PrairiePundit

Red States: In the lengthy Twitter thread below, Undercover Huber tells of a 100% false story that was leaked by someone to CNN and published on September 18, 2017. CNN reported the “bombshell” story that the Crossfire Hurricane team had obtained a FISA warrant on Paul Manafort. Undercover believes the leaker might have been a member of the Special Counsel team. Their motive would have been “to influence D.C’s Chief Judge into allowing the SCO to pierce Manafort’s Attorney/Client privilege.” The deep state couldn’t have carried out their conspiracy against President Trump if it hadn’t been for the media. The media could always be counted on to publish just the right story at just the right moment. They played an essential role. Undercover does a superb job of lifting the curtain on the early days of the government’s case against Manafort. By the time the Mueller team began ramping up their campaign against him, they knew that the dossier was completely bogus and that no one in th...

John Solomon: Sometimes it is the quiet, elusive ones who come back to haunt you. And for ex-special prosecutor Robert Mueller, one of those might be a Russian billionaire named Oleg Deripaska. The oligarch who once controlled Russia’s largest aluminum empire has been an international man of intrigue in the now-completed and disproven Trump collusion investigation. Deripaska was a disaffected former business client of Donald Trump’s fallen campaign chairman Paul Manafort. He also was a legal research client of Trump-hating, Clinton-aiding British spy Christopher Steele. In his spare time, he was an occasional friendly cooperator with the FBI and its fired deputy director, Andrew McCabe. And, at the height of the Russia collusion hysteria, Deripaska was sanctioned by the Trump administration to financially punish Russian President Vladimir Putin for his meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. With the Russia case, in which he had so many connections, now completed, De...

John Solomon: When the final chapter of the Russia collusion caper is written, it is likely two seminal documents the FBI used to justify investigating Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign will turn out to be bunk. And the behavior of FBI agents and federal prosecutors who promoted that faulty evidence may disturb us more than we now know. The first, the Christopher Steele dossier, has received enormous attention. And the more scrutiny it receives, the more its truthfulness wanes. Its credibility has declined so much that many now openly question how the FBI used it to support a surveillance warrant against the Trump campaign in October 2016. At its best, the Steele dossier is an “unverified and salacious” political research memo funded by Trump’s Democratic rivals. At worst, it may be Russian disinformation worthy of the “garbage” label given it by esteemed reporter Bob Woodward. The second document, known as the “black cash ledger,” remarkably has escaped the same scrutiny, even th...

John Solomon: In a key finding of the Mueller report , Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik , who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort , is tied to Russian intelligence. But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters. Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny. The incomplete portrayal of Kilimnik is so important to Mueller’s overall narrative that it is raised in the opening of his report. “The FBI assesses” Kilimnik “to have ties to Russian intelligence,” Mueller’s team wrote on page 6, putting a sinister light on every contact Kilimnik had with Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman. ...

Jonathon Turley: ... The New York state charges that Vance filed against Manafort appear to run afoul of state and federal protections against double jeopardy, or being prosecuted twice for the same underlying conduct. The timing of the charges alone seemed right out of the playbook of “The Producers” character Max Bialystock, the corrupt Broadway figure who insisted that in New York the rule is “if you got it, flaunt it, flaunt it.” Accordingly, Vance waited just minutes after the Manafort sentencing to hit him with state charges, guaranteeing the maximum exposure and credit for his effort. The problem is that the case appears not only constitutionally flawed but ethically challenged, coming right out of the Max Bialystock School of Prosecution. I have long been one of the longest and loudest critics of Manafort. He is a corrupt and despicable person who deserves the two sentences that could keep him in jail for the rest of his life. However, it is not his crimes but his associat...

Washington Post: New charges against Manafort in N.Y. fall outside Trump’s pardon power The charges were announced just minutes after Manafort received his second federal sentence. This is a case of piling on a guy who was a victim of the Democrat vendetta against people associated with Trump's election.  First, they tried pushing the Russian collusion hoax for which there was no evidence so they fell back on charges that had nothing to do with it and which were not brought against any Democrat who did the same thing Manafort did.  If these charges are for the same offense they could be considered double jeopardy under recent court rulings.

NY Times: Manafort Faces Up to 10 Years in Conspiracy Cases The special counsel’s case against Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, is drawing to a close, with the possibility of a presidential pardon still alive. Manafort will be punished for alleged crimes that had nothing to do with Russian collusion and everything to do with Mueller's attempt to extort testimony against the President.  Some of the charges he was found guilty of involve conduct for which Democrats who did the same thing have never been charged.  The judge, in this case, is an angry Democrat Obama appointee.  This is another example of the two-tier justice system in Washington that ignores Democrat offenses.

Washington Post: Sentence sparks debate over judicial system’s ‘blatant inequities’ Paul Manafort’s case was perceived as a high-profile instance of the system working one way for a wealthy, well-connected man, while working in a harsher way for indigent defendants facing lesser crimes. When you are talking about wealthy well-connected men you should include those who worked for Hillary Clinton and did some of the same things Manafort did and were never prosecuted.  The main reason Manafort was prosecuted is because Mueller and his team of angry Democrats were trying to extort testimony from him to attack the President.  The extortion attempt is likely the reason Manafort got the lower sentence.  He may not fare as well in the other case he was tried for because that judge seems more amenable to Mueller's political prosecutions.

NY Times: Sentencing Memo Paints Manafort as Someone Who ‘Repeatedly and Brazenly’ Broke Law The special counsel’s team said the fact that Paul Manafort lied to prosecutors after agreeing to cooperate “reflects a hardened adherence to committing crimes and lack of remorse.” Mueller seems really angry with Manafort and Roger Stone for not being cooperative witnesses.  Manafort was tried and convicted of several "crimes" for which Democrats who did the same thing were not.  He was mainly targeted for briefly working for Trump on his campaign.  Roger Stone is a gadfly who also was openly hostile to the Mueller investigation, although he did cooperate.  Mueller was dissatisfied with the extent of his cooperation, even though he had no evidence that Stone colluded with the Russians.  It looks like Mueller wanted to go after him for spite because Stone would not turn on Trump. What all this demonstrates is Mueller is still a process crime fighter ra...

streif: Washington Post Destroys The Russia Facebook Story And Then Goes To Work On The Manafort Polling Fable The story reveals just how silly the Russian collusion hysteria has been all along.  The Russians ads failed to target states where the election was decided, and the Manafort polling data disclosure was before Trump even won the nomination and would have been worthless in the fall election.

NY Times: Manafort Tried to Broker Deal With Ecuador to Hand Assange Over to U.S. There is no evidence that Paul Manafort was working with President Trump or other administration officials on the talks, which stemmed from 2017 discussions on Chinese investment. It looks like the Guardian story about Manafort meeting with Assange could not have been more wrong.  The Guardian owes them both a retraction at a minimum.

Rowan Scarborough: Paul Manafort’s passports don’t show he entered London in all the years claimed by Guardian newspaper when it said he met secretly with WikiLeaks Julian Assange. The Guardian said he met with Mr. Assange in London in 2013, 2015 and 2016. A review of Manafort’s two passports shows he entered Heathrow Airport since 2008 on two occasions, in 2012 and on another time where the customs stamp year is blurred. It appears to be either 2010 or 2016. Prosecutors entered two of the three passports into evidence. Manafort says he has never met Mr. Assange. The liberal Guardian newspaper on Tuesday claimed that Manafort in the spring of 2016 met with Mr. Assange, the WikiLeaks chief, in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The story cited “sources.” WikiLeaks, which released streams of emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, immediately denounced the story as a hoax and said it planned to raise money to file a libel suit. ...

David Oscar Marcus: ... ... One such issue is demonstrated in the Paul Manafort case, where the prosecution team just filed a status report with the court explaining that they have concluded that Manafort is not fulfilling his end of the plea agreement because, they say, he has lied to them during interviews (or as they are called in the system, debriefings). Manafort has said he has answered all of their questions truthfully. This may or may not be true. But who decides? Strangely, the Mueller team is the decisionmaker in whether Manafort is telling the truth. In the Manafort plea, just as with all other cooperation deals in the federal system, the government gets to decide unilaterally whether to ask for a sentencing reduction based in part on whether they believe Manafort is telling the truth. Manafort cannot himself file a sentencing reduction motion under the sentencing guidelines, and neither can the judge. The government and only the government is charged with evaluating...

Washington Times: Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has not told prosecutors with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team anything damaging about President Trump, Reuters reported Tuesday. Rudy Giuliani, who represents Mr. Trump in the Russia investigation, told the news outlet that Manafort is speaking to Mr. Mueller’s team “about a lot of things, none of which are incriminating with regard to the president.” Mr. Giuliani also said he spoke with Manafort attorney Kevin Downing as recently as last week. Manafort has meet with Mueller prosecutors about half a dozen times since the longtime political operative agreed to cooperate with the government in exchange for avoiding a second trial in Washington, D.C., Mr. Giuliani told Reuters. ... It is another dry hole for Mueller if he was looking for Russian collusion charges.  I don't think he got any from Flynn or Papadopoulos either.  I think the Russian collusion story was a hoax cooked up by the...

Washington Times: A senior U.S. Treasury employee has been arrested and charged with leaking to news outlets about financial suspicious transactions on former Trump campaign figures Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, accused Russian agent Maria Butina and the Russian Embassy, federal authorities said Wednesday. Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, 40, of Quinton, Virginia, and a senior adviser in the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network or FinCEN, was arrested Tuesday. She faces one count of unlawfully disclosing suspicious activity reports, or SARs, and one count of conspiracy to disclose those reports. Each count carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Ms. Edwards is scheduled to appear before a judge late Wednesday. Prosecutors with the Southern District of New York say Ms. Edwards leaked “numerous” SARs to a BuzzFeed News reporter starting in October 2017 and continuing through this month. ... Ms. Edwards transmitted the reports by taking photographs of th...

Power Line: CNN  reports: Federal prosecutors in New York are weighing criminal charges against former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig as part of an investigation into whether he failed to register as a foreign agent in a probe that is linked to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, according to sources familiar with the matter. In addition, these sources said, prosecutors in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York are considering taking action against powerhouse law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, where Craig was a partner during the activity under examination. Apparently the fact that Skadden Arps and Paul Manafort collaborated in the conduct for which Manafort was prosecuted has been in the public domain for a while: The inquiry into Craig and Skadden is closely linked to a case against Manafort, and details about Skadden’s work in the matter were disclosed in superseding criminal charges filed Friday by Muelle...

Roger Kimball: Never mind Paul Manafort, the Mueller inquiry is the biggest scandal in US history Mueller’s activities are meant primarily to intimidate, pressure, and co-opt associates of Donald Trump in order to convince them to bear witness against him ... The main thing to bear in mind about all of those guilty pleas—from those of General Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI, to Rick Gates, who had been in business with Paul Manafort—is that none of the pleas have anything to do with collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, the putative reason for Mueller’s investigation in the first place. In the case of Flynn and Papadopoulos, it is now abundantly clear that both were set up by the FBI as part of a deliberate attempt to delegitimise Trump’s presidency. In the case of Manafort, Mueller uncovered real wrongdoing, but, again, it long pre-dated the 2016 campaign and had nothing to do with the Donald Trump or Russians. Alto...

Daily Caller: Clinton-connected lobbyist Tony Podesta knew he was working with Paul Manafort on behalf of a Ukrainian politician, according to an indictment released Friday by the special counsel’s office. Podesta, Manafort and Mercury Public Affairs all failed to register as foreign agents of Ukraine for the work. Manafort entered a plea agreement with the special counsel Friday. Two lobbying firms, including one owned by Democratic superlobbyist Tony Podesta, knowingly worked with Paul Manafort at the direction of the Ukrainian government, according to an indictment released Friday by the special counsel’s office. The indictment, which was released ahead of an expected plea deal for Manafort, the former chairman of President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, says that as a part of his “lobbying scheme,” Manafort solicited two lobbying firms in February 2012 to lobby on behalf of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. “Various employees of Companies A and B under...

Spengler: Precisely how does Bill Clinton's main legal fixer turn up as Michael Cohen's attorney in a plea bargain with a special prosecutor? If you put that kind of plot line in a political thriller, the public would laugh you off the newsstand book racks. Nonetheless, we now have Lanny Davis, special counsel to the president for Bill Clinton during 1996-1998, declaring to CNN: "It's my observation that Mr. Cohen has knowledge that would be of interest to the special counsel about the issue of whether Donald Trump, ahead of time, knew about the hacking of emails, which is a computer crime." On Tuesday Davis told MSNBC that Cohen knew about "the possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election." There you have it, boys and girls: None of this has anything to do with paying off floozies who claimed to have done the dirty with a presidential candidate. No one cares about that. It's about using ...

Washington Times: Two heated arguments between Judge T.S. Ellis III and prosecutors from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team overshadowed a largely unremarkable Wednesday in the financial-fraud trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. During afternoon testimony, prosecutor Uzo Asonye asked JudgeEllis whether IRS agent Michael Welch, who had reviewed Mr. Manafort’s tax filings, could testify as an expert witness. That would allow Mr. Welch to offer his opinion to the court instead of limiting his testimony to the factual record. Mr. Asonye then disclosed that Mr. Welch had been sitting in the courtroom, watching Mr. Manafort’s trial play out. JudgeEllis lost his temper at Mr. Asonye, yelling that he prohibits all witnesses from observing the proceedings and thought he had done so in the Manafort case. Mr. Asonyne responded that he thought experts were allowed to watch the trial, but JudgeEllis insisted he bars that practice too. “Let me clear, I don’t care w...