Mueller is proven right once again. Maybe this conviction will boost his morale – let’s hope he has the courage and conviction to do the right thing tomorrow and clearly lay out Trump’s crimes of obstruction without any of his usual convoluted explanations.
Let’s also hope that House Democrats will vigorously pursue their investigation of other crimes committed within the Transition Team which was headed by Pence. I still can’t understand why Pence isn’t being held accountable for the fact that he vetted Flynn even though Flynn actually confessed to the committee that he was under investigation for accepting secret payments from Turkey (aka “bribes”). For a refresher, see this posting from Day 698.
It’s about time we really dug into what went on during the transition – there’s every reason to believe that Flynn’s and Rafiekian’s crimes were known by others on the team and that their corruption was just the tip of the iceberg. Onward with the investigations!
A federal jury on Tuesday convicted Bijan Rafiekian, a former business partner of Michael Flynn, on a pair of foreign-agent felony charges stemming from work the two men did for Turkish interests during the final months of the Trump presidential campaign in 2016.
The verdicts, returned by jurors in Alexandria, Va., after a weeklong trial and only about four hours of deliberation, amount to a belated courtroom victory for special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated the $600,000 lobbying and public relations contract at the heart of the case and then handed the matter off to other federal prosecutors after Flynn’s guilty plea to a false-statement charge in 2017.
Rafiekian, 67, faces up to 15 years in prison on the two felony counts against him: acting as an unregistered foreign agent in the U.S., and conspiracy to violate that law as well as to submit false statements to the Justice Department in a foreign-agent filing. Defendants are typically sentenced in accord with federal sentencing guidelines that result in far less than the maximum.
