

In Manafort’s closed hearing last Monday, the 143 pgs of commentary between Manafort’s lawyers and the Mueller lawyers, particularly Andrew Weissmann contained more clues as to where the investigation is going.

Seems that Weissmann is leaving the door open on whether election meddling (conspiracy to alter the election) did take place with any of T’s people and a foreign entity - Russia and/or Assange.

All the back and forth between Manafort and Kilimnik and all the lies that Manafort is making makes for a very questionable defense. Weissmann, who is one of the most aggressive lawyers that Mueller has worked with is taking them to task for what they are stating and what those lies mean.

This is getting some airtime. Ari Melber’s done a segment on it today on The Beat, discussing Andrew’s work with Mueller on Enron, and his tactics as has Nicolle Wallace on her Deadline White House today.

Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, a Republican who is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CBS News on Thursday that, based on the evidence they have seen so far, the committee’s investigators “don’t have anything that would suggest there was collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia.”

But Mr. Weissmann’s remarks seem to suggest that for the special counsel, at least, that avenue of inquiry is still alive.

…

The transcript suggests that Mr. Manafort claims that he wanted only public data transferred. But Mr. Weissmann told the judge that the question of whether any American, wittingly or unwittingly, engaged with Russians who were interfering in the election relates to “the core” of the special counsel’s inquiry.

…

But Judge Amy Berman Jackson seemed to agree with prosecutors that whether Mr. Manafort lied about his contacts with Mr. Kilimnik was important, saying at one point, “I am, actually, particularly concerned about this particular alleged false statement.”

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.”

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#161

My brain hurt after reading this. Without being able to sort out all the implications, my main take away is that Mueller is assuredly hot on the trail of connections between Trumpworld and foreign entities that attacked our 2016 election. The company profiled here, Salix Services, is yet another pin in Mueller’s investigation board with strings of yarn connecting it to Psy Group (alleged to have interfered in our election) and Joel Zamel (the company’s supposed owner who has links to Israeli intelligence) and George Nader (an international influence-peddler representing Saudi Arabia and U.A.E., who, for some mysterious reason, paid Zamel $2 million after the election and is now a cooperating witness in the Mueller Probe). Phew!

Not mentioned in this article is Nader’s business partner, Eliott Broidy, a self-confessed financial criminal who was a fund raising vice-chair for Trump’s campaign, as well as a Republican National Committee deputy finance chairman, as well as vice-chair of Trump’s Inaugural Committee – and who was engaged in many other nefarious Trump-related activities. :moneybag:

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#162

Good find and deciphering @Keaton_James …we’ve all been tasked to become spy masters in the game of who met with whom, why, and why so many weirdly configured connections.

Interesting wrinkle within that article…

Rule #1 in setting up OPS (read about from C Steele’s Dossier) is ALWAYS SET UP PLAUSABLE DENIABILITY.
By setting up how the company is layered into Trusts and just out of the way of too much financial scrutiny, the 'plausible deniability" is there.

Rule #2 (mine) - Does it pass the smell test???
NO, not at all.

… documents reviewed by The Daily Beast and interviews with individuals familiar with Psy Group’s financial structure lay bare a complex web of companies with connections to Zamel that point to Salix.

“It’s how Joel holds his shares,” one former Psy Group employee told The Daily Beast. “They set up trusts and provide nominee services to… shield beneficial owners from their holdings. It’s completely legal.”

Psy Group, registered as Invop in Israel, has its ownership obscured by a series of offshore companies.

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#163

Breaking today -

Washington Post reports today that there was a secret meeting in NYC, in early August 2016, a couple months before the election with Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Kilimnik. The report says that this is where Polling Data was given to Kilimnik.
This could be the big bombshell that Burr is countering, which does smell like collusion or treason.

This could be a smoking gun or perhaps not.

The questions about it just keep cropping up though…Why would Russia need Polling data?

See Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word, MSNBC to look for transcript on it…

The two Americans met with an overseas guest, a longtime employee of their international consulting business who had flown to the United States for the gathering: a Russian political operative named Konstantin Kilimnik.

The Aug. 2, 2016, encounter between the senior Trump campaign officials and Kilimnik, who prosecutors allege has ties to Russian intelligence, has emerged in recent days as a potential fulcrum in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation.

It was at that meeting that prosecutors believe Manafort and Kilimnik may have exchanged key information relevant to Russia and Trump’s presidential bid. The encounter goes “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating,” prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told a federal judge in a sealed hearing last week.

…

During the hearing, the judge also appeared to allude to another possible interaction at the Havana Room gathering: a handoff by Manafort of internal polling data from Trump’s presidential campaign to his Russian associate.

Kilimnik, whom prosecutors have charged with working with Manafort to obstruct the investigation, did not respond to a request for comment.

In a 2017 statement to The Washington Post, he denied any connection to Russian intelligence. Kilimnik said the Grand Havana Room meeting had nothing to do with politics or the presidential campaign. Instead, he called the session a “private” visit, during which he and Manafort gossiped about “bills unpaid by our clients” and the political scene in Ukraine, where Manafort had worked as a political consultant for a decade before joining Trump’s campaign.

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#164

:fire: :fire_engine:

Special counsel Robert Mueller said in a new court filing that search warrants have uncovered communications that connect longtime GOP operative Roger Stone to "Guccifer 2.0 and with Organization 1,” which is widely believed to be WikiLeaks.

Mueller made the disclosure in a filing Friday arguing that Stone’s case is related to the one involving Russian military hackers who are alleged to have breached the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and personal account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

The communications were uncovered in search warrants executed on accounts in the investigation into Russian hackers, Mueller said.

Stone’s attorneys have objected to his case being labeled as “related” to the Russian hacking case, arguing that it should be randomly assigned to a new judge. …

“Several of those search warrants were executed on accounts that contained Stone’s communications with Guccifer 2.0 and with Organization 1,” the filing states. …

Last July’s indictment against the Russian hackers cited communications between Guccifer 2.0, who is identified as a Russian GRU officer, and “a person who was in regular contact with senior members” of Trump’s campaign. Stone has acknowledged that he is likely the person referred to in the indictment.

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#165

Great development…seeing that Stone is dancing around whether he did or did not have discussions with wikileaks is important.

Natasha Bertand of Atlanta wrote this :point_down: last year…Feb 2018 about the same thing…we knew he’s been communicating. But what was said is not known or was there more.

The correspondence raises questions about whether Stone—who served as Trump’s lobbyist in Washington in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and had been encouraging him to run for president for over a decade—has kept secret any interactions that may be of interest to congressional investigators examining Russia’s election interference.

Stone also exchanged private Twitter messages in August and September of 2016 with a user known as Guccifer 2.0. Guccifer claimed in a posting on their Wordpress site to have “penetrated Hillary Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers,” but the self-described hacker was later characterized by U.S. officials as a front for Russian military intelligence. Stone only published that exchange after it was revealed by The Smoking Gun, a website that publishes mugshots and other public documents.

Here’s her response today as well…

Thanks for pointing this out @Keaton_James! I agree we should prepare for :fire: and as with all these disclosures, it seems to continue to emit smoke, which leads up to fire and alarm bells…see :fire_engine:

And Roger’s been gagged…so no commentary from his mouth to spin it. A bit of poetic justice I’d say! :statue_of_liberty:

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#166

Investigation is looking at Brittany Kaiser, a director at Cambridge Analytica and Mueller subpoena’s her. I had not realized that Sam Patten worked for Cambridge Analytica as well, and he’s already been indicted (and subpoenaed) because he created a strawman set up to get an Oligarch into the Inauguration.

These breadcrumbs along the way that we’re getting now: polling data to Kliminik/Deripaska; confirmed Wikileaks communiques with Roger Stone; and checking into the backgrounds/actions of Cambridge Analytica sets up a conspiratorial/collusion-ary set of facts.

Wait, and “a new Netflix documentary, The Great Hack,” too - coming soon to Netflix, which unveiled this…

Waiting for shoes to drop, but the trail has never gone cold for Mueller methinks.

We are closer, ever closer. :mag:

A director of the controversial data company Cambridge Analytica, who appeared with Arron Banks at the launch of the Leave.EU campaign, has been subpoenaed by the US investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

A spokesman for Brittany Kaiser, former business development director for Cambridge Analytica – which collapsed after the Observer revealed details of its misuse of Facebook data – confirmed that she had been subpoenaed by special counsel Robert Mueller, and was cooperating fully with his investigation.

He added that she was assisting other US congressional and legal investigations into the company’s activities and had voluntarily turned over documents and data.

…

Kaiser, who gave evidence to the UK parliament last April in which she claimed Cambridge Analytica had carried out in-depth work for Leave.EU, is the second individual connected to the firm subpoenaed by the special counsel.

In August, Sam Patten, a US political consultant who had worked for Cambridge Analytica on campaigns in the US and abroad, struck a plea deal with Mueller after admitting he had failed to register as a foreign agent for a Ukrainian oligarch.

He became a subject of the special counsel’s inquiry because of work done with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, in Ukraine. He had also set up a business with Konstantin Kilimnik, a key figure who Mueller has alleged has ties to Russian intelligence and who is facing charges of obstruction of justice. In a 2017 statement to the Washington Post, Kilimnik denied any connection to intelligence services. Kaiser, however, is the first person connected directly to both the Brexit and Trump campaigns known to have been questioned by Mueller.

The news came to light in a new Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, which premiered at the Sundance film festival last month and is expected to be released later this spring. Film-makers followed Kaiser for months after she approached the Guardian, including moments after she received the subpoena. She claims the summons came after the Guardian revealed she had visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while still a Cambridge Analytica employee in February 2017, three months after the US election.

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#167

Bertrand: Shifting gears now to the special-counsel investigation, legal experts have often observed that Mueller seems to be investigating Trump and his campaign like he would a Mafia family. You spent a decade going after the Russian mob in New York. Do you think, given what we’ve seen from Mueller so far, that Trump is still a target?

McCabe: There are a lot of patterns in what Director Mueller is doing that are very familiar to me. Those patterns of targeting and investigating people who may have had more of a hands-on role, albeit at a lower level, and using those investigations to develop information and informants and cooperators—I mean, it is really the classic enterprise investigation that Director Mueller and his team have pursued. So do I think the case into Trump is open or closed? There’s absolutely no reason for me to believe that it’s closed. And you can certainly look at what Mueller’s done so far to say he is doing exactly what we would do with the investigation of a cartel or an organized-crime family.

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#168

Big breaking news today…

A lot of focus over time of T’s need to get Sessions out, get others out…

and here’s an example to get a better lawyer presiding in SDNY for Cohen’s case.

Another attorney general takes office

As the prosecutors closed in, Mr. Trump felt a more urgent need to gain control of the investigation.

He made the call to Mr. Whitaker to see if he could put Mr. Berman in charge of the New York investigation. The inquiry is run by Robert Khuzami, a career prosecutor who took over after Mr. Berman, whom Mr. Trump appointed, recused himself because of a routine conflict of interest.

What exactly Mr. Whitaker did after the call is unclear, but there is no evidence that he took any direct steps to intervene in the Manhattan investigation. He did, however, tell some associates at the Justice Department that the prosecutors in New York required “adult supervision.”

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#169

That’s Times story is a monster read! :clap:

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