WTF Community

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

General Discussion
,
#182

Thanks for excerpting various parts relevant to the jockying for getting the investigation covered. I am glad that Rosenstein above all did try to keep the FBI’s efforts (and by extension’s) Mueller’s interviews the main ones.

The Senate Intel committee had seemed like it was doing the work, and getting their investigation done. It made sense to stall the interviews in light of what Mueller had captured. The question becomes was the Senate Intel committee going to go the way of impeachment, given that the R’s rule the Senate.

Sen Burr (R party) had been non-partisan it seemed until he said “no collusion,” when we knew they hadn’t been able to get docs, and testimony.

And as far as the House Intel group, only Rep’s Schiff, Swalwell were fully on board with keeping the investigation above board.

Glad you were enlightened by the book…haven’t picked up a copy yet.

2 Likes
#183

Re: Rosenstein deputizing lawyers…I may have used the wrong words. I believe it is Rosenstein contacted lawyers/prosecutors in various divisions - 4 of them, to send the open investigations and/or potential indictments to different courts.
My understanding that these were 4 of the original 17 Mueller investigators/lawyers.

Nicolle Wallace mentioned this fact today as well. She emphasized it was Rosenstein who did this.

I am googling around, and will also look on Mueller She Wrote’s list of news sources to see if I can dig it up.

Thx for reminder…I was looking today for it, but haven’t found it yet!:mag:

2 Likes
#184

Burr sucks, I wasn’t surprised.

2 Likes
#185

I went looking today too. Maybe I should just DM AG on Twitter?

1 Like
#186

Am still looking for these 4 lawyers, and what I am coming up with is from the docket that Marcy Wheeler created Docket of Mueller’s legal work- this group of lawyers appears two times and they are prosecuting Michael Cohen and AMI. They are prosecutors for SDNY.

Rachel Maimin
Andrea Griswold
Thomas McKay
Nicolas Roos

They are not part of the original Mueller team, nor are any of the original Mueller team part of any bit of the legal team.

So by deduction, I am assuming that these are the 4 lawyers, that Rod Rosenstein deputized.

But for Mueller’s team…this group below, seems to be working on Jerome Corsi trial/plea and Roger Stone’s indictment.

Jeannie Rhee
Andrew Goldstein
Aaron Zelinsky
Rush Atkinson

For now can not find any Rod Rosenstein media stories on which lawyers he may have put into the ‘system,’ to keep working on investigations and litigation. I am going with this for now. I did leave a question on the Mueller She Wrote comments area, hoping to come up with more details.

The Mueller teams look like they work in specific areas, and then as we’ve said they can leave.

4 Likes
#187

I sent AG a DM. :crossed_fingers:

I ended up staring at those slick NYT charts too. :grin:

2 Likes
#188

Smooth!

I was thinking you were saying Query Twitter with DM AG…but Rosenstein’s title is DAG. But AG is her name…got it!

3 Likes
#189

Ha ha! Same here – I was thinking, boy, Pet’s got some chutzpah. :smile:

4 Likes
#190

Well you know what DAG would say about this, click for video :point_down:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4730919/rod-rosenstein-believing-media

4 Likes
#191

He is a ‘just the facts’ guy with a wide net for interpretation and always look for the name attached. She is more of a conspiracist methinks.

2 Likes
#192

I was thinking the same :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#193

New York is prepared to charge Manafort in the event he receives a presidential pardon from Trump.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-22/new-york-is-said-to-prep-manafort-charges-if-trump-pardons-him

New York state prosecutors have put together a criminal case against Paul Manafort that they could file quickly if the former chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign receives a presidential pardon.

New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is ready to file an array of tax and other charges against Manafort, according to two people familiar with the matter, something seen as an insurance policy should the president exercise his power to free the former aide. Skirting laws that protect defendants from being charged twice for the same offense has been one of Vance’s challenges.

—

Prosecutors in Vance’s office began investigating Manafort in 2017, months before Mueller charged him with conspiracy, failure to file reports of foreign bank accounts and failure to register as an agent of a foreign country, activities stemming from his earlier work for Ukraine. Mueller’s team followed up with more charges of bank fraud, filing false tax returns and failure to file reports of foreign bank accounts in early 2018.

At the state level, Vance is preparing an array of criminal charges. While their full extent isn’t clear, they would include evasion of New York taxes and violations of state laws requiring companies to keep accurate books and records, according to one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the investigation is confidential.

Much of the evidence against Manafort has emerged through Mueller’s prosecutions. But Vance’s office can’t cut and paste Mueller’s charges into a state indictment. It must avoid New York’s double jeopardy law, which provides protections for defendants even stronger than those guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

NYT confirms

5 Likes
#194

We knew this, but it’s good to hear it confirmed by Mueller. Another, alt-right, deep state, conspiracy theory goes pfffft…

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office is formally denying Roger Stone’s claims that journalists got early access to his indictment last month, allowing CNN to film the GOP operative’s arrest.

In a court filing Friday, Mueller prosecutors said Stone’s sealed indictment was ordered to be automatically unsealed upon Stone’s arrest on charges of lying to congressional investigators and intimidating a witness. In accordance with that order, Mueller’s office notified reporters of the indictment and posted it on the office’s website shortly after the FBI raided Stone’s South Florida home and took him into custody just after 6 a.m. on Jan. 25, prosecutors said.

“The government’s public release of the indictment shortly after the defendant’s arrest was consistent with the order sealing the indictment,” Mueller attorneys and lawyers from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington argued in their submission Friday…

The defense team also suggested that prosecutors gave reporters a heads-up about Stone’s arrest, potentially contributing to the presence of a reporter and a cameraman from CNN outside Stone’s home when the heavily armed FBI team showed up.

However, Mueller’s team told U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson it does not believe any journalists were informed in advance about the indictment.

“The Special Counsel’s Office is aware of no information indicating that reporters were given any advance knowledge of a possible indictment from the Special Counsel’s Office,” prosecutors wrote in a footnote to their Friday filing.

Prosecutors also noted that CNN has publicly denied having advance knowledge about Stone’s arrest, saying it decided to stake out Stone’s house because of various public clues that his arrest was imminent.

In other words, CNN was on the job. Thank you, CNN.

4 Likes
#195

Someone from DOJ put a stop to the notion that we’d (Barr) be getting the Mueller Report next week. OK, brakes on.

Special counsel Robert Mueller will not deliver a report to the attorney general next week, as was previously reported by multiple outlets, a senior Department of Justice official told NBC News on Friday.

4 Likes
#196

Read this interesting laying out of what the already submitted documents that Mueller has filed already about what we do know, and how the criminal activities overlap within the T compaign.

Maybe in lieu of a Manafort sentencing filing this is just the right amount of reassurance that Mueller’s got this.

Yes. Now. :joy:

America has been waiting for Mueller to present a document that ties all of this together — eager, in part, for evidence proving the president’s guilt, or exonerating him, on charges that he and his campaign worked with the Russians. As people have awaited the outcome, the slow accretion of malfeasance that Mueller has already uncovered has faded into background noise. It has allowed Trump to lump every new revelation into a big snowball labeled “no collusion,” parroting the same refrain as the snowball grows. Meanwhile his opponents, waiting for a smoking gun, are happy to keep looking forward as well.

There’s a lot that Mueller knows and which we don’t, certainly. But we know a lot more than we did when he was appointed.

…

It’s a broad description of criminal activity that overlaps at only one point: Involvement in the 2016 election.

It is absolutely true that little of the activity undertaken by the Americans on that list involved criminal activity directly related to the campaign. But Manafort’s and Gates’s involvement in the campaign meant they got looped into Mueller’s probe, to their detriment. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s involvement in the campaign led him to work on Trump’s transition team, about which he later lied to authorities. Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen lied to Congress about how far into the campaign his conversations about a project in Moscow had continued. Former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos lied about his contacts with Russians while serving on the campaign. Trump adviser Roger Stone lied about his interactions with people as he sought out a back channel to WikiLeaks — which was in the process of releasing documents allegedly stolen by the Russian nationals working for the country’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.

The Mueller report that is sitting in plain sight above does not show that Trump himself actively conspired with Russian actors to influence the election. It does show, though, that his campaign and campaign team were a locus of suspicious activity and suspicious actors.

That this network has been fleshed out slowly over the course of 16 months has made it easy to overlook what we’ve already learned. Mueller’s report is, to some significant degree, already out.

3 Likes
#197
#198

The Manafort Sentencing Memo was more than likely filed. The wait to see it is over the redactions, as a few had suggested.

From what I am hearing - Mueller’s group proposes redactions, they need to be approved by Defense and the Judge has the final say. Because some of the redactions from Manafort’s group got botched (inadvertently revealed), it is probable that this part of the making the Sentencing Memo public is being very carefully scrutinized.

The public will have to wait a little longer to read Paul Manafort’s sentencing memo from special counsel Robert Mueller.

The critical filing had a midnight Friday deadline set by the federal court, but the report was not publicly released.

It is possible prosecutors have sent the document to Judge Amy Berman Jackson under seal with proposed redactions. It is up to Jackson to determine what happens next.

The memorandum is the last major requisite court filing in Mueller’s longest running case, a sprawling prosecution of the former Trump campaign manager that led investigators to gather exhaustive information about his hidden Cypriot bank accounts, Ukrainian political efforts in Europe and the US and into Manafort’s time on the 2016 presidential campaign.

A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment about the situation Friday, and a spokesperson for the court could not be reached.

2 Likes
#199

Manafort Docs are up on Lawfare. :point_down:

3 Likes
#200

Here’s a mention of Mueller moving over some prosecutors to handle his cases, perhaps Rosenstein needed to approve this. It does look like it is the Stone and AMI cases, with the group from SDNY.

Mueller has brought on federal prosecutors from other districts to assist in some cases, including the prosecution of Trump ally Roger Stone, a sign he may ultimately look to hand off some cases.

Press reports have identified prosecutors leaving Mueller’s office to return to their other jobs. And Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who first appointed Mueller and had been overseeing the investigation for more than a year, is expected to leave the Justice Department in coming weeks.

3 Likes
#201

Meet Mar-A-Lago member Franklin Haney, a millionaire investor, and read how T peddled some Qatar guests through his club house to see how they might invest in some nuclear/power plants. Michael Cohen acted like a middle-man.

We know that QIA (Qatar Investment Authority) is on Mueller’s radar which some are suggesting is Company A, because it is state-owned and involved with all sorts of money laundering, quid pro quo activity.

Haney had hired Michael Cohen to act as a liaison between his interests and finding money from the Qatari’s.

Days after Haney hired Cohen to pursue possible Qatari investment for Bellefonte, federal agents raided the lawyer’s office. Haney’s relationship with Cohen was exposed in national media reports in May, yet the businessman has previously refused to talk to reporters.

“We decided, what the heck. Let’s see what he (Cohen) brings,’’ Haney told the Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis. “Of course, he didn’t bring anything. Because it was just all lies.’’
…

Haney told the Institute he signed a three-month contract with Cohen and paid him about $200,000 before severing the arrangement after the lawyer’s dealings became public in April.

Haney says he forgot the name of the Qatari official with Trump. But a person who had business dealings with the QIA around that time said it was likely Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani, Qatar’s minister of economy and commerce and deputy chair of the QIA. Although Haney was vague on when this introduction happened, his description suggests it would have occurred on one of the last two weekends of March 2018, when Trump’s public schedule shows the president was at Mar-a-Lago.

Haney says that after this brief meeting with Trump and the Qatari, he traveled from Palm Beach, the home of Trump’s club, to Miami Beach in his 167-foot yacht, the Emelina . MarineTraffic.com, which tracks the location of ships, shows that the Emelina was docked in Miami from April 2 through April 7. That week, Qatar hosted the first “Qatar-US Economic Forum” in Miami Beach, taking pitches from Americans seeking capital from the QIA.

It was during Haney’s stay in Miami that Cohen inserted himself into the nuclear project.

3 Likes