First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Russia

[BenDhyan]

Mueller Probe Appears to Hit Democratic Powerhouses, Too

The indictments issued by special counsel Robert Mueller are bad news for Team Trump—and, it seems, for some of Washington’s best-connected Democrats.
Betsy Woodruff Spencer Ackerman 10.30.17 1:59 PM ET

The indictment of former Trump campaign boss Paul Manafort is likely causing bipartisan headaches. While it alleges that President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman was a tax-dodging money-launderer in cahoots with an authoritarian Ukrainian regime, it also hints at a potential legal mess for one of Washington’s most powerful Democratic dynasties: the Podestas.

The indictment describes a cozy, coordinated relationship between Manafort, Ukraine’s Putin-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych, and two unnamed Washington lobbying firms, beginning in 2012. Lobbying disclosure forms show that the Podesta Group and Mercury LLC, two powerful Washington firms, started working alongside Manafort that year, and with the European Centre for Modern Ukraine –– a group the indictment describes as a cut-out for the Yanukovych government.

The AP reported in August that Manafort directed The Podesta Group and Mercury LLC as part of a “covert influence campaign.”

Multiple lobbyists tell The Daily Beast they are confident that the Podesta Group and Mercury LLC are the two firms the indictment refers to. NBC News quotes three sources with knowledge of the investigation who drew similar conclusions.

“I’m 99.9 percent sure that’s who it is,” said one longtime Washington attorney and lobbyist. “Those are the two firms who did this work.”

“Manafort and Tony [Podesta] were inseparable and driving the same train,” added a person familiar with the Mueller probe.

Tony Podesta was a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. His brother John, one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington, chaired that campaign. Together, they founded the Podesta Group.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-probe-appears-to-hit-democratic-powerhouses-too?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29

[seemslikeadream]

^^^^ go for it

REMINDER

trump is the president ...Manafort...Gates..... George Papadopoulos are trump's guys

Manafort is the one that has been dealing with the scum of the earth for decades

Rick Gates would be part of the Mercer-funded America First Policies


High odds that Trump at lunch today demanded Sessions fire Mueller. If Trump succeeds, he must be impeached

Papadopoulos was probably wearing a wire for months

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Thanks seemslikeadream. Here's more from Josh Marshall:

Big Stuff in the Papadopolous Plea Deal

By Josh Marshall Published October 30, 2017 4:03 pm

Here are some other points to note in the Papadopolous plea deal …

1. In April, the Trump campaign knew from intermediaries from the Russian government that the Russians had “dirt” on Secretary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” Those were almost certainly references to emails later released through Wikileaks in the second half of the year. Papadopolous and his campaign colleagues may not have known precisely that the Russians had DNC and Podesta emails. But they would have realized what was happening once those emails started pouring out of Wikileaks in July. They must have wondered: why would Russian agents have emails incriminating Hillary Clinton? The entirety of the exchanges has a deep similarity to the Trump Tower meeting with Trump Jr. on June 8th – just extended over a much longer period of time. They knew. They were looped deep into what Russia was doing.

2. There’s a key passage in the Papadopolous plea agreement that I don’t think has gotten a lot of attention yet.



Here’s a tweet from President Trump with an image from that meeting. You’ll see President Trump is there. Now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions is there. Papadopolous is the second man in a clockwise direction from Sessions in the lower left.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/sta ... 86/photo/1

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/sta ... 8465680386

With Trump and Sessions there, according to the plea, Papadopolous told the group “he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.” That’s not against the law in itself. It is bizarre to think that a presidential candidate would travel abroad to meet with the President of Russia during a campaign. But there’s no law against it. This is a key fact because Papadopolous seems to have given a little speech about what he was up to and what he could do in a small meeting with Trump and Sessions themselves. This happened one week after Papadopolous had met in London with as yet unnamed people who he knew had close ties with the Russian government. This is very significant.

[BenDhyan]

^^^^ go for it

REMINDER

trump is the president ...Manafort...Gates..... George Papadopoulos are trump's guys

Manafort is the one that has been dealing with the scum of the earth for decades

Rick Gates would be part of the Mercer-funded America First Policies


High odds that Trump at lunch today demanded Sessions fire Mueller. If Trump succeeds, he must be impeached

Papadopoulos was probably wearing a wire for months

Nevertheless, the indictment against Manafort and Gates appears to relate to a period before the Trump presidential campaign.

[seemslikeadream]

Nevertheless, the indictment against Manafort and Gates appears to relate to a period before the Trump presidential campaign.

Robert Mueller arrests Paul Manafort for money crimes, then reveals he has Manafort nailed on Trump-Russia collusion

there is more to the case than the money laundering


SO WHAT? They are/were trump's guys!

AND we have NOT seen trump's tax returns yet

As a former federal prosecutor, it seems to me that there are several angles to Mueller’s strategy with the timing of these announcements.


The most obvious is the effort to squeeze Manafort. Prosecutors indict lower level co-conspirators to get them to flip on their higher level counterparts all day long. The slightly more subtle dynamic is to put Manafort on an island, and let him see those he is protecting cut him loose and distance themselves from him. This will weaken his willingness to hang in and protect others. I think the timing of the release of the Papadopolous plea is designed to press another lever – it lets Manafort know that there is more to the case than the money laundering, and this is going to get a lot worse for him if he doesn’t cooperate. All of these moves are intended to bring maximum pressure on Manafort to cooperate with the investigation.

While I agree that the Papadopolous plea had the effect of blindsiding Trump, I don’t think that was the primary goal of the timing of its release. What Trump tweets doesn’t matter to Mueller. He has his sights set on Manafort and getting him to flip.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/mor ... s-strategy

oh no ...during the campaign...time will tell this is just the beginning ..THIS IS NOT A CLINTON SCANDAL

we have General Yellowkerk to be indicted ...he WAS trump's GUY TOO!

but this is just the start of the indictments....we have plenty more like obstruction of justice

reminder ..Clinton is NOT president ....and that Podesta had NOTHING to do with her campaign

no one is going to turn this into a Clinton scandal no matter how hard they try

remember Papadopolous was probably were a wire for months!!!


Sam Clovis was the direct supervisor of Papadopoulos

Mueller discloses Trump campaign aide pleaded guilty to lying about Russian contacts

Michael Isikoff
Chief Investigative Correspondent
Yahoo NewsOctober 30, 2017

A former Donald Trump campaign adviser was secretly arrested in July and has pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about contacts with Russia during the 2016 campaign, according to court documents unsealed by special counsel Robert Mueller on Monday.

The former Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, admitted to making “numerous” false statements to the FBI about his repeated efforts to arrange an “off the record” meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office. He is now cooperating with Mueller’s investigation, according to the unsealed court records.

Among the subjects he is providing information on, according to the court records, are his communications with an unidentified Russian professor in London with close ties to the government in Moscow, who informed him in April 2016 that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, including “thousands of emails.”

The charges against Papadopoulos provide substantial new details about communications between the Trump campaign and figures close to the Russian government — a central part of the investigation by Mueller. The court records unsealed Monday do not provide a clear account of how senior Trump officials followed up on Papadopoulos’s efforts to set up a meeting with Russian officials.

But they quote one unidentified campaign “supervisor” as emailing him in August 2016 that “I would encourage you” to make a trip to Moscow to arrange such a meeting. A Trump campaign source identified the supervisor as Sam Clovis, a conservative radio host who was co-chairman of the campaign. Another “high ranking” official — identified by the source as campaign chairman Paul Manafort — received an email from Papadopoulos saying that “Russia has been eager to meet Mr. Trump for quite some time and has been reaching out to me to discuss.” Manafort forwarded that email to his associate Richard Gates and wrote: “Let’s discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.” (Some of these emails were quoted in a Washington Post story this past August that first identified Clovis, Manafort and Gates as the campaign officials who sent and received them.)

Papadopoulos admitted lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts when he was initially interviewed in January, and, according to the “statement of offense” unsealed Monday, by doing so “impeded the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the [Trump] campaign and the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”

Trump first mentioned Papadopoulos’s role in the campaign during a meeting with the Washington Post editorial board in March 2016, identifying him as one of five foreign policy advisers who had joined his team. Papadopoulos immediately drew attention because of his apparent lack of foreign policy experience: A 2009 college graduate, he had worked as an intern and researcher at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, and listed as one of his credentials on his LinkedIn profile his participation in a Model U.N. program for students.

It is far from clear how much influence, if any, he wielded on Trump’s campaign. But the charges laid out by Mueller flesh out what U.S. intelligence officials have long said was a concerted effort by Moscow to cultivate figures close to the Trump campaign — in part by offering damaging information about Clinton. “They set out what appears to be a classic Russian intelligence operation, in which a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign was approached — or bumped, in intelligence parlance — by a person claiming to have substantial connections to Russian officials,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

When Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign in early March 2016, he “understood that a principal foreign policy focus of the campaign was an improved U.S. relationship with Russia,” according to the documents.

A week later, while traveling in Italy, Papadopoulos met a Russian professor based in London who claimed to have “substantial connections” with Russian government officials, the statement says. After learning about his role in the Trump campaign, the professor “appeared to take great interest” in Papadopoulos and later introduced him to a Russian woman whom Papadopoulos described in an email as “Putin’s niece.” (He later learned she wasn’t.) Papadopoulos told the two Russians that he had “connections that could help arrange a meeting between then candidate Trump and President Putin,” the statement says.

That meeting never took place, but key Trump advisers including Donald Trump Jr., campaign manager Manafort — whose indictment on unrelated charges was also unsealed Monday — and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner met at Trump Tower with Russian officials offering compromising material about Hillary Clinton on June 9. It is unclear whether Papadopoulos played any role in setting up that meeting, which is believed to be a focus of Mueller’s probe.

Papadopoulos met the Russian professor on April 26, 2016. It was at this meeting that the professor said he had just returned from a trip to Moscow, where he met with “high level Russian government officials.” The professor told Papadopoulos that the Russians had obtained “dirt” on Clinton, that “the Russians had emails of Clinton” and that “they have thousands of emails.”

After this meeting, Papadopoulos stepped up his efforts to arrange meetings between Trump officials and the Russians. “Have some interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right,” he emailed a senior policy adviser to Trump the next day, April 27. He emailed another “high ranking campaign official” the same day about “Russia’s interest in hosting Mr. Trump. Have been receiving a lot of calls over the last month about Putin wanting to host him and the team when the time is right.” He also emailed the professor three days later, on April 30, thanking him for his “critical help” in seeking to arrange a meeting between the campaign and Russian officials, adding: “It’s history making if it happens.”

View photos
A photo published on Donald Trump’s Instagram of George Papadopoulos (circled by Yahoo News) at a Trump campaign national security meeting in March 2016.
More
As laid out in the statement of offense, Papadopoulos continued to stay in touch with the professor about setting up a meeting and peppered campaign officials with updates about his efforts. On June 19, 2016, just 10 days after the Trump Tower meeting, Papadopoulos emailed a high-ranking Trump campaign official with the subject line “New message from Russia.”

“The Russian ministry of foreign affairs messaged and said that if Mr. Trump is unable to make it to Russia, if a campaign rep (me or someone else) can make it for meetings? I am willing to make the trip off the record if its in the interest of Mr. Trump and the campaign to meet specific people.”

It was after several weeks of communications about this “off the record” meeting that the unidentified Trump campaign supervisor appeared to give the green light: “I would encourage you” and another foreign policy adviser to “make the trip if it is feasible.”

When first questioned by the FBI on Jan. 27, Papadopoulos acknowledged meeting with the Russian professor and hearing about Russian “dirt” on Clinton, but he insisted his communications all took place before he joined the Trump campaign. “I wasn’t even on the Trump team, that wasn’t even on the radar. … This was a year ago, this was before I even got with Trump,” he told them, falsely.

After his FBI interview, Papadopoulos took further steps to conceal his campaign communications by deactivating a Facebook account that contained information about those communications. On July 27, returning to the country from a foreign trip, he was arrested by the FBI at Dulles International Airport, and in subsequent questioning began to “provide information and answer questions,” the statement of offense reads.https://www.yahoo.com/news/mueller-disc ... 02597.html

Lock him up

George Papadopoulos confession may have just sent Jeff Sessions to prison
Bill Palmer
Updated: 5:22 pm EDT Mon Oct 30, 2017
Home » Opinion

Today’s arrests of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have gotten the most headlines thus far, but the plea deal and confession of George Papadopoulos may prove to be the bigger storyline in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. It was revealed today that Papadopoulos was secretly arrested four months ago, and has since confessed to using his position with the Trump campaign to collude with the Russian government during the election. In the process he sold two key Trump campaign officials down the river. One of them is likely to flip on Attorney General Jeff Sessions.


George Papadopoulos admits that he met with a Kremlin-connected professor in the hope of getting his hands on emails stolen from Hillary Clinton. This is a first-hand formal confession that the Trump campaign did indeed collude with the Russian government to try to influence the outcome of the election, thus striking down Donald Trump’s months of public denials. In his confession, Papadopoulos spells out that two Trump officials knew what he was doing and went along with it, making them criminally complicit. They’ve now been revealed as Manafort and Sam Clovis (link). Clovis may be the key here.


Sam Clovis was the direct supervisor of Papadopoulos, which is why Papadopoulos ran the collusion past Clovis. But the overall supervisor of the team in question was a guy named Jeff Sessions. It’s difficult to believe Clovis wouldn’t have turned around and run this collusion past Sessions before proceeding. In fact, Mueller is almost surely about to use Papadopoulos’s confession to nail Clovis, who based on his nature is likely to cut his own deal. That would involve giving up whoever he told.


This would mean Jeff Sessions isn’t merely a guy who had a series of suspicious meetings with the Russian Ambassador during the campaign and then lied about it. Instead, it would mean Sessions signed off on his campaign underling’s collusion with the Russian government. That would nail the Attorney General of the United States for one or more felonies. Lock him up.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/pri ... papa/5802/

thanks to robert


I think I smell pizza!

‘Putin’s Niece’ Catfished Trump Aide, Offered Kremlin Meeting

HONEYPOT?
‘Putin’s Niece’ Catfished Trump Aide, Offered Kremlin Meeting

George Papadopoulos was approached by a mysterious Russian woman and a Kremlin-backed professor. They offered up dirt on Hillary Clinton—and a chance to meet Putin.

KELLY WEILL
10.30.17 12:39 PM ET
Days after becoming a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign in 2016, George Papadopoulos started meeting with a woman he believed to be Vladimir “Putin’s niece,” according to a newly unsealed indictment by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The woman, along with a Kremlin-connected, London-based professor, wanted to help Papadopoulos arrange meetings between representatives of then-candidate Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Maybe, the woman said, she could even get the two men to meet face-to- face.
“I have already alerted my personal links to our conversation,” she later emailed. “As mentioned we are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump. The Russian Federation would love to welcome him once his candidature would be officially announced.”
But the woman was not, in fact, Putin’s relative. Papadopoulos had, in a sense, been catfished—and then lied about catfishing to federal investigators.
Papadopoulos, who was arrested in late July, pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI. That plea was unsealed on Monday—as were court paper showing that Papadopoulos, the professor, and the so-called “niece” had been part of an effort to establish a back channel between Trump and the Kremlin, and to obtain thousands of Clinton emails before anyone knew those messages had been hacked.
Papadopoulos was living in London when he was named a foreign policy advisor to Team Trump in March 2016. Approximately eight days after accepting the job, Papadopoulos met another Londoner: a Russian professor who “claimed to have substantial connections with Russian government officials,” the indictment reads.
One of those connections was of particular interest to Papadopoulos. On March 24, the professor invited Papadopoulos to a meeting with a Russian woman, whom he introduced as a relative of Russian president Vladimir Putin. After the meeting, Papadopoulos wrote an email to the Trump campaign, stating that he had just met with the professor, whom he described as a “good friend,” and the alleged “niece.”


Papadopoulos said “Putin’s niece” and the professor had offered “to arrange a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump.”
The woman also allegedly promised to introduce Papadopoulos to the Russian Ambassador in London, but never made good on the offer.
But Trump campaign staffers praised Papadopoulous’s new connections. “Great work,” an unnamed campaign supervisor replied to the email. The supervisor shied away from making any early commitments to a meeting, but promised to “work it through the campaign.”
When Papadopoulos met with Trump and campaign staffers in person later that month, he introduced himself as having connections that could arrange a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Putin. An Instagram post from Trump’s account shows Papadopoulos at the meeting, along with members of the foreign policy team and future Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Absent from that group was foreign policy advisor Carter Page, whose communications with Russian officials have also been the subject of investigation.
After the meeting, Papadopoulos, the professor, “Putin’s niece,” and an official in Russia’s ministry of foreign affairs were in frequent communication about a possible meeting.

“I have already alerted my personal links to our conversation and your request,” the woman posing as Putin’s relative wrote Papadopoulos in April. “As mentioned we are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump.”
Then, on April 26, Papadopoulos met the professor for breakfast at a London hotel. The professor confided in him that he had just been to Moscow, where high-level Russian officials had talked of obtaining “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. “The Russians had emails of Clinton,” the professor told him, according to the indictment. “They have thousands of emails.”
The timing of the leak is critical. The rest of the world did not learn about the Clinton campaign’s and the Democratic National Committee’s leaked emails until months later. But the breach began on March 19, when Clinton campaign chair John Podesta clicked on a phishing link, the New York Times previously reported. In April, the Russian hacking group known as Fancy Bear breached the Democratic National Committee, a report by CrowdStrike found. Those emails did not surface online until July 22.
“The Russians had emails of Clinton. They have thousands of emails.”
— Professor to Papadopoulos
The day after meeting with the professor, Papadopoulos emailed what the indictment describes as an unnamed “senior policy advisor” and an unnamed “high-ranking campaign official” about “interesting messages coming in from Moscow.” Papadopoulos pressed again for the campaign to arrange an in-person meeting between Trump and Putin in Moscow.
While the recipients of those emails are unnamed in the indictment, an August report by the Washington Post revealed sent then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski an April 27 email, stating that “Putin wants to host the Trump team when the time is right,” an invitation that intelligence officials speculated might have been a Russian effort to gauge the Trump campaign’s receptiveness to cooperation.
Over the next several months, Papadopoulos made repeated attempts to send Trump or campaign officials to a meeting in Moscow. The Trump campaign appeared receptive. After weeks of communication about an “off the record meeting” with Russian officials, a Trump campaign supervisor told Papadopoulos in August that “I would encourage you” and another foreign policy advisor to “make the trip, if it is feasible.”
The meeting never materialized. But Papadopoulos’ communications with the professor, the Russian foreign ministry official, and “Putin’s niece” attracted FBI’s attention.
In late January 2017, FBI officials interviewed Papadopoulos about his interactions with Russian officials. Papadopoulos repeated claimed the communications occurred before he joined the Trump campaign.
“This isn’t like [the professor]’s messaging me while I’m in April with Trump,” he told investigators, according to the indictment. “I wasn’t even on the Trump team, that wasn’t even on the radar … This was a year ago. This was before I even got with Trump.” He conceded that it was a “very strange coincidence” to have learned about the “dirt” on Clinton a year before joining the Trump campaign.
Papadopoulos downplayed the professor’s Kremlin ties, calling the man “a nothing” and “just a guy talk[ing] up connections or something.” Papadopoulos claimed he thought the professor was “BSing to be completely honest with you.”
Papadopoulos also minimized his interactions with the woman he had described as “Putin’s niece,” telling FBI investigators that he had no relationship with her, other than sending emails that amounted to “hi, how are you?”
None of those claims were true. Not only did Papadopoulos knowingly connect with the Kremlin-linked professor after he joined the campaign, he also met the mystery Russian woman in person, and Skyped with her multiple times, according to the indictment.
FBI officials interviewed Papadopoulos again on February. The following day, he deleted his Facebook account, where he had been communicating with the professor and a Russian official, and created a new account, scrubbed of all the old messages. Days later, Papadopoulos ditched his phone and started using a new number.
He was arrested July 27 in Dulles International Airport, according to his indictment. Since his arrest, which remained secret until now, Papadopoulos has met with investigators to answer more questions—and cooperate with Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe of ties between Trump Tower and the Kremlin.
“We look forward to telling all of the details of George’s story at the time,” Papadopoulos’s attorney said in a statement.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/putins-ni ... ia=desktop

[seemslikeadream]

Column: Mueller indictments prove one thing: Hillary Clinton is to blame!

Rex Huppke
After reviewing the charges against three former members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — the first charges to come from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election — I have reached the following conclusion: LOCK HER UP!

By “HER” I mean Hillary Clinton, and by “LOCK” and “UP” and the exclamation point I mean put Clinton — aka, “HER” — behind bars.

The indictments of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates, along with a guilty plea by former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos show the obscene lengths Clinton went to in an effort to make Trump look bad.

Honestly, it’s shameful. Not only is she responsible for this entire “witch hunt,” as Trump calls the Mueller investigation, but now she’s seeing to it that actual witches get caught, a move that GREATLY LESSENS the dismissiveness of calling something a witch hunt.

LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP!

Manafort and Gates are charged with conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money and acting as unregistered foreign agents, among other things. The charges largely revolve around work they did for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine.

Papadopoulos, a 2009 graduate of DePaul University in Chicago, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI as part of a deal. According to court documents, he had multiple interactions during the campaign with an overseas professor he believed to be connected to the Russian government and was told the Russians had “thousands” of Clinton’s emails. The documents say Papadopoulos tried to arrange a meeting between Russian government officials and members of the Trump campaign.

In response to these developments, Trump sensibly tweeted: “But why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????”

That is such a good question, and it truly merits five question marks.

If there’s one thing we know, Crooked Hillary is to blame for everything. Why? Because Republicans want her to be, and it’s not possible to believe in two controversies at the same time.

You might say, “Gee, couldn’t it be true that Clinton engaged in some dodgy behavior AND people around Trump also engaged in dodgy behavior?”

No. The answer is no. It was decided years ago that there can only be one dodgy person, and it’s Clinton. I don’t make the rules. (Fox News does.)

Knowing that, here’s what we know based on what we have been programmed to think we know:

When she wasn’t busy killing people or loading our precious uranium supplies into Russian nuclear warheads in exchange for money she used to fund a pizza parlor that served as a front for a child sex ring, Clinton convinced Trump’s adult children to advise Trump to hire Manafort to run his presidential campaign.

She even bribed Trump advocate Newt Gingrich to glowingly tweet: “Nobody should underestimate how much Paul Manafort did to really help get this campaign to where it is right now.”

For years before that, Clinton forced Manafort and his business associate Gates to make bazillions of dollars doing political work for Putin-hugging politicos in Ukraine. She then forced them to launder much of that money, setting them up for future charges.

Paying attention even to tiny details, Clinton had the Trump campaign encourage only one change to the GOP platform at its 2016 convention: the removal of language that suggested the United States arm Ukrainians to help them push back against Russian aggression. Clever move, Clinton.

It’s clear from Mueller’s court documents — if you read between the lines with your head in a microwave — that the Russia-connected “overseas professor” who met Papadopoulos was actually Clinton wearing a costume. She is known as a master of disguise, which explains how she hid her identity while shooting President John F. Kennedy, raiding the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and being Charles Manson.

During the presidential campaign, she covertly started chants of “LOCK HER UP!” at Trump rallies, knowing that people who wanted her to go to prison for violating government email rules might later look silly when they shrugged off 12-count federal indictments against Trump supporters as “nothing burgers.”

These facts I’m highlighting should be more than enough to show that Clinton was involved in a wide-ranging conspiracy to create a conspiracy against Trump, one that he and his followers would believe is a conspiracy for which she was to blame. (That woman is devious!!)

But the icing on the Clinton-baked cake is this: Months after she purposely lost the election, she got Mueller — a lifetime Republican highly respected by members of both political parties — to convince a federal judge to convene a grand jury. Then she managed to get her Clinton tentacles on each member of that independent grand jury and force them — presumably under threat of death by uranium poisoning — to indict Manafort and Gates.

And in an act of mercy, she allowed Papadopoulos to cut a plea deal, presumably because she felt bad that she fooled him with that professor costume.

It’s sinister. It’s telling.

And it’s the only possible explanation.

Because Hillary Clinton has to be blamed for everything.

Rules are rules.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opin ... story.html

B
E
G
Hillary isn't getting indicted.
A
Z
I

I smell someone wearing a wire

[Heaven Swan]

/

Because some times you just have to laugh!

[8bitagent]

So, when is FBI Mueller going to go after the war crimes of Bush, Clinton & Obama?

[8bitagent]

Wait, if its all Trump associates, why am I seeing in mainstream news Tony Podesta and Clinton/DNC campaign people being roped into the Mueller sphere of intrigue? This is what I cant stand: Team sports. When I see the Fox/Breitbart/Alex Jones types or the Huffpo/MSNBC/CNN/DailyBeast crowd and they cant see the hypocrisy rife within their own home field or apply rigorous intuition

[seemslikeadream]

you are not seeing things correctly..you need to know what you are talking about and stop regurgitating the Faux News version of events..read up 8 you got it all wrong...too bad you failed to read everything ..use your rigorous intuition and not jump to conclusions by only seeing buzz words.....stop skimming that ain't gonna work

Faux News will rot your brain

Sean Hannity is so loosing it that he just called Hillary Clinton "President Clinton"


Interesting you are only reading the trump version on events

I guess you want to be fair and balanced ...can't do that reading just the fair and balanced Faux News

you know there was a GUILTY PLEA today right? You know that was a trump person right? You know this is all about the trump administration right?

You know that George Papadopoulos was wearing a wire for 3 months right?

Here's George Papadopoulos. In London. Five days ago. Wearing a wire.



You know Manafort was a big time money launderer right?

you don't get a 10 million dollar bail for nothing ..you don't get house arrest for nothing


but none of this was on Faux News so you wouldn't know the whole truth

Throughout his long career as a Republican Party fixer and influence peddler on behalf of what the Center for Public Integrity termed “the torture lobby”—a global cadre of dictators and strongmen who wanted to make sure the United States did not hold them to account—Manafort has been one of most troublesome creatures in the Washington “swamp” that Donald Trump decried as a presidential contender. Yet Manafort has also worked, from the 1980s on, for his client “Donald”—the New York billionaire who relied on Manafort to help clear hurdles for gambling and real estate endeavors.

'''
In detailing the alleged scheme, Mueller's office listed more than 200 transactions involving payments from shell companies and offshore accounts in Cyprus and the Grenadines to unnamed vendors in New York, Virginia, South Carolina, California and Florida

....

the payments allegedly included tens of millions of dollars on home improvements, including $934,350 spent at an antique rug store in Alexandria and $623,910 paid to an antique dealer in New York. The list includes alleged payments of $849,215 at a men's clothing store in New York, $520,440 at a clothing store in Beverly Hills, and payments of $163,705 for three Range Rovers, a $62,750 Mercedes Benz and a $47,000 Range Rover.

Manafort also allegedly used offshore accounts to buy real estate, including $2.85 million for a New York City condo in Soho and a Brooklyn brownstone that cost $3 million.

Separately, court papers were unsealed Monday detailing a guilty plea by George Papadopoulos, a member of the Trump campaign's foreign policy team, on charges of lying to federal agents about his dealings with several Russians who were offering "dirt" on Trump's Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Papadopoulos admitted to lying about the nature of his interactions with "foreign nationals" who he thought had close connections to senior Russian government officials.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/30/heres-w ... -went.html

Unsurprisingly, a Twitter brigade has formed to spin today's Manafort etc indictments as related to the Democrats rather than trump/Russia


Volume since midnight for tweets containing both "Manafort" and "Podesta". I'm guessing we haven't seen the end of this one yet.

This network diagram shows the retweet/reply relationships for tweets containing both "Manafort" and "Podesta" as of 8:00 AM Central.

Same diagram (Manafort/Podesta tweets) as of 10:30 AM. Cernovich took time out of his busy schedule of babbling about pedophiles to join in.


Same diagram (Manafort/Podesta tweets) as of 10:30 AM. Cernovich took time out of his busy schedule of babbling about pedophiles to join in.

I guess they totally missed this part of that story.


https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status ... 1217268736

Right To Be Worried

By JOSH MARSHALL Published OCTOBER 30, 2017 9:37 PM
6778Views
This is just what I was thinking (from the Post) …

Away from the podium, Trump staffers fretted privately over whether Manafort or Gates might share with Mueller’s team damaging information about other colleagues. They expressed concern in particular about Gates because he has a young family, may be more stretched financially than Manafort, and continued to be involved in Trump’s political operation and had access to the White House, including attending West Wing meetings after Trump was sworn in.

Rick Gates is 45, 23 years younger than Manafort. He was also with Trump much longer than Manafort. Any guesses about whether he saw anything bad when he was in the Trump orbit?

I also found this paragraph interesting. it follows immediately on that one.

Some White House advisers are unhappy with Thomas J. Barrack Jr., Trump’s longtime friend and chair of his inauguration, whom they hold responsible for keeping Gates in the Trump orbit long after Manafort resigned as campaign chairman in August 2016, according to people familiar with the situation. Barrack has been Gates’s patron of late, steering political work to him and, until Monday, employing him as director of the Washington office of his real estate investment company.

Note what I wrote earlier. Barrack played a seemingly central role in bringing Manafort into Trump’s campaign. But the story is murky and vague when it comes to just who was pushing who. I didn’t realize that Barrack had helped keep Gates in the Trump orbit and given him a soft landing after he was finally ejected from Trump world. That’s interesting.

There is finally signs of what I wrote I wrote about in this afternoon’s Backgrounder …

But Trump’s anger Monday was visible to those who interacted with him, and the mood in the corridors of the White House was one of weariness and fear of the unknown. As the president groused upstairs, many staffers — some of whom have hired lawyers to help them navigate Mueller’s investigation — privately speculated about where the special counsel might turn next.

“The walls are closing in,” said one senior Republican in close contact with top staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. “Everyone is freaking out.”

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/right-to-be-worried

PAUL MANAFORT’S ALLEGED MONEY-LAUNDERING SCHEME WAS EXPOSED MONTHS AGO
David Dayen
October 30 2017, 9:53 a.m.
THE CHARGES AGAINST Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his protégé Rick Gates, the first in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sweeping investigation, primarily involve laundering money earned in Ukraine without paying taxes or registering as a foreign lobbyist. A main conduit for moving these funds from offshore companies to the United States were a series of real estate transactions that The Intercept identified in February.

At that time, we identified over $19 million in home equity loans taken out by Manafort in New York City over a five-year period. The escalating series of transactions included one particularly large and unusual loan from a banker on Trump’s now-shuttered Economic Advisory Council.

The indictment, unsealed this morning, found that Manafort laundered “more than $18 million” through offshore accounts, money earned while working for corrupt former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort and Gates concealed this overseas work in Ukraine and used the offshore accounts to “purchase multi-million dollar properties in the United States,” according to the indictment. Manafort then “borrowed millions of dollars in loans using these properties as collateral, thereby obtaining cash in the United States without reporting and paying taxes on the income.”

The indictment outlines a fairly common money-laundering technique: create an offshore company to accept foreign money and use that company to purchase American property. Then take a loan out against that property. The loan enables the person to have full access to the money without having paid taxes or disclosed the source of the income. Money laundering in the New York City real estate world has become so ubiquitous that it is likely driving up the price of high-end properties. A recent Treasury Department estimate suggested nearly a third of all such properties were obtained suspiciously.

So the dubious home equity loans were critical to the scheme. They became the manner in which Manafort converted Ukrainian earnings into cash he could use in the U.S., while avoiding taxes or reporting.

In the initial story, Julian Russo and Matthew Termine, two New York attorneys who first wrote about the loan data at a blog, indicated the shady nature of the transactions. “It feels like we’re seeing a small piece of the bigger picture here,” Russo said.

Ukrainian journalist and member of parliament Serhiy Leshchenko holds pages showing allegedly signings of payments to Donald Trump's presidential campaign chairman Paul Manafort from an illegal shadow accounting book of the party of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych during a press conference in Kiev on August 19, 2016.The Ukrainian authorities have released line-item entries of payments worth million of dollars that US presidential campaign hopeful Donald Trump's campaign chief allegedly received from the now-ousted Russian-backed leaders in Kiev. The revelations from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) on August 18, 2016 were followed on August 19 by claims by a top lawmaker that Paul Manafort lobbied in favour of a pro-Kremlin party even after a February 2014 pro-EU revolt had pulled Ukraine out of Russia's orbit. Manafort served as a public relations adviser to Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovych -- now living in self-imposed exile in Russia -- and his Regions party in the former republic between 2007 and 2012. / AFP / SERGEI SUPINSKY (Photo credit should read SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images) Ukrainian journalist and member of parliament Serhiy Leshchenko holds pages showing allegedly signings of payments to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign chairman Paul Manafort from an illegal shadow accounting book of the party of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych during a press conference in Kiev on Aug. 19, 2016. Photo: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images
FROM 2012 TO 2016, Manafort took out seven home equity loans worth approximately $19.2 million on three separate New York-area properties, owned through holding companies registered to him and his son-in-law Jeffrey Yohai, a real estate investor. The properties include a condo on 27 Howard St. in Manhattan, a condo in Trump Tower, and a four-story, two-unit brownstone in Brooklyn at 377 Union St.

In 2012, Manafort took out a $1.5 million home equity loan on 27 Howard St. from First Republic Bank, through his limited liability company MC Soho Holdings. Four years later, Manafort paid off that loan and got another, even bigger one — for $2.73 million from Citizens Bank.

MC Soho Holdings is named in the Justice Department indictment, which states that Manafort used the Howard Street property as a revenue-generating Airbnb in 2015 and 2016, and took tax benefits associated with owning a rental property. Manafort then represented to the bank that the property was owner-occupied so he could acquire a larger loan. The indictment lists that loan amount at $3.185 million.

In March 2016, Manafort and Yohai purchased a pair of short-term mortgage loans on the 377 Union St. brownstone, worth a total of $5.3 million. The brownstone was listed in the name of MC Brooklyn Holdings, a limited liability company. MC Brooklyn Holdings is also named in the complaint.

By June 1, lender Genesis Capital had filed for foreclosure, alleging a missed payment. In January 2017, MC Brooklyn Holdings transferred the property to Manafort, and two weeks later, Federal Savings Bank, a small lender that normally caters to low- and moderate-income military veterans, issued Manafort’s wife, Kathleen, a $5.3 million loan, evidently to cover the prior Genesis Capital mortgage, and an additional $1.3 million loan. The loan is also short term, due in January 2018.

This $6.6 million in loans to one customer represents roughly 2.2 percent of Federal Savings Bank’s overall assets, and nearly 11 percent of the bank’s total shareholder equity. The total borrowing cost appears to exceed the equivalent market value of a property of that size in the neighborhood, and it’s also unusual from a risk-management standpoint to loan millions of dollars for a home already in default by the same owner.

Adding to the intrigue is the identity of Federal Savings Bank’s founder, CEO, and chair Steve Calk, a Trump campaign supporter and member of the president’s now-shuttered Economic Advisory Council. Neither Federal Savings Bank nor Calk responded to a request for comment in February. Through a spokesperson, Genesis Capital stated that they “do not release information to third parties about the status of our loans.”

MC Brooklyn Holdings bought the 377 Union building for roughly $2.9 million in late 2012, according to local Brooklyn blog “Pardon Me for Asking.” The indictment indicates that all the money for the purchase came from offshore accounts based in Cyprus. In 2013, the New York Department of Buildings approved a permit to turn the two-unit brownstone into a single-family home. That application lists the owner as Paul Manafort. But the home has been empty since the purchase.

The indictment refers to a “home improvement company in The Hamptons, New York” as the recipient of wire transfers from Manafort-linked offshore accounts. One of a series of 13 suspicious wire transfers identified by BuzzFeed on Sunday went from Global Endeavour, Manafort’s offshore political consulting firm that worked for Yanukovych, to SP&C Home Improvement, a remodeling company out of Long Island. According to SP&C, the $200,000 in that wire transfer was for a remodeling project at 377 Union Street, the brownstone in Brooklyn.

That wire transfer occurred in late 2013 and was described as an advance on the remodel. Though work initially started, none has been performed in the last year and a half; cinderblocks and steel beams line the front yard. A stop-work order on the project is dated February 1, after Manafort secured the new loan. Neighbors have complained about Manafort’s “eyesore” of a project. Manafort told the New York Post that he hired a new architect and planned to complete the conversion by the end of this year.

But in December 2015, Manafort told his tax preparer that the money for the home equity loan “will allow me to pay back the [another Manafort mortgage] in full.” The complaint alleges that Manafort had no intention of actually converting the home with those funds.

Manafort also got a $3 million mortgage loan against his Trump Tower property in 2015, issued by UBS Bank USA, which comes due in 2040.

Adding up all the outstanding indebtedness on the Trump Tower, Union Street, and Howard Street properties, and as of February, Manafort had $12.33 million in home equity loans outstanding, less any principal payments made since they were issued.

In February, Manafort never responded to repeated requests for comment. He’s now in FBI custody. The Justice Department will seek to seize the Howard Street and Union Street properties if Manafort is convicted.

Top photo: President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort in New York on May 4, 2016.
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/30/pau ... onths-ago/

Manafort Was in Debt to Pro-Russia Interests, Cyprus Records Show
By MIKE McINTIREJULY 19, 2017

Paul J. Manafort at Trump Tower in Manhattan last August, days before he resigned as Donald J. Trump’s campaign manager. Credit Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Financial records filed last year in the secretive tax haven of Cyprus, where Paul J. Manafort kept bank accounts during his years working in Ukraine and investing with a Russian oligarch, indicate that he had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in March 2016.

The money appears to have been owed by shell companies connected to Mr. Manafort’s business activities in Ukraine when he worked as a consultant to the pro-Russia Party of Regions. The Cyprus documents obtained by The New York Times include audited financial statements for the companies, which were part of a complex web of more than a dozen entities that transferred millions of dollars among them in the form of loans, payments and fees.

Photo

President Vladimir V. Putin with the Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska in 2013. In a 2015 court complaint, Mr. Deripaska claimed that Mr. Manafort and his partners owed him $19 million related to a failed investment in a Ukrainian cable television business. Credit Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
The records, which include details for numerous loans, were certified as accurate by an accounting firm as of December 2015, several months before Mr. Manafort joined the Trump campaign, and were filed with Cyprus government authorities in 2016. The notion of indebtedness on the part of Mr. Manafort also aligns with assertions made in a court complaint filed in Virginia in 2015 by the Russian oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, who claimed Mr. Manafort and his partners owed him $19 million related to a failed investment in a Ukrainian cable television business.

After The Times shared some of the documents with representatives of Mr. Manafort, a spokesman, Jason Maloni, did not address whether the debts might have existed at one time. But he maintained that the Cyprus records were “stale and do not purport to reflect any current financial arrangements.”

Photo

A financial statement for a Cyprus shell company, Lucicle Consultants, showing a $9.9 million loan to a Delaware company connected to Mr. Manafort.
“Manafort is not indebted to Mr. Deripaska or the Party of Regions, nor was he at the time he began working for the Trump campaign,” Mr. Maloni said. “The broader point, which Mr. Manafort has maintained from the beginning, is that he did not collude with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.” (Mr. Manafort resigned as campaign manager last August amid questions about his past work in Ukraine.)

Still, the Cyprus documents offer the most detailed view yet into the murky financial world inhabited by Mr. Manafort in the years before he joined the Trump campaign.

Photo

Mr. Manafort’s political consulting operation was run out of a first-floor office on Sofiivska Street in Kiev, Ukraine. Credit Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times
Mr. Manafort is one of several former Trump associates known to be the focus of inquiries into Russian meddling in the presidential election. He was among those in attendance at a meeting in June 2016 at which Donald Trump Jr. was told they would receive compromising information on Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.

Continue reading the main story


Mr. Manafort’s Cyprus-related business activities are under scrutiny by investigators looking into his finances during and after his years as a consultant to the Party of Regions in Ukraine. He recently filed a long-overdue report with the Justice Department disclosing his lobbying efforts in Ukraine through early 2014, when his main client, President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine, was ousted in a popular uprising and fled to Russia.

Photo

LOAV Advisers, a Cyprus company linked to Mr. Manafort, reported a $7.8 million loan from an entity associated with Mr. Deripaska.
The Cyprus documents detail transactions that occurred in 2012 and 2013, during the peak of Mr. Manafort’s decade-long tenure as a political consultant and investor in the former Soviet republic, where his past work remains a source of controversy. Last year, his name surfaced in a handwritten ledger showing $12.7 million designated for him by the Party of Regions, and documents recovered from his former office in Kiev suggest some of that money was routed through offshore shell companies and disguised as payment for computer hardware.

The byzantine nature of the transactions reflected in the Cyprus records obscures the reasons that money flowed among the various parties, and it is possible they were characterized as loans for another purpose, like avoiding taxes that would otherwise be owed on income or equity investments.

Photo

Ivan Fursin, a Party of Regions lawmaker, appears to have ties to Lucicle Consultants. Credit UNIAN (Ukrainian Independent News and Information Agency)
One of the Manafort-related debts listed in the Cyprus records, totaling $7.8 million, was owed to Oguster Management Limited, a company in the British Virgin Islands connected to Mr. Deripaska. The debtor was a Cyprus company, LOAV Advisers, that the Deripaska court complaint says was set up by Mr. Manafort to make investments with Mr. Deripaska, a billionaire close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The loan is unsecured, bears 2 percent interest and has “no specified repayment date,” according to a financial statement for LOAV.

The other debt, for $9.9 million, was owed to Lucicle Consultants, a Cyprus company that appears to have ties to a Party of Regions member of Parliament, Ivan Fursin. Lucicle, whose precise ownership is unclear, is linked to Mr. Fursin through another offshore entity, Mistaro Ventures, which is registered in St. Kitts and Nevis and listed on a government financial disclosure form that Mr. Fursin filed in Ukraine. Mistaro transferred millions to Lucicle in February 2012 shortly before Lucicle made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C., a Delaware company that Mr. Manafort previously used to buy real estate in New York. The loan to Jesand was unsecured, with a 3.5 percent interest rate, and payable on demand.

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There is no indication from the financial statements that the loans had been repaid as of the time they were filed in December 2015. The statements contain a note saying that as of January 2014, the debts and assets for Lucicle and LOAV had been assigned to “a related party,” which is not identified. The records define related parties as entities that are under common control, suggesting that the assignment did not affect the ultimate debtors and creditors. The statements also said there had been no other changes after the financial reporting period covered by them, which was for the 2013 calendar year.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska declined to comment. Mr. Deripaska appears to have stopped pursuing his court action against Mr. Manafort and his former investment partners, Rick Gates and Rick Davis, in late 2015. In addition to the $19 million he said he had invested with Mr. Manafort, Mr. Deripaska claimed he paid Mr. Manafort an additional $7.3 million in management fees.


Mr. Manafort has previously said any payments he received for his Ukraine activities were aboveboard and made via wire transfers to an American bank. The Cyprus records suggest that at least some transactions originated with shell companies in tax havens like the Seychelles and the British Virgin Islands, and passed through financial institutions on Cyprus, including Hellenic Bank and Cyprus Popular Bank.

Mr. Manafort’s name does not show up in the Cyprus records. However, hints of his dealings in Ukraine appear throughout.

A 23-page financial statement for a Cyprus shell, Black Sea View Limited, lists transactions that include one with Pericles Capital Partners. Both Black Sea View and Pericles Capital are identified in court papers filed by Mr. Deripaska in the Cayman Islands as part of the corporate structure that Mr. Manafort put together to invest in a Ukrainian telecommunications business, Black Sea Cable. The same statement also reports what are described as $9.2 million in loans received in 2012 from four other entities, including one controlled by two Seychelles companies, Intrahold A.G. and Monohold A.G., which Ukrainian authorities have asserted were involved in the looting of public assets by allies of the Yanukovych government. The Black Sea Cable business was controlled at one point by Monohold and Intrahold.

Similarly, Manafort-connected entities appear in the financial records for Lucicle Consultants, the Cyprus shell that received financing from a company associated with Mr. Fursin, the Party of Regions politician in Ukraine. Mr. Fursin did not respond to a request for comment. Lucicle received money from Black Sea View and PEM Advisers Limited, another firm identified in court papers as controlled by Mr. Manafort. It also made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C.

Jesand appears to be a conflation of Jessica and Andrea, the names of Mr. Manafort’s two daughters. In hacked text messages belonging to Andrea Manafort that were posted last year on a website used by Ukrainian hackers, Jesand is mentioned in the context of financial dealings involving the Manaforts. Jesand was used by Mr. Manafort and his daughter Andrea in 2007 to buy a Manhattan condominium for $2.5 million.

The condo was one of several expensive pieces of real estate that Mr. Manafort bought, often with cash, during and after his time in Ukraine. He also invested millions with his son-in-law, Jeffrey Yohai, who set up a business to buy and redevelop luxury properties in the Los Angeles area. The business failed amid accusations of fraud by another former investor, who claimed Mr. Yohai had exploited his connection to Mr. Manafort to raise funds.

Last year, while trying to salvage his investments with Mr. Yohai, Mr. Manafort embarked on a borrowing spree in the United States, obtaining mortgages totaling more than $20 million on properties controlled by him and his wife. The F.B.I. and the New York attorney general’s office are investigating some of Mr. Manafort’s real estate dealings, including the loans he obtained last year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/us/p ... trump.html

What you need to know about Manafort indictment, Papadopoulos guilty plea

By John Kruzel on Monday, October 30th, 2017 at 5:36 p.m.

The special counsel’s investigation into possible ties between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia escalated dramatically with news that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business associate were indicted on a dozen felony counts, including money laundering.

Separately, a foreign policy adviser to the campaign pleaded guilty to misleading the FBI about outreach efforts to Russian government officials.

These mark the most significant developments to date in special counsel Robert Mueller’s five-month-old investigation. Here’s what you need to know.

The charges against Manafort and Gates
The 12 charges against Manafort and Gates fall broadly into three categories: failing to disclose lobbying activities on behalf of foreign entities, financial crimes and making false statements. (They pleaded not guilty to all charges.)

The first group of charges relates to their work on behalf of Ukraine, for which they’re charged with failing to fully and accurately disclose their activities as foreign agents.

Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates made tens of millions of dollars lobbying on behalf of a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine and the man who led it into power, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

But according to the indictment, from roughly 2008 through 2014, Manafort and Gates did not register with the U.S. attorney general as agents working on behalf of Ukrainian interests, as required by law. A separate count alleges they made false and misleading statements about their activities.

The second group of charges relates to financial crimes, including money laundering.

In order to hide the money from the U.S. government, the indictment states, Manafort and Gates "laundered the money through scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnerships and back accounts." Manafort and Gates also stand accused of failing to report financial interests held overseas.

Finally, one count alleges that Manafort and Gates made false statements on their submissions to the U.S. Justice Department.

Why what they're charged with is criminal
Manafort and Gates have been charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, for failing to disclose lobbying activities on behalf of foreign entities. Congress passed this law in 1938 amid worries that foreign governments would try to infiltrate the United States.

The law requires agents of foreign interests to register with the Justice Department and outline the terms of their agreement, as well as income and expenditures on behalf of the foreign interest, and updating their disclosure every six months.

"Lawmakers wanted to create barriers to infiltration and to expose hidden foreign lobbying on questionable positions that don’t focus on ‘patriotic purposes,’ " said Jed Shugerman, a professor at Fordham Law School.

Shugerman said there are longstanding statutes on the books that outlaw money laundering and that require disclosure of foreign assets and bank accounts. He said money laundering laws have been rewritten through the years to create a new tool to combat organized crime and those who assist it.

Statutes that make it illegal to provide false statements date back to before the Civil War, he said.

Shugerman noted that a person does not need to be under oath when they make a false statement to the FBI in order to violate the law. That makes the law broader than perjury laws, which makes it illegal to tell untruths in a judicial proceeding after a witness has sworn an oath.

What Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to
In a separate development, foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos agreed to plead guilty to making false statements to the FBI.

Papadopoulos misled the bureau about the timing of his involvement with the campaign, as well as the significance of interactions he had with people he understood to be connected to Russian government officials.

According to the court filing, Papadopoulos falsely told the FBI that he was not part of the Trump campaign when a person described as an "overseas professor" told him that Russians possessed "dirt" on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails." In fact, Papadopoulos learned of the "dirt" in late April 2016, more than a month after signing on as a Trump adviser.

Papadopoulos also falsely downplayed the significance of his interactions with the professor. In his interview with the FBI, he dismissed the professor as "a nothing," that he thought the professor was "just a guy talk(ing) up connections or something," and believed he was "BS’ing to be completely honest with you."

But according to the court filing, Papadopoulos "understood the professor to have substantial connections to high-level Russian government officials," including officials in Moscow.

Papadopoulos also failed to disclose to the FBI that the professor had introduced him to someone in Moscow with a purported connection to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He also misled the FBI about the timing and significance of his meeting with a female Russian national who he mistakenly believed was related to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

How it affects or didn't affect 2016 election
There’s no direct evidence of collusion or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia in the Manafort and Gates indictment, Shugerman said.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders emphasized this point during a briefing with reporters.

"We've been saying from day one, there's been no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, and nothing in the indictment today changes that at all," she said.

Sanders said of Papadopoulos’ guilty plea, "it has nothing to do with the activities of the campaign, it has to do with his failure to tell the truth. It doesn’t have anything to do with the campaign or the campaign’s activities."

But the revelations contained in the Papadopolous court filing are less easily dismissed.

Papadopoulos learned in early March 2016 that he would be an adviser to the Trump campaign on foreign policy, and that one of the campaign’s principal goals was to improve U.S.-Russian relations.

It was after joining the campaign that he cultivated relationships he would try to use to broker an overseas meeting between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials. According to the court filing, the proposed trip never took place.

But Papadopolous’ repeated outreach efforts are sure to raise more questions of collusion, particularly in light of the fact that Donald Trump Jr. accepted a meeting during the campaign that was predicated on the promise that a "Russian government attorney" would deliver damaging information to him about his father’s Democratic opponent as part of the Kremlin’s effort to tip the scales in Trump’s favor.

Papadopoulos’ guilty plea is the result of a negotiated resolution between the defendant and the Justice Department, said Andrew D. Leipold, law professor at University of Illinois College of Law.

But Leipold said it's unclear what the terms of the agreement were, including the extent to which the deal was made in exchange for future or past cooperation.

While it’s not clear exactly what Papadopoulos’ guilty plea means, it contains "all kinds of tea leaves and hints about what’s coming next," said Shugerman.

He believes it’s no coincidence that it was revealed just after Manafort’s indictment, and said it puts additional pressure on Manafort to cooperate with the special counsel.

"It triggers the isolation of Manafort, who realizes how much jeopardy he’s in," Shugerman said.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter ... ent-papad/

Why George Papadopoulos' guilty plea is a much bigger problem for Trump than the Manafort indictment
Chris Cillizza
Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
Updated 5:44 PM ET, Mon October 30, 2017
Former Trump adviser cooperates with Mueller

Former Donald Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort looks on during Game Four of the American League Championship Series at Yankee Stadium on October 17, 2017 in the Bronx borough of New York City.
Toobin on Manafort: Trump is simply wrong

Indictment against Manafort, Gates unsealed


Toobin: Papadopoulos may have worn wire

Toobin on Manafort: Trump is simply wrong

Indictment against Manafort, Gates unsealed


(CNN)Even as President Trump was on Twitter insisting that the indictment of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was meaningless because it involved activities unrelated to Trump or the campaign came news that former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos had pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with, wait for it, Russia.

The Manafort news drew the bigger headlines Monday morning -- understandable given his high-profile role at the top of the Trump campaign. But, the Papadopoulos guilty plea -- and the fact that he has been cooperating with the special counsel investigation since his July arrest -- strikes me as significantly more problematic for Trump and his White House in the medium-to-long term.
This paragraph from the FBI's guilty plea agreement with Papadopoulos is incredible:

"In truth and in fact, however, and as set forth above, defendant PAPADOPOULOS met the Professor for the first time on or about March 14, 2016, after defendant PAPADOPOULOS had already learned he would be a foreign policy advisor for the Campaign; the Professor showed interest in defendant PAPADOPOULOS only after learning of his role on the Campaign; and the Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS about the Russians possessing" dirt" on then-candidate Clinton in late April 2016, more than a month after defendant PAPADOPOULOS had joined the Campaign."
So, Papadopoulos copped to lying to the FBI about the timing of his contacts with Russians. In his initial interview in January 2017, Papadopoulos was insistent that he had reached out to his foreign contact "The Professor" (amazing!) before he had formally joined the Trump presidential campaign. He was arrested in July, pleaded guilty in October and appears to have been cooperating in between.
close dialog

And, most importantly the "Professor" only showed interest in Papadopoulos after it became known that he was employed by the Trump campaign.
That. Is. A. Very. Big. Deal.
The obvious question is why Papadopolous initially lied to the FBI -- despite being warned that doing so would have major consequences. Why, if there was nothing to hide about his relationship -- or attempted relationship with Russian officials -- would Papadopoulos feel the need to put himself in serious legal jeopardy by lying about the timing of his conversations with "the Professor"?
We don't know the answer to that question. But, we do know one reason why Papadopoulos was pursuing the relationship with the Russians; he believed they had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. This, again from Papadopoulos' plea agreement, makes that plain:
"On or about April 26, 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS met the Professor for breakfast at a London hotel. During this meeting, the Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS that he had just returned from a trip to Moscow where he had met with high-level Russian government officials. The Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS that on that trip he (the Professor) learned that the Russians had obtained "dirt" on then-candidate Clinton. The Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS, as defendant PAPADOPOULOS later described to the FBI, that "They [the Russians] have dirt on her"; "the Russians had emails of Clinton"; "they have thousands of emails."
The broad goal of the Russian contact with Papadopoulos was to get Trump to visit Russia during the campaign -- a visit where he would huddle with Russian officials and maybe even meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Obviously, that trip never happened.

So, to recap:
1. "The Professor" only expressed interest in Papadopoulos after it became clear that he would play a role in the Trump campaign as a foreign policy advisor.
2. Papadopoulos lied about the timing of his interactions with "The Professor." Those lies were aimed at suggesting the interactions came before Papadopoulos was an adviser to the Trump campaign. But, in fact, those interactions were because Papadopoulos worked for Trump, not in spite of them
3. Papadopoulos' interactions with "The Professor" were driven by the promise of "dirt" on Clinton in the from of "thousands of emails" regarding Clinton.
4. Papadopoulos seems to have been cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation since July.
Given all of that, it's much harder for Trump and his allies to dismiss Papadopoulos than Manafort. What's more, court documents make clear he was in contact with high-ranking campaign officials about his contacts with the Russians. A senior former campaign adviser told CNN's Gloria Borger that Papadopoulos was not a major player.
"He was a zero. A non-event," the adviser said.
But, what Papadopolous has already admitted to doing -- lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian operatives regarding "dirt" on Trump's general election opponent -- is a very big deal. A bigger deal -- in terms of the investigation into Russia's attempted meddling in the election and allegations of collusion -- than the dozen counts laid out in the Manafort indictment.
And the day is still young!
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/30/politics/ ... index.html

Manafort Monday Turns Into a Very Bad Day for Trump—and Mike Pence
Paul Manafort put the Trump-Pence ticket together and maintained ties to the veep even after leaving the campaign.
By John NicholsTwitter TODAY 2:55 PM


“The technical term for what we do and what law firms, associations and professional groups do is lobbying. For purposes of today, I will admit that in a narrow sense, some people might term it influence peddling,” Paul Manafort admitted in 1989, when he testified regarding his role in a Reagan-era scandal at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Throughout his long career as a Republican Party fixer and influence peddler on behalf of what the Center for Public Integrity termed “the torture lobby”—a global cadre of dictators and strongmen who wanted to make sure the United States did not hold them to account—Manafort has been one of most troublesome creatures in the Washington “swamp” that Donald Trump decried as a presidential contender. Yet Manafort has also worked, from the 1980s on, for his client “Donald”—the New York billionaire who relied on Manafort to help clear hurdles for gambling and real estate endeavors.

When “Donald” ran for Republican presidential nomination, he needed influence peddlers to help him close the deal and organize a functional party convention in Cleveland. So he brought in the torture lobbyist and his associate Rick Gates to manage the campaign.

Manafort managed things for several months, while Gates remained on the Trump team as a key figure in the campaign, the transition process and the planning of the new president’s inauguration. Manafort also maintained a relationship with “Donald,” reportedly continuing to talk with his longtime associate through the remainder of the campaign and into the transition process.

Now that Manafort and Gates have been indicted on 12 counts of money laundering involving at least $18 million, setting up secret overseas bank accounts through which $75 million flowed, lying to federal authorities, and operating as unregistered foreign agents for the government of a Ukrainian leader who linked with the Russians, and now that it has been revealed that George Papadopoulos (a foreign policy adviser to Trump who urged the candidate meet with Russian officials) has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, the word from the White House is that Trump barely knows these guys and that the indictments by special counsel Robert Mueller has focused on figures who had only “limited” contact with the Trump team.

That sounds like the sort of “I-know-nothing” spin that Manafort counseled his clients to employ back in the day when he was working for the cruelest – and most criminal — dictators in the world. They should be recognized as the self-serving lies that they are.

Trump led the lying project with Monday morning tweets that announced, first, “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????” and, second, “….Also, there is NO COLLUSION!”

The truth is that Manafort’s role in the Trump campaign was not “limited.” It was definitional. When Manafort was in charge of making sure that the Republican platform-writing process and convention went smoothly, the party suddenly became dramatically friendlier to Russia – to such an extent that a Washington Post headline on an analysis piece published just before the convention read: “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russia stance on Ukraine.”

There will be many attempts to deny and dissemble. But one thing is certain: Manafort definitely put one man in the West Wing of the White House (and the adjoining Eisenhower Executive Office Building): Mike Pence.

It was Manafort who brought Pence, a scandal-plagued and politically-vulnerable governor of Indiana who had backed Texas Senator Ted Cruz in that state’s Republican primary, into consideration as a vice presidential prospect for Trump. Referring to Trump, Manafort explained last summer that: “I brought him in to meet Pence.” That manipulation, said Manafort, fostered the notion that Pence “had value to Trump as a potential VP nominee.”

But the Manafort-Pence connection was about more than just an introduction of a Republican stalwart the fixer had known for many years to Trump. Veteran Republican strategist John Weaver says: “Remember, Manafort selected the VP and was therefore the most important person on the campaign team.”

Most indications going into the 2016 Republican National Convention were that Trump wanted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to be his running-mate, and that Christie was ready to take the gig.

But, according a CBS report on the negotiations, “Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager at the time, allegedly had another idea in mind.”

The report explained that:

Manafort had arranged for Trump to meet with his first choice for the job on July 13: Indiana Governor Mike Pence. Afterwards, the plans was for Trump and Pence to then fly back to New York together and a formal announcement would be made, a campaign source said of Manafort’s thinking:

What had previously been reported as a “lucky break” by the New York Times was actually a swift political maneuver devised by the now fired campaign manager. Set on changing Trump’s mind, he concocted a story that Trump’s plane had mechanical problems, forcing the soon-to-be Republican nominee to stay the night in Indianapolis for breakfast with the Pence family on Wednesday morning.

Swayed by Pence’s aggressive pitch, Trump agreed to ditch Christie and make Pence his VP the following day, according to a source.

It should be understood that Manafort had allies, especially Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was in the anyone-but-Christie camp because the New Jerseyan had as a federal prosecutor sent Kushner’s dad to jail.

But the Manafort-Pence connection ought not be underestimated. Indeed, when CNN reported that in December, that Manafort had “reemerged as a player in the fight to shape the new administration,” the network explained that “with Pence firmly entrenched in Trump’s inner circle… Manafort — who keeps a home in Trump Tower — has a direct line to top decision-makers.”

Pence ran the transition team, which populated the Trump administration with scandalous figures who have been accused of serious wrongdoing, including ousted White House National Security Advisor Mike Flynn. After Flynn exited the administration under a cloud, Pence adopted his own “I-know-nothing” stance. But then it was revealed that Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, had informed Pence in a November 18, 2016, letter that: he was concerned about ethical issues that would arise if “Lt. Gen. Flynn’s involvement in advising Mr. Trump on matters relating to Turkey or Russia – including attending classified briefings on those matters…”

Cummings said Pence and the transition team had “17 or 20 red lights” regarding Flynn, yet Flynn got security post.

There is a fantasy that suggests that Mike Pence is a mere spectator – and an ignorant one at that – when it comes to the scandals associated with the Trump campaign, the Trump transition and the Trump administration. That has never been true. Pence has often been at or near the center of things. And, as attention turns toward Manafort, it must also turn toward Pence.

That does not mean that Vice President Pence’s connections and statements and actions are of more concern that those of President Trump. But it does mean that Trump will not be the only member of the 2016 Republican ticket who is going to face serious scrutiny in 2017 and beyond.
https://www.thenation.com/article/manaf ... ike-pence/

[seemslikeadream]

The White House continues to lie about this man's role in the campaign. Pathetic.

Papadopolous is the big one - lesser charges but it is about collusion. And he is cooperating. Bad news for Trump.
George Papadopoulos, foreign policy adviser to Trump campaign, admits he lied to FBI




Feds have been in the midst of a full scale investigation of Trump-Russia election collusion since at least January, when Papadopoulos lied to the FBI.

Trump Advisor Knew Russians Had Clinton Emails
NEWS | OCT 30, 2017

The newly unsealed Statement of the Offense posted online by the Justice Department Monday reveals that a Russian operative known as the Professor told Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails" in April 2016.

A timeline of Russian cyber attacks shows that hackers breached John Podesta's email on March 19, 2016 and infiltrated the DNC's network (for a second time) in April. The media does not start reporting on the hacks until June 14, 2016.

When questioned, Papadopoulos downplayed the Professor's relevance and connections to Russian officials and lied to the FBI, saying he received that information prior to knowing he would be a part of the Trump campaign:

professor tells papadopoulos about email
Via Buzzfeed:

Papadopoulos' guilty plea to charges of lying to the FBI provides the first suggestion that the Trump campaign knew well before its Democratic rivals that Russia had hacked Democratic computer systems and had purloined thousands of Clinton-related emails.

(...)

But it's not clear who in the Trump campaign Papadopoulos told about the emails or how far up the campaign's hierarchy the information might have gone. The document identifies Papadopoulos' campaign supervisor only as “the Campaign Supervisor” and provides no names for other campaign officials with whom he communicated.

(...)

The summary contains no indication that Papadopoulos passed the information about the emails on to the campaign, but the document says he continued to message the senior policy adviser and a “high-ranking campaign official” about his contacts with the Russians until at least August 2016.
https://investigaterussia.org/media/201 ... ton-emails

Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS’S PLEA DEAL IS VERY, VERY BAD NEWS FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS
Marcy Wheeler
October 30 2017, 4:12 p.m.
THE BIGGEST NEWS of Mueller Monday — the rollout of a money-laundering indictment against Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser, Paul Manafort and campaign aide Rick Gates, and the unsealing of a false-statements plea deal by another campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos — may involve someone not named explicitly in either indictment: Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

That’s because Sessions has repeatedly testified to the Senate that he knows nothing about any collusion with the Russians. (Though in his most recent appearance, he categorized that narrowly by saying he did not “conspire with Russia or an agent of the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”)

But the Papadopoulos plea shows that Sessions — then acting as Trump’s top foreign policy adviser — was in a March 31, 2016, meeting with Trump, at which Papadopoulos explained “he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.” It also shows that Papadopoulos kept a number of campaign officials in the loop on his efforts to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin, though they secretly determined that the meeting “should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal,” itself a sign the campaign was trying to hide its efforts to make nice with the Russians.

Papadopoulos also learned, on April 26, that the Russians “have dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” A key part of Papadopoulos’s cooperation must pertain to what he told the Trump campaign about these emails. According to his complaint, he originally claimed he hadn’t told anyone on the campaign about the dirt on Clinton because he didn’t know if it was real. But as his plea makes clear, after being arrested, he “met with the Government on numerous occasions to provide information and answer questions.” There would be no reason for Papadopoulos to lie about the significance of the emails in January unless he did so to hide his discussions of them with the rest of the campaign.

That suggests the campaign knew, a month before Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. took a meeting with a Russian lawyer to get dirt on Clinton, that the Russians had already told Papadopoulos about dirt in thousands of stolen emails.

To be sure, Papadopoulos’s plea perhaps hurts Trump the most. After all, Trump was in the March 31 meeting too, along with Sessions. Trump personally intervened in the White House spin about the June 9, 2016, meeting, pushing the line — and the lie — that it pertained to adoptions rather than obtaining dirt on Clinton.

But unlike Trump, Sessions’s claims about such meetings came in sworn testimony to the Senate. During his confirmation process, Sessions was asked a key question by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn.: “If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?”

“Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities,” Sessions responded. “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.”

The question, however, was about Sessions’s knowledge of such communications, and we now know he was in a meeting in which they were discussed.

More recently, on October 18, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked Sessions a series of questions about his knowledge of interactions with Russians, including whether he had discussed emails with Russian officials since the campaign. To that question, Sessions said he “did not recall.”

Franken then asked, in an attempt to clarify the confirmation questions, “You don’t believe that surrogates from the Trump campaign had communications with the Russians?”

“I did not — and I’m not aware of anyone else that did. I don’t believe that it happened,” said the attorney general whose own department had, two weeks earlier, already gotten a guilty plea from a campaign surrogate describing such discussions with Russians.

Most curiously, Sessions seemed unable to answer what kind of communication he had had with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. “Have you been requested to be interviewed by the special counsel?” Leahy asked. “You’ll have to ask the special counsel,” the attorney general responded. While Sessions’s spokesperson later made it clear he hadn’t been approached for an interview, that says nothing about any discussions about the possibility of testimony.

It’s part of a pattern that began early for Sessions. He initially denied categorically meeting with Russians during the campaign, but was forced to walk that back when it emerged he had met at least twice with then-Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He then claimed that the meetings had focused purely on foreign affairs and his senatorial duties, a claim rebutted by Kislyak himself, who told his superiors that he spoke with Sessions about the 2016 campaign.

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/30/jef ... y-general/

The mysterious professor who tried to connect Trump to the Kremlin is probably Joseph Mifsud

WRITTEN BY

Max de Haldevang
OBSESSION

"America First"
October 30, 2017
Trump campaign foreign-policy advisor George Papadopoulos’ relationship with a mysterious unnamed professor was at the center of the first guilty plea in special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia campaign meddling.
In a 14-page Statement of Offense stipulated to by Papadopoulos, Mueller’s office outlines how the campaign aide was in contact with the professor, who put him in touch with a Russian foreign ministry official, and an unnamed women whom Papadopoulos incorrectly believed was Putin’s niece. The contacts were initially aimed at arranging a meeting between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The Washington Post has reported (paywall) that Joseph Mifsud, on the staff of Stirling University in Scotland—and, the Post said, also with the London Academy of Diplomacy—is “likely” the professor in question. The Post based its assessment on an email described to the Post in which Papadopoulos reportedly identifies Mifsud.
(The Post reports Mifsud told them in August that he had “absolutely no contact with the Russian government” and said he was an academic whose only ties to Russia are through “academic links.” Neither Quartz nor the Post have been able to reach Mifsud for comment after news of Papadopoulos’ guilty plea.)
Quartz has found further evidence that Mifsud is probably the professor in question. Here’s what points in that direction:
1. Mifsud attended a conference at Russia’s Valdai Club on the same dates as “the professor”

“I am flying to Moscow on the 18th for a Valdai meeting, plus other meetings at the Duma [Russia’s parliament],” the professor emailed Papadopoulos on April 11, 2016, according to the prosecutors’ statement. Mifsud spoke on April 19 at a panel at the Valdai Club, a think tank with close ties to Putin’s government and at which Putin appears every year for a headline event.
Mifsud has a profile page on the Valdai Club’s website and has written three articles for the think tank.
2. Mifsud matches “the professor’s” description in the affidavit

Papadopoulos told the FBI that a “professor of diplomacy based in London” who is “a citizen of a country in the Mediterranean” and “an associate of several Russian nationals” is the person who told him Russians have “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, including thousands of emails. Mifsud is a Maltese citizen, who reportedly teaches at the London Academy of Diplomacy.
3. Mifsud and Papadopoulos are friends on Facebook

Here’s a screenshot:
5Screen Shot 2017-10-30 at 18.52.4

4. Mifsud knows the man who is probably the Russian foreign ministry contact

The Post has also reported (paywall), based on emails it has seen, that Ivan Timofeev, a “senior MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] official” is likely the Russian official Papadopoulos was in contact with (the men were introduced by “the professor,” according to the prosecutors’ statement.).
Mifsud and Timofeev definitely know each other: Timofeev moderated the panel at which Mifsud spoke in April 2016. The two men were reported to have appeared at an event at the Russian International Affairs Council (a state-funded think tank where Timofeev is listed on the staff) to present Global Energy 2015-2016, a report that they co-authored with several other academics.
5. This wasn’t Mifsud’s first visit to Russia

Diplomacy professor Nabil Ayad, who said he has worked with Mifsud, told Quartz that Mifsud, “Goes to Russia occasionally to attend conferences and meetings. He doesn’t stay for long, normally two or three days but he has, I think, good links with universities there.”
“I know that he has good links with the Russians but I can’t tell whether he has links with officials there,” said Ayad. “But he doesn’t have any professional…it’s a matter of education and relations as far as I know.”
When asked if it was plausible that Mifsud helped connect Papadopoulos to the Russian government, he said: “Maybe it was a casual occasion because he happened to be there and he knew some Russians and introduced them, but I don’t think he was trying to do anything sinister,” he said.
Ayad believed Mifsud is currently in Rome (the court document states that Mifsud and Papadopoulos met in Italy) and was trying to phone Mifsud to put him in contact with Quartz but could not get hold of him. (When Quartz phoned Mifsud’s cell phone, it went straight to voicemail.) “It’s important for him to clear his name,” Ayad said.
6. Mifsud’s profile disappeared from a London legal practice’s website as rumors swirled

On the morning of Oct. 30, Mifsud was listed as the director of International Strategic Development at the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP). Later that afternoon, his profile page appeared to have been taken down. (It is still accessible via a cached link.)
The LCILP’s phone went straight to voicemail when called. Early on Monday, the LCILP’s address was listed as: Ground Floor South, 14 Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn, London. When Quartz visited that address—which is at one of London’s four medieval Inns of Court, of which every British barrister has to be a member—it didn’t find the name listed anywhere. A man found exiting the small building told Quartz he works there and he had never heard of the company—”and I spend a lot of time here,” he added.
Later on Monday, that address had been removed from the website. Quartz visited the other address on the website, just around the corner at 8 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and found a buzzer with LCILP’s name on it. When pressed, a visitor was put straight to an answerphone. Inside the building, LCILP’s name was on a mailbox but there was no other sign of the company in the building, which had at least one floor that seemed to be unoccupied.
So, just who is Joseph Mifsud?

His scrubbed profile on the LCILP website lists myriad positions that Mifsud has filled, as does a profile on the European Parliament’s website (pdf). He is president of the Euro-Mediterranean University in Slovenia, according to the EU, and has worked in Malta’s foreign ministry, representing the island nation at the Council of Europe.
The LCILP says he has worked in Malta’s ministry of education, is a member of the Valdai Club and the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank. It lists his geographical areas of expertise as basically the whole world (outside Latin America): Europe, USA, The Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
Mifsud is listed as a “professorial teaching fellow” at Stirling University. The administration support officer at the university said he was a dean for international development and diplomacy but that “he’s not often on campus here…he does a lot of traveling.”
When Quartz phoned the Academy of Diplomacy at Loughborough University London, a reporter was told that Mifsud was not listed in any of their internal systems.
https://qz.com/1115591/the-professor-in ... ph-mifsud/

Shadowy ‘Professor’ Is at the Center of the Latest Revelation in the Trump-Russia Probe
By Chris Quintana OCTOBER 30, 2017
Updated (10/30/2017, 2:52 p.m.) with news that The Washington Post had identified the professor.

Newly released court documents reveal that a person described only as a “professor” may have played the go-between for an adviser to the Trump campaign and the Russian government, according to The New York Times.

Little is known about the academic other than the brief descriptions provided in the court documents.

The newspaper reported that George Papadopoulos, the adviser in question, spoke in 2016 with the professor, who claimed to know that the Russian government had intelligence on Hillary Clinton.

The documents come on the heels of the news that a former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was indicted on felony charges as part of the investigation led by Robert Mueller, the Department of Justice’s independent counsel. Mr. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the professor. The Times tried to contact Mr. Papadopoulos, but didn’t receive a response.

“The professor told defendant Papadopoulos, as defendant Papadopoulos later described to the FBI, that ‘they [the Russians] have dirt on her,’” the court documents read. “The Russians had emails of Clinton”; “they have thousands of emails.”

So what else do we know about this professor? According to the documents, he is based in London, and he took interest in Mr. Papadopoulos only after learning that the latter had a connection to Mr. Trump’s campaign. “Initially, the professor seemed uninterested in defendant Papadopoulos,” the documents state. “However, after defendant Papadopoulos informed the professor about his joining the campaign, the professor appeared to take great interest in defendant Papadopoulos.”

The documents also reveal that the professor is close to the Russian government, and allegedly introduced Mr. Papadopoulos to a woman — referred to in the court documents as “the female Russian national” — said to be a relative of the Russian president Vladimir V. Putin. However, Mr. Papadopoulos later learned that was false.

It wouldn’t be the first time something the professor promised to Mr. Papadopoulos failed to materialize. “In addition, while defendant Mr. Papadopoulos expected that the professor and the female Russian national would introduce him to the Russian ambassador in London, they never did,” says a footnote in the court documents.

The professor did appear to introduce Mr. Papadopoulos to a member of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And in April, over a breakfast with Mr. Papadopoulos in Washington, D.C., the professor claimed to meet with several “high-level Russian government officials,” and learned “the Russians had obtained ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Clinton.”
And the professor, according to the court documents, appeared to serve as a liaison between the Russian government and Mr. Papadopoulos. “We will continue to liaise through you with the Russian counterparts in terms of what is needed for a high-level meeting of Mr. Trump with the Russian Federation," the professor is said to have written to Mr. Papadopoulos.

It’s unclear from the documents where the professor is employed, though at one point he appears to refer to members of the Russian government as “colleagues.” And if the account is true, the professor had the power to arrange meetings.

“I have just talked to my colleagues from the MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs],” the professor wrote. “The[y] are open for cooperation. One of the options is to make a meeting for you at the North America Desk, if you are in Moscow.”

Though the professor was unidentified in the court documents, The Washington Post on Monday reported that the unnamed professor was Joseph Mifsud, an academic said to be the director of the London Academy of Diplomacy.

The Post reported that it contacted Mr. Mifsud in August to ask if he had any ties to Russia, and that he denied any connection. He didn’t return the newspaper’s request for comment on Monday.

In 2011, The Chronicle interviewed Mr. Mifsud, in his capacity as then-president of the Euro-Mediterranean University, for an article on how globalization was changing university consortia.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Shadow ... -at/241602

The Plot Against America
Michelle Goldberg
Michelle Goldberg OCT. 30, 2017


On Monday morning, after America learned that Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Manafort’s lobbying partner, Rick Gates, had been indicted and turned themselves in to federal authorities, the president tried to distance himself from the unfolding scandal. “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign,” the president wrote in one tweet. A few minutes later, he added, in another, “Also, there is NO COLLUSION!”

At almost the exact same time, news broke suggesting that the F.B.I. has evidence of collusion. We learned that one of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy aides, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his attempts to solicit compromising information on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. Despite Trump’s hysterical denials and attempts at diversion, the question is no longer whether there was cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia, but how extensive it was.

In truth, that’s been clear for a while. If it’s sometimes hard to grasp the Trump campaign’s conspiracy against our democracy, it’s due less to lack of proof than to the impudent improbability of its B-movie plotline. Monday’s indictments offer evidence of things that Washington already knows but pretends to forget. Trump, more gangster than entrepreneur, has long surrounded himself with bottom-feeding scum, and for all his nationalist bluster, his campaign was a vehicle for Russian subversion.

We already knew that Manafort offered private briefings about the campaign to Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The indictment accuses him of having been an unregistered foreign agent for another Putin-aligned oligarch, the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Trump wasn’t paying Manafort, who reportedly sold himself to the candidate by offering to work free. But he intended to profit from his connection with the campaign, emailing an associate, “How do we use to get whole?” If there were no other evidence against Trump, we could conclude that he was grotesquely irresponsible in opening his campaign up to corrupt foreign infiltration.


But of course there is other evidence against Trump. His campaign was told that Russia wanted to help it, and it welcomed such help. On June 3, remember, the music publicist Rob Goldstone emailed Donald Trump Jr. to broker a Trump Tower meeting at which a Russian source would deliver “very high level and sensitive information” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. responded with delight: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

The guilty plea by Papadopoulos indicates what information Trump Jr. might have been expecting. An obscure figure in foreign policy circles, Papadopoulos was one of five people who Trump listed as foreign policy advisers during a Washington Post editorial board meeting last year. A court filing, whose truth Papadopoulos affirms, says that in April 2016, he met with a professor who he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials.” The professor told him that Russians had “dirt” on Clinton, including “thousands of emails.” (The Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta had been hacked in March.)

In the following months, Papadopoulos and his supervisors emailed back and forth about plans for a campaign trip to Russia. According to the court filing, one campaign official emailed another, “We need someone to communicate that D.T. is not doing these trips.” D.T. clearly stood for Donald Trump. The email continued, “It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”

Thanks to an August Washington Post story, we know that this email was sent by Manafort. Some have interpreted the exchange to mean that Manafort wanted a low-level person to decline the invitation, not to go to Russia. But the court filing also cites a “campaign supervisor” encouraging Papadopoulos and “another foreign policy adviser” to make the trip. Papadopoulos never went to Russia, but the foreign policy adviser Carter Page did.

So here’s where we are. Trump put Manafort, an accused money-launderer and unregistered foreign agent, in charge of his campaign. Under Manafort’s watch, the campaign made at least two attempts to get compromising information about Clinton from Russia. Russia, in turn, provided hacked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks.


Russia also ran a giant disinformation campaign against Clinton on social media and attempted to hack voting systems in at least 21 states. In response to Russia’s election meddling, Barack Obama’s administration imposed sanctions. Upon taking office, Trump reportedly made secret efforts to lift them. He fired the F.B.I. director James Comey to stop his investigation into “this Russia thing,” as he told Lester Holt. The day after the firing, he met with Russia’s foreign minister and its ambassador to America, and told them: “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

We’ve had a year of recriminations over the Clinton campaign’s failings, but Trump clawed out his minority victory only with the aid of a foreign intelligence service. On Monday we finally got indictments, but it’s been obvious for a year that this presidency is a crime.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/opin ... d=tw-share

While the world was marveling at Trump’s crowd size fetish during that fateful first week of his presidency, George Papadopoulos and allegedly Mike Flynn were lying to the FBI, Sally Yates was scrambling to warn the White House, and Donald Trump himself was pressing Jim Comey for personal loyalty in a private dinner. Notably, the seeds of what would become the first charges in the special counsel probe came four months before Robert Mueller arrived on the scene. Sam Thielman reviews the newly updated timeline for the last week of January.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the ... as-a-doozy

First Charges In Mueller’s Russia Probe Stem From Trump Admin’s Earliest Days


By SAM THIELMAN Published OCTOBER 31, 2017 6:00 AM

During the Trump administration’s very first week in office, the seeds were planted for the initial charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

Thanks to an indictment unsealed Monday morning, we now know former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos lied about the extent of his Russian contacts in an interview with FBI agents on Jan. 27, exactly one week after the inauguration. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to making false statements in that interview about his Russian contacts.

Mueller’s appointment didn’t come until May, after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, who had been overseeing the bureau’s probe into Russian interference in the U.S. election—and the collection of evidence for that investigation had already begun before Trump had even taken his hand off the Bible. The day before inauguration, the New York Times reported that law enforcement and intelligence sources were already looking at intercepted communications and financial records “as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.” Comey later testified before Congress that the FBI investigation into those links began in July 2016; Manafort was arrested on Monday.

Papadopoulos wasn’t even the first campaign adviser accused of misleading the FBI during the initial week of Trump’s presidency: Three days before Papadopoulos’ interview, Michael Flynn, at the time Trump’s national security advisor, denied to FBI investigators that he had discussed sanctions on Russia with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak—even though the Washington Post cited U.S. officials saying Flynn had indeed discussed sanctions with Kislyak before Trump took office.

The same day that Papadopoulos met with the FBI, then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates met with White House Counsel Don McGahn to share her concerns about Flynn’s “underlying conduct” for a second time.

The following Monday, Trump fired Yates.

Under oath before Congress, Yates later asserted that problems with Flynn went much farther than being “compromised by the Russians,” as she said the Justice Department believed under her tenure.

“Not only did we believe that the Russians knew this but that they likely had proof of this information,” Yates said in May. “And that created a compromise situation, a situation where the national security advisor essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians.”

Mueller’s investigators are looking into Flynn’s failure to disclose contacts with Russian officials during the campaign and transition, as well as his work on a lobbying contract for a Turkish businessman, and whether he played any role in a former GOP operative’s efforts to obtain Hillary Clinton’s private emails. Flynn has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

That same Friday Papadopoulos lied and McGahn met Yates, Trump also surprised Comey with a private dinner, just the two men alone.

“I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” Trump told him, according to Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey interpreted the dinner as “at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship,” he told the committee.

Trump went on to fire Comey on May 9, giving rise to Mueller’s appointment.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... first-week

Robert Mueller Is Just Getting Started

Legal experts said Monday's revelations show the special counsel is “maximizing the clout” of the Russia investigation.

Matt Ford and Adam SerwerOct 30, 2017
Updated at 5:04 p.m.

With the release of his first indictments and a surprise plea deal on Monday morning, Special Counsel Robert Mueller sketched a partial outline of his team’s investigation into Russian electoral meddling and took control of a news narrative that had been increasingly dominated by his conservative critics.

Legal experts said the court filings indicate Mueller is running a serious, deliberative, and far-sighted inquiry. “I would say this is High-Level Special Counsel Investigation 101,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the Watergate special-prosecutor task force. “Mueller is operating by the book.”

The first wave of charges came against two top Trump campaign officials, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates. Their indictment describes a conspiracy to evade taxes and launder at least $75 million of foreign income into the United States from offshore accounts. According to the special counsel’s office, Manafort used the money to “enjoy a lavish lifestyle” by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on expensive suits, antique rugs, and other luxuries.

Both men were charged with 12 criminal counts related to their business activities in Ukraine before the election, including conspiracy to commit money laundering, filing false statements about millions of dollars in foreign income, and acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Manafort and Gates pled not guilty to all of them in a court appearance Monday afternoon. If convicted, both men would face significant prison time.


“These are very serious criminal charges, and it reflects a lot of detail and appears to be a strong, very professional federal criminal case,” said John Q. Barrett, a St. John’s University law professor and former Iran-Contra associate special counsel. “I doubt it’s the only front, or that it’s the end point of the investigative activity.”

Manafort and Gates pled not guilty in federal court on Monday afternoon. Manafort’s attorney, Kevin Downing, issued a statement calling the indictment “ridiculous” and accusing Mueller of pursuing a “novel theory” of prosecution under the Federal Agents Registration Act. Downing stopped short however, of specifically denying any of the charges laid out in the indictment. He also said that “President Donald Trump was correct. There is no evidence the Trump Campaign colluded with the Russia government.”

Shortly after the Manafort and Gates indictments went public, President Trump took to Twitter in response. He dismissed the allegations against his two former staffers, noting the reported activity predated their time on his campaign. He also repeated his attempts to shift the focus onto Hillary Clinton, his former 2016 opponent.



Conservative media outlets had embraced a similar theme in the run-up to Monday’s revelations. Trump allies seized on reports over the last week that Clinton campaign officials helped fund the controversial Steele dossier in an apparent effort to delegitimize Mueller’s probe. They also rehashed discredited allegations about her involvement in an Obama-era uranium deal that involved Russia. By Friday, Fox News commentators claimed a media cover-up on Clinton’s behalf, while The Wall Street Journal editorial board opined that Mueller should step down.


However, their efforts would soon be interrupted. Just over an hour after the Manafort indictment went public on Monday, the special counsel’s office revealed that George Papadopoulos, a former foreign-policy adviser for the Trump campaign, had become a cooperating witness. As part of a plea deal, Papadopoulos admitted to lying to federal investigators about his interactions with Russian nationals and their associates during the campaign.

His indictment offered a trove of new details on the extent of internal Trump campaign discussions about overtures from Moscow’s intermediaries. It described Papadopoulos’s encounters after joining the campaign in early 2016 with “the Professor,” an unnamed figure in London who proffered high-level connections within the Russian government, as well as an unnamed Russian woman claiming to be Putin’s niece. (A footnote in the indictment clarified that she isn’t related to the Russian president.)

Papadopoulos admitted to prosecutors that he tried to use those connections to set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In April 2016, the Professor told him the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, including a cache of thousands of her emails. Those claims came after Russian hackers had penetrated the Democratic National Committee, but months before the cyber-attacks became public knowledge. Along the way, Papadopoulos reportedly received support and encouragement from unidentified Trump campaign officials.


“Manafort might be a bigger fish, but Papadopoulos is a bigger story,” said Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor. “To me, this is the kind of plea deal that puts the c-word—collusion—back on the table.” He pointed to parts of the Papadopoulos indictment that indicated he knew about stolen Clinton campaign emails before Wikileaks began releasing them. Barrett said the indictment also sends a message to the unnamed campaign officials referenced within it. “This is a very strong signal of government interest, relevance, and consequences if they haven’t been forthcoming,” he said.

Papadopoulos’s indictment doesn’t directly prove collusion on its own, but it undermines the Trump White House’s claims of ignorance on behalf of the president and his inner circle. “Russians pursued [Papadopoulos], and he pursued Russians, and the context was the Trump campaign,” Barrett said. “It doesn’t allege anything being accomplished by this channel, but it suggests serious Russian governmental interest in contact with the Trump campaign.”

The one-two punch of the Manafort and Gates indictment, followed by the Papadopoulos plea deal just over an hour later, also suggested that Mueller was taking the hostile political climate into consideration. Before Monday, many observers thought Manafort was the likeliest subject of an expected indictment. But the Papadopoulos revelations came as a complete surprise and undermined conservative talking points.


“Not only does this suggest that Mueller is taking into account the optics and the politics of the moment, but that he’s actually trying to take advantage of them to maximize the clout of the investigation and to control the narrative,” Vladeck said.

Other filings released Monday revealed Papadopoulos was actively cooperating with Mueller’s investigation as part of his plea deal. “One assumes that the plea deal was in exchange for something” on Papadopoulos’s part, Vladeck said. “And the ‘something’ is clearly not related to the Manafort indictment. So the real question is, what exactly did Papadopoulos give up?”

Papadopoulos’s plea agreement was initially sealed. According to a motion filed in July, were its particulars publicly known at the time, they would have hampered his ability to work on behalf of investigators as a “proactive cooperator.” According to Barrett, that phrase could refer to Papadopoulos “having law enforcement-monitored meetings,” including wearing a wire or arranging “calls or emails with other subjects of the investigation who are unaware that he is cooperating with the government.”

Reading between the lines, legal experts said Monday’s indictments also made sense as pieces of a larger investigative puzzle. A common prosecutorial tactic in high-level white-collar and organized-crime investigations is to seek convictions for lesser crimes on the outer fringes of their main focus. The threat of long prison sentences allows investigators to extract plea deals from potential witnesses, which can then be used to bring charges against more significant targets.


The Manafort-Gates indictment “doesn’t directly involve allegations of collusion with Russians in the 2016 presidential election,” Ben-Veniste observed. “However, it may act as a vehicle to exert significant pressure on them to provide information in connection with other possible violations of law involving other persons.”

“[Mueller]’s setting up the scene,” said Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who now runs a security firm called the Soufan Group. He noted that the special counsel could file additional charges in the future. “This indictment is a living document,” Soufan explained. “It’s going to continue to change based on the evidence and on the investigative strategy of the special counsel.”

Most importantly, the filings and indictments signified that Mueller’s wide-ranging investigation is nowhere near over. The surprise revelation of Papadopoulos’s plea deal raises questions about what other evidence or witnesses Mueller might secretly have at his disposal that aren’t publicly known. Papadopoulos’s statement also includes a tantalizing clause that it “does not include all of the facts known to me regarding this offense”—a sign that other shoes could potentially drop in the future.

“I’ve thought all along that the real question after the Manafort indictment [would be] whether this was the beginning of the story or the end,” Vladeck said. “The Papadopoulos news sure makes it seem like it’s the beginning.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... urce=atltw

Upstairs at home, with the TV on, Trump fumes over Russia indictments

What we know about the first charges from the special counsel probe

President Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Manafort's former business associate Rick Gates and Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos have all been charged in the special counsel's investigation into Russian election interference. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
By Robert Costa, Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker October 30 at 8:04 PM
President Trump woke before dawn on Monday and burrowed in at the White House residence to wait for the Russia bombshell he knew was coming.

Separated from most of his West Wing staff — who fretted over why he was late getting to the Oval Office — Trump clicked on the television and spent the morning playing fuming media critic, legal analyst and crisis communications strategist, according to several people close to him.

The president digested the news of the first indictments in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe with exasperation and disgust, these people said. He called his lawyers repeatedly. He listened intently to cable news commentary. And, with rising irritation, he watched live footage of his onetime campaign adviser and confidant, Paul Manafort, turning himself in to the FBI.

Initially, Trump felt vindicated. Though frustrated that the media were linking him to the indictment and tarnishing his presidency, he cheered that the ­charges against Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, were focused primarily on activities that began before his campaign. Trump tweeted at 10:28 a.m., “there is NO COLLUSION!”

But the president’s celebration was short-lived. A few minutes later, court documents were unsealed showing that George Papadopoulos, an unpaid foreign policy adviser on Trump’s campaign, pleaded guilty to making a false statement to the FBI about his efforts to broker a relationship between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The case provides the clearest evidence yet of links between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.

George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in early October to lying to federal officials about his contacts with Russian nationals. He is one of three former Trump campaign officials facing criminal charges. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)
For a president who revels in chaos — and in orchestrating it himself — Monday brought a political storm that Trump could not control. White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, along with lawyers Ty Cobb, John Dowd and Jay Sekulow, advised Trump to be cautious with his public responses, but they were a private sounding board for his grievances, advisers said.

“This has not been a cause of great agita or angst or activity at the White House,” said Cobb, the White House lawyer overseeing Russia matters. He added that Trump is “spending all of his time on presidential work.”

[Three former Trump campaign officials charged by special counsel]

But Trump’s anger Monday was visible to those who interacted with him, and the mood in the corridors of the White House was one of weariness and fear of the unknown. As the president groused upstairs, many staffers — some of whom have hired lawyers to help them navigate Mueller’s investigation — privately speculated about where the special counsel might turn next.

“The walls are closing in,” said one senior Republican in close contact with top staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. “Everyone is freaking out.”

Trump is also increasingly agitated by the expansion of Mueller’s probe into financial issues beyond the 2016 campaign and about the potential damage to him and his family.

This portrait of Trump and his White House on a day of crisis is based on interviews with 20 senior administration officials, Trump friends and key outside allies, many of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.

Who’s who in the government’s investigation into Russia ties VIEW GRAPHIC
Trump and his aides were frustrated that, yet again, Russia steamrolled the start of a carefully planned week of policy news. Trump is preparing to nominate a new chairman of the Federal Reserve and is scheduled to depart Friday for a high-stakes, 12-day trip across Asia, and House Republicans are planning to unveil their tax overhaul bill.

“I’d like to start the briefing today by addressing a topic that I know all of you are preparing to ask me about, and that’s tax reform,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at Monday afternoon’s news briefing. It was a lighthearted prelude to a question-and-answer session immediately overtaken by queries about the indictments.

Away from the podium, Trump staffers fretted privately over whether Manafort or Gates might share with Mueller’s team damaging information about other colleagues. They expressed concern in particular about Gates because he has a young family, may be more stretched financially than Manafort, and continued to be involved in Trump’s political operation and had access to the White House, including attending West Wing meetings after Trump was sworn in.

Some White House advisers are unhappy with Thomas J. Barrack Jr., Trump’s longtime friend and chair of his inauguration, whom they hold responsible for keeping Gates in the Trump orbit long after Manafort resigned as campaign chairman in August 2016, according to people familiar with the situation. Barrack has been Gates’s patron of late, steering political work to him and, until Monday, employing him as director of the Washington office of his real estate investment company.

Trump and his aides tried to shrug off the ominous headlines, decorating the South Portico of the White House in black bats and faux spider webs to welcome costumed children for Halloween trick-or-treating. As the sun set on Monday, the president and first lady Melania Trump handed out goody bags to little princesses and pirates.

[Mueller’s moves send message to other potential targets: Beware, I’m coming]

The Russia drama has been distracting and damaging for Trump — from a public relations perspective if not, eventually, a legal one. The president’s inner circle on Russia matters has tightened in recent months. In addition to his lawyers, Trump has been talking mostly with Kelly and members of his family, including Melania, as well as daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, both senior White House advisers. Trump also leans on two senior aides, counselor Kellyanne Conway and communications director Hope Hicks, as well as some outside friends for advice.

Still, Trump has little ability to influence the ongoing Russia probe save for firing Mueller — the sort of rash decision that his lawyers insisted Monday he is not considering.

“Nothing about today’s events alters anything related to our engagement with the special counsel, with whom we continue to cooperate,” Cobb said. “There are no discussions and there is no consideration being given to terminating Mueller.”

Sekulow, one of Trump’s outside lawyers, said: “There’s no firing-Robert-Mueller discussions.”

Asked whether Trump is considering pardons for Manafort or Gates, Cobb said, “No, no, no. That’s never come up and won’t come up.”

On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, some of Trump’s allies are privately revving up their own version of a counterattack against Mueller. Several top Republican legislators plan to raise questions in the coming days about the FBI’s handling of a “dossier” detailing alleged ties between Trump and Russian interests. They intend to argue that Mueller’s team has become overly reliant on a document that was funded in part by Democrats, according to two people involved in the discussions. Mueller does not appear to have relied on the dossier for the cases revealed on Monday, however.

For Trump and his team, the bad news began as disconcerting drips last Friday, when CNN first reported that indictments were probably coming Monday. The only question: of whom?

The White House had no inside information beyond what was public in news reports, officials said, and were left to scramble and speculate as to what might happen. Reliable information was hard to come by, as Trump’s team was scattered. Cobb was at his home in South Carolina until Monday afternoon, while Trump spent much of Saturday at his private golf club in Virginia and went out to dinner with Melania and their son, Barron, at the Trump International Hotel’s steakhouse in Washington.

Among the many unknowns, the Trump team arrived at an educated guess that Manafort was likely to be indicted — in part, according to one White House aide, because they heard that television news crews were preparing to stake out Manafort’s Virginia home.

“This wasn’t a shocking development,” Sekulow said.

[As Russia case unfolds, Trump and Republicans go to battle with Clinton and Democrats]

When the first pair of indictments came naming Manafort and Gates, there was palpable relief inside the West Wing. The 31-page document did not name Trump, nor did it address any possible collusion between Russia and the president’s campaign.

Moreover, aides were simply happy that the initial batch of indictments did not include Michael Flynn, Trump’s former and controversial national security adviser, who was fired from his top White House perch after misleading Vice President Pence about his contacts with Russian officials. Flynn had been intimately involved in both the campaign and the early days of the administration, and a Flynn indictment, most staff believed, would have been far more damaging.

The indictment of Gates — who had played a quiet, behind-the-scenes role in Trump’s orbit — was more of a surprise, though he had served as Manafort’s campaign deputy and protege. Trump’s team quickly settled on a messaging plan: The duo’s alleged misdeeds, the White House argued, had nothing to do with the president or his campaign.

Privately, aides and allies acknowledged that the campaign had perhaps not sufficiently vetted the two men before bringing them on board.

Michael Caputo, a former campaign adviser whom Trump praised on Twitter Monday morning for his appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” later called the indictments “one big, huge fail.”

“Rick and Paul, I would consider them friends of the president because they worked so closely with him,” Caputo said. “The president’s watching closely and he should be concerned for his friends’ welfare, but he has absolutely no concern about collusion with Russia because there was none.”

On Sunday, Trump had attempted to seek refuge from the political squall with another round of golf at his Virginia club. Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) were set to join him, according to two people briefed on the plans — an afternoon of camaraderie and talk about his tax proposal.

It was not to be. Rainy weather forced the White House to cancel the outing — yet another disappointment, beyond the president’s control.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... b2754c047e

Trump Campaign Adviser Pleads Guilty to Lying About Some Very Interesting Contact With Russia
By Ben Mathis-Lilley

The headline news of the morning seemed to be that special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for a number of crimes related to his pre-campaign work for a Russia-aligned political party in Ukraine. But it's starting to look like a guilty plea that the Department of Justice announced with little fanfare on its website may be even more consequential going forward. Specifically, the DOJ posted some very intriguing information related to Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to making a number of false statements to the FBI about his 2016 contact with individuals purporting to represent the government of Russia.

Here's the official summary Papadopoulos' plea, which took place on Oct. 5 and was kept under seal until Monday:

screen_shot_20171030_at_12.46.09_pm
Screenshot/DOJ

Another court document lays out who these "foreign nationals" were. One was an unnamed professor who "claimed to have substantial connections to Russian government officials" and who Papadopoulos met coincidentally (or "coincidentally"?) while traveling in Europe in March 2016 after he'd agreed to advise the Trump campaign. Another was a "female Russian national," purportedly related to Vladimir Putin, who the professor introduced him to. A third was a Moscow-based individual who purported to have connections within Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The DOJ says Papadopoulos corresponded with these individuals for several months about the possibility of setting up a meeting between Trump campaign staffers—or Trump himself—and Russian officials.

Meanwhile, Papadopoulos also repeatedly told "high-ranking" Trump campaign officials about his Russia contacts in an effort to make the meeting happen:

screen_shot_20171030_at_12.52.23_pm
Screenshot/DOJ

The formal Trump campaign–Russia meeting that Papadopoulos was attempting to broker never took place. Based on earlier Washington Post reporting, though, we know that one of the "high-level officials" Papadopoulos was in touch with was Paul Manafort. And the DOJ also says that Papadopoulus was told in person by one of his contacts in April 2016 that Russia possessed "thousands of emails" involving "dirt" on Hillary Clinton.

screen_shot_20171030_at_1.06.22_pm
Screenshot/DOJ

Signs of Russia-directed incursion into the Democratic National Committee's email system were detected as early as November 2015, and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was hacked in March 2016. But the first DNC emails weren't released publicly by WikiLeaks until July.

Crucially, the DOJ document does not say whether Papadopoulos told Manafort or any other Trump campaign officials about this "dirt." But it does say he lied to the FBI and deleted his Facebook account in an attempt to cover up the extent of his communications—and that after being arrested and, presumably, informed that he was in way over his head unless he struck a cooperation plea deal, he met with investigators on "numerous occasions" to "provide information."

So, what we have here is evidence that a Trump campaign adviser was told by Russian contacts that the Russian government possessed incriminating emails related to Hillary Clinton. We also know that Papadopoulos made top Trump campaign officials, including Paul Manafort, repeatedly aware that he was in touch with these purported representatives of the Russian government. And we know that Papadopoulos was cooperating with investigators for months—cooperation that was kept secret until the same day that Manafort was taken into custody.

Stay tuned!
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ ... llary.html

BE CAREFUL MR. trump ...you have no idea who is wearing a wire now

[seemslikeadream]

So, when is FBI Mueller going to go after the war crimes of Bush, Clinton & Obama?

I don't care whether Podesta quit his firm. Mueller should indict anyone who broke the law. That includes trump's campaign co-chair, Manafort.

funny side note..... These are different Podestas! And that's what Trump is deliberately doing, conflating stories......funny that ...just like YOU and Faux News are doing


hey this is fantastic you agree with the General Kelly

too bad Kelly can't own black people

"Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man who gave up his country to fight for his state," he said, adding that lessons had to be learned from history, including that "the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War." The obvious counterpoint here is that slavery led to the Civil War, and Lee's army was fighting to preserve slavery.

Kelly wants investigation into allegations surrounding Clinton

Screengrab via Fox News
In a Fox News interview, John Kelly said he thought an investigation was needed into funding from Hillary Clinton's campaign and the DNC for the research behind the Trump/Russia dossier, and Clinton's involvement in the Uranium One deal.
"The American people really do have a right to know what their government does… have a right to know what their government is doing on any given day, and by this same token what private citizens are doing if they break the law," he said.

Russia probe

Kelly said he thought Robert Mueller's Russia investigation "should wrap up soon," and attempted to distance President Trump from any wrongdoing by the three men for whom indictments were announced Monday.

Monuments

Kelly was also asked about the removal of monuments to prominent slaveowners like George Washington and Robert E. Lee. He said it was wrong to apply modern standard to past actions, citing Christopher Columbus as an example.

"Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man who gave up his country to fight for his state," he said, adding that lessons had to be learned from history, including that "the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War."
Worth noting: The obvious counterpoint here is that slavery led to the Civil War, and Lee's army was fighting to preserve slavery.

Gold Star widow

Kelly condemned the "politicization" of Trump's conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in Niger. He said he would not apologize to Rep. Fredrica Wilson, despite having mischaracterized statements she made.
Trump's Asia trip

Kelly said North Korea is "coming close" to having an ICBM that can successfully strike the U.S. mainland.
On China: "They beat us in trade, but that doesn't make them the enemy... they're another world power."
Why it matters: As Peter Baker noted in a recent NY Times piece, Kelly was until recently viewed as a fairly apolitical figure. With comments like these, that's clearly no longer the case.
https://www.axios.com/john-kelly-hillar ... 32737.html

maybe the republicans can find another 10 million dollars and 8 more years and find something

what 20 years just ain't enough for you?

do you believe Obama was born in Kenya also?

just how much Fox News do you watch every day?

who cares about Niger ..it's all about BENGHAZI ...STILL

trump is not responsible for anything

Steele Dossier is a sideshow & who funded it is a sideshow of a sideshow. Don’t let Trump make it main event.

Real scandal isn’t Clinton/Kremlin collusion, as Fox claims. It’s Trump attempts to smear Clinton as a distraction.

To believe Clinton was real colluder requires same faith-based reasoning as it takes to believe Obama not born here.

In response to indictments, Trump has launched Operation Obfuscation, claiming Clinton is the real Kremlin colluder.

oh to be a white male having the luxury to care more about getting Clinton and Obama than caring about women, immigrants, LGBTs and people of color

I'm sure this girl has a different point of view

She has cerebral palsy. Her name is Rosa Maria Hernandez, and she does not understand why, days after undergoing emergency gallbladder surgery, she has not yet seen her mother, even though they are less than a three-hour drive apart.
In a year when President Trump’s hard line on illegal immigration has driven the number of immigration arrests up by more than 40 percent, Rosa Maria’s case has sped straight to the heart of the immigration-debate maelstrom.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/us/i ... ained.html

and the immigrant girl who is in U.S. custody and wanted an abortion but was held against her will by fucking trump's christian right asshole and was prevented from doing so ...yea trump's a great guy

The 4 Worst Things Donald Trump Has Done to the Environment

Hired Scott Pruitt

Trump’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency built his career by attacking the agency and its clean air and water rules. Pruitt is beginning to staff the EPA with Beltway insiders who have made their living lobbying for weaker pollution rules on behalf of the industry. For example, it has been widely reported that Andrew Wheeler may be named Pruitt’s top deputy. Wheeler is now a lobbyist for Murray Energy, a coal-mining conglomerate that is demanding an end to the rule that limits mercury pollution.
In fact, a recent analysis by Columbia University Law School showed that more than one quarter of the Administration’s appointees so far to environmental, energy, and natural resource management agencies have close ties to the fossil-fuel industry. The likely result: Thousands of decisions over the next four years made by those more interested in protecting polluters than public health. That will leave a toxic legacy of more disease and premature death.

2. Undermined chemical safety

Last year, a Congress overwhelmingly passed the bipartisan Lautenberg Act, a new chemical safety law that, after four decades of a broken system flooding our stores and homes with dangerous or untested chemicals, finally constructed a strong chemical safety net.

But now the EPA has to finish writing the rules to implement it. For that, Pruitt has chosen Nancy Beck, an insider straight from the main chemical industry trade association who has even within the last few weeks lobbied the agency on these very rules. If the new rules give the industry everything it wants, we’ll have blown a historic chance to restore public trust and market confidence in the products consumers buy for household use, everything from paints to baby clothes to cleaning products. Our health and that of our environment would continue to be at risk — and undoing the damage would take years.

3. Slashed the federal budget

The Administration’s budget proposal would cut the EPA by almost a third — more than any other agency, even though its budget is tiny. Out of every $10 the federal government spends, only two cents go to the EPA. These cuts don’t really save money. They’re part an ideological crusade that the public doesn’t support.

If the EPA budget is cut this way, the loss of experts and institutional knowledge will reverberate for years. Detailed plans obtained by the Washington Post show that Trump and Pruitt want to cut a quarter of the workforce and abolish 56 programs with impacts from the Chesapeake Bay to Puget Sound. Such reductions would cripple the agency’s ability to protect clean air and water. Together, this will lead to more asthma attacks, more health problems for the elderly and a more dangerous future.

4. Rolled back health protections from dirty energy

Pruitt is now trying to gut many of the same the rules and safeguards he sued to stop as Oklahoma’s attorney general. They limit the amount of arsenic and acid gases power plants can emit, reduce smog that causes respiratory problems and cut carbon pollution that causes climate change.

He has signaled hostility to the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, despite the fact that nearly all power plants are in compliance. The EPA chief and Trump are also planning to withdraw the Clean Power Plan, America’s first limits on carbon pollution from power plants, without any strategy for how to replace it.

And Trump and Pruitt are risking all this for the sake of putting the American energy industry farther behind: The energy market is moving toward cleaner energy, but slowing that process means losing clean tech jobs to other countries and a bigger cleanup for our children’s generation.

And yet he has also: Fueled environmental activism

This fifth item is the positive legacy of the Trump Administration: Americans who used to take clean air and water for granted are waking up to the danger. Membership in environmental groups is skyrocketing — the biggest question we get these days is, “What can I do?” — as women and men from all walks of life reclaim environmentalism as a mainstream American value. On Saturday, thousands will take to the streets in Washington, D.C., and other cities for the People’s Climate March.

Just as a blossoming environmental awareness in the early 1970s led to some of the bedrock laws we rely on today, I believe the great awakening of 2017 will echo for years to come. If we work together and make our voices heard, we can limit the worst of the damage Trump intends to inflict.
http://time.com/4756797/environment-don ... -100-days/

Here’s What Trump Has Done For Women In His First 100 Days
Hint: A lot of bad stuff.

By Catherine Pearson

BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
In his first 100 days in office, President Donald Trump and his team have spent a lot of time trying to convince Americans that they’re hard at work improving the lives of women. Just this week, White House advisor Ivanka Trump told a crowd in Germany that her dad is “a tremendous champion of supporting families” who believes in the potential of women. She was booed.

Because despite team Trump’s insistence that he is a champion for women, the president has done little to actually improve the lives of women in this country or abroad in his first 100 days. Instead, he has pushed for policies that roll back protections for women’s health and safety, and has made comments that prove his “tremendous respect” for women to be hollow.

Here are some of the ways that Trump’s first 100 days have hurt women.

He reinstated—and broadened—the global gag rule.

One of Trump’s first acts as president was to reinstate the Mexico City Policy, widely known as the global gag rule, which prohibits foreign aid from going to organizations that provide abortion services or that counsel women on family planning methods if they include abortion.

Public health experts around the world have been extremely critical of the policy, which was first put in place in 1984 by then-President Ronald Reagan and has been rescinded and reinstated several times since. It means, for example, that HIV clinics that rely on funding from the U.S. to provide patients with antiretrovirals could lose their funding. “If they’re giving advice to women on what to do if they’re pregnant and HIV positive, giving them all the options that exist, they cannot now receive money from the U.S,” a fellow with the United Nations Foundation explained to Slate.

But not only does the policy put women’s lives at risk; it’s not even that good at achieving its anti-abortion goals.

“There is no evidence that the global gag rule has ever resulted in its stated aim of reducing abortion,” Ann M. Starrs, President and CEO of The Guttmacher Institute, the reproductive health policy institution wrote in an editorial in the journal The Lancet in February. “The first study to measure the effect of the gag rule showed that this policy could actually have resulted in an increase in abortions. Another study assessed the gag rule in Ghana and found that because of declines in the availability of contraceptive services, both fertility and abortion rates were higher during the gag rule years than during non-gag rule years in rural and poor populations.”

He has repeatedly come after Planned Parenthood.

The GOP’s first attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with what Trump promised was “a great plan” would have effectively blocked access to Planned Parenthood for millions of women who rely on Medicaid. That plan may have flopped, but Trump also signed a resolution giving states permission to deny funding for Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortion services, rolling back an Obama-era regulation that helped protect the healthcare provider. (Reminder, Planned Parenthood affiliates see roughly 2.5 million patients annually and in 2014 to 2015 alone performed more than 635,000 pap tests and breast exams and diagnosed more than 171,000 sexually transmitted infections.)

Subscribe to the In(formation) email.
The reality of being a woman — by the numbers.


“Four million people depend on the Title X family planning program, and by signing this bill, President Trump disregards their health and well-being,” Dawn Laguens, Executive Vice President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a press release that condemned the measure. “We should build on the tremendous progress made in this country with expanded access to birth control, instead of enacting policies that take us backward.”

He has proposed cutting programs that help victims of domestic violence.

When Trump’s blueprint budget proposal landed in March, advocates working with victims of domestic violence were highly critical, pointing out that his cuts hurt programs that serve vulnerable victims. One expert told HuffPost’s Melissa Jeltsen that if Trump’s cuts are applied across the board, roughly 260,000 fewer victims of domestic violence will be able to access the help they need through shelters and supportive services. The National Domestic Violence Hotline, says that if its budget is cut by 10 percent, more than 180,000 calls (including those from victims, friends, family and abusers) would go unanswered annually.

He went out of his way to defend an accused sexual harasser.

Before Bill O’Reilly fired from Fox News, Trump defended him in an interview with The New York Times in early April—right at the start of Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

“I think he’s a person I know well ― he is a good person,” Trump said. “I think he shouldn’t have settled; personally, I think he shouldn’t have settled,” he added. “Because you should have taken it all the way. I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”

Trump also marked Sexual Assault Awareness Month by issuing a proclamation, just as the White House has done every year since 2009 when then-President Barack Obama first announced the awareness month. As HuffPost’s Emma Gray pointed out, Trump’s statement removed all allusions, which had been made in his predecessor’s statement, to the culture of victim-blaming that harms women who speak out. It was also, of course, the first time that a president who has been accused of sexual assault and caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the pussy has issued such an official statement.

Here’s hoping Trump and his team can do better for women in the next 100 days.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/he ... a5c0f9f901

Donald Trump’s Biggest Disinformation Campaign Yet

The Russia collusion scandal is closing in on America's commander-in-chief of fake news.

BY MAX BOOT | OCTOBER 31, 2017, 10:20 AM

President Donald Trump hasn’t delivered on his campaign promise to create U.S. coal or steel jobs (foreign steel imports are up 27 percent this year), but he is creating a bonanza in the business of “fake news.” Admittedly a lot of those jobs have been outsourced to Russia, but Trump is also providing plenty of employment at home.

Even before Monday’s bombshells from special counsel Robert Mueller — Trump’s campaign manager and his business partner have been indicted on multiple counts of laundering more than $18 million from pro-Russian clients in Ukraine, while a Trump foreign policy advisor pleaded guilty to lying about his efforts to solicit Clinton “dirt” from Russian contacts — Trump and his associates had launched Operation Obfuscation. Their far-fetched claim is that the real collusion isn’t between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It’s between Hillary Clinton and the Kremlin.

“It is now commonly agreed, after many months of COSTLY looking, that there was NO collusion between Russia and Trump,” Trump tweeted on Friday. “Was collusion with HC!” Then on Sunday, with the indictments looming, a more desperate version of the same message: “There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out. DO SOMETHING!” And on Monday, after the indictments were announced: “[W]hy aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????”

Picking up the theme, Trump’s faithful follower Jeanine Pirro blared on Fox News: “It’s time to shut it down, turn the tables, and lock her up.” Former White House aide Sebastian Gorka did her one better. He implied that Hillary Clinton was guilty of treason, just like the Rosenbergs, and that she too deserves the electric chair!

What, exactly, is the evidence for these hyperbolic claims? White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders asserted: “The evidence Clinton campaign, DNC & Russia colluded to influence the election is indisputable.” True — if “indisputable” has been redefined to mean “nonexistent.” The White House case, based on little more than warmed-over hearsay and discredited conspiracy mongering, relates to two familiar controversies: the Steele dossier alleging Trump-Russia links and the Russian acquisition of a Canadian company that owns uranium mines in America.

The Steele dossier, compiled by the respected former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, landed in the news recently when a law firm representing the Clinton campaign admitted to having paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS to compile it. (Earlier, we now know, Fusion had been hired by conservative news site the Washington Free Beacon to research Trump and other candidates.) The horror! If you listen to Trump’s defenders, it’s perfectly proper for Donald Trump Jr. to seek opposition research from Russian agents but a death-penalty offense for the Clinton campaign to try to uncover the Trump-Russia links. In their telling, the investigation of a potential crime is as bad as the crime itself. Huh?

The argument seems to be that because Steele talked to Russian sources in the course of compiling his dossier, he, and thus the entire Clinton campaign, was “colluding” with the Kremlin. By the same logic, anytime the CIA talks to Russian agents it, too, is “colluding” with Russia. This is to render the word “collusion” meaningless — which is precisely the point.

It’s perfectly possible, even probable, that some misinformation made it into the Steele dossier. That’s often the case with raw intelligence files. But the veteran CIA officer John Sipher has concluded that a “large portion of the dossier is crystal clear, certain, consistent and corroborated.”

There is no reason to suppose, as the Trumpkins posit, that the Kremlin fed all this information to Steele in the hopes of discrediting Trump when no one could be certain that the report would ever become public. Why, in any case, would the Kremlin seek to discredit the most pro-Russian candidate ever to pursue the presidency? Why, moreover, would Trump want to help Hillary Clinton, whom he is widely reported to revile for her tough anti-Russia line? And why, if the Kremlin were intent on making Trump out to be a Russian stooge, would its spokesman so vociferously deny that very charge? To believe that the Steele dossier was an elaborate Kremlin ploy requires the same sort of faith-based reasoning necessary to believe that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. or that Ted Cruz’s father killed JFK.

In the final analysis, the Steele dossier is a sideshow, and the question of who funded it is a sideshow of a sideshow. Yes, the FBI saw it, but it’s not the basis for the unanimous assessment released in early January by the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the director of national intelligence concluding that the Kremlin interfered in the U.S. election to help Trump and hurt Clinton. Nor is the Steele dossier the reason why independent counsel Robert Mueller has been appointed to investigate the president. Mueller was appointed only after (1) Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself after not having been truthful about his own contacts with Russia’s ambassador during the campaign and (2) Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in a self-confessed attempt to stop the probe of the “Russia thing.”

Thus Trump is now being investigated not only for collusion with a hostile foreign power but also for obstruction of justice and probably other offenses as well — and based on the indictments unsealed Monday, special counsel Mueller is making rapid progress. The truth or falsity of the Steele dossier does not affect the outcome of this investigation in the slightest.

What about the uranium deal, which Trump has compared to Watergate and his “minister of information,” Sean Hannity, has called “the biggest scandal — or, at least, one of them — in American history”? If you listen to the hype, you would think that in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton allowed the Russians to loot America’s uranium reserves. As Trump said on Oct. 24, 2016: “Remember that Hillary Clinton gave Russia 20 percent of American uranium and, you know, she was paid a fortune.”

The reality, as numerous media organizations have documented, is rather more prosaic. In 2010, Russia’s nuclear-energy agency, Rosatom, applied to buy a majority stake in Uranium One, a Canadian firm that controls roughly 20 percent of America’s uranium reserves. The deal had to be cleared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which includes a representative of the State Department along with eight other federal agencies. Ultimate approval authority to stop the deal lay with President Obama. The government duly OK’d the sale, because it wasn’t judged to be a threat to national security. Rosatom was prohibited from exporting any of the uranium, and the mining licenses would remain with U.S. subsidiaries controlled by American citizens.

If you believe the conspiracy-mongers, however, the reason the deal went ahead is that Uranium One’s owner contributed beaucoup bucks to the Clinton Foundation. Fact check: Foundation donor Frank Giustra sold his company to Uranium One in 2007 and says he unloaded his personal stake in the firm at that time — three years before Rosatom tried to buy Uranium One. Bill Clinton did get $500,000 for a speech in Moscow in 2010, but there is no evidence that this was part of any quid pro quo, and there are no records of Rosatom contributing to the Clinton Foundation.

Moreover, Hillary Clinton says she was not personally involved in the review of the sale, and the official who represented the State Department on the review panel backs her up. Even if they are lying, Clinton’s vote still would have been only one of nine, so the approval of the sale was hardly her doing.

The real scandal may turn out to be Trump’s efforts to tar Clinton.The real scandal may turn out to be Trump’s efforts to tar Clinton. CNN has reported that “Trump made it clear he wanted the gag order lifted on an undercover informant who played a critical role in an FBI investigation into Russian efforts to gain influence in the uranium industry in the United States during the Obama administration.” If true, this would suggest that Trump is actively interfering with the course of justice in order to impugn a political opponent.

This episode recalls Trump’s efforts earlier this year to prove that Obama had wiretapped him. In September, Trump’s own Justice Department definitively refuted this reckless allegation, writing in a court filing: “Both FBI and NSD [National Security Division] have no records related to wiretaps as described by the March 4, 2017 tweets.” The only crime that may have been committed was by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who had to step down from overseeing the Kremlingate probe because of accusations that he had leaked classified information to concoct an “Obama surveillance scandal.”

Now Nunes has directed the House Intelligence Committee to investigate the uranium deal in cooperation with the House Oversight Committee, while the House Judiciary Committee is set to launch the umpteenth probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The operating principle was laid out by Trump himself in his final debate with Clinton when he responded to her accusations that he was a pawn of Putin by sputtering with his trademark eloquence: “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet.” This is the reasoning of an elementary school playground: “I know you are, but what am I?”

That Trump’s defenders find this riposte so compelling is an indicator of the extent to which they are willing to suspend their critical faculties in slavish service to their maximum leader. As for the rest of us, we need to ignore the Trumpkins’ attempts to shift the conversation and focus like a laser on the case that Mueller and his Untouchables are building against the president of the United States and his closest associates.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/31/don ... paign-yet/

[seemslikeadream]

Trump nominee Sam Clovis blasted progressives as 'race traders' and 'race traitors' in old blog posts
http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/02/politics/ ... index.html

According to the criminal charge filed yesterday, Clovis encouraged Papadopoulos to “make the trip” to meet with Russian officials.

Papadopoulos told Clovis that he was arranging a meeting “between us and the Russian leadership.” Clovis told Papadopoulos “great work.”

Clovis was nominated by Trump to be Undersecretary of Agriculture. Is he “young” and “low level” too?

Sam Clovis’s really bad excuse for greenlighting a Trump campaign meeting with Russians

Sam Clovis was always a pretty suspect pick by President Trump to become the chief science adviser at the Agriculture Department — mostly because he's not actually a scientist. His chief qualification for the job seems to be that he was national co-chairman of Trump's 2016 campaign. Democrats have also spotlighted his past comments skeptical of climate change and suggesting that laws protecting LGBT rights could lead to the legalization of pedophilia.

And now we can add another reason his nomination could be a key battle for Democrats — and a dicey proposition for Republicans.

The Washington Post's Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger reported Monday night that Clovis was one of those anonymous campaign officials cited in former Trump aide George Papadopoulos's plea deal. Clovis was the one named as a “campaign supervisor,” and he both praised Papadopoulos's efforts to broker a meeting with the Russians as “great work” and later urged Papadopoulos to make the trip rather than Trump.

“Make the trip, if it is feasible,” Clovis told Papadopoulos.

Clovis's attorney, Victoria Toensing, told The Post that Clovis was only being nice and that he actually opposed the campaign meeting with Russians:

She said Clovis was “being polite” when he encouraged Papadopoulos to meet with Russian officials in August, adding that the campaign had a “strict rule that no person could travel abroad as a representative of the campaign.” Clovis could not stop an American citizen from traveling abroad “in his personal capacity,” she said.

. . .

Toensing described Clovis as a “polite gentleman from Iowa” who “would always have been courteous to a person offering to help the campaign.”

Er, okay. So basically, Clovis told someone to do something he opposed and was against campaign rules because he was only being a polite Midwesterner and he couldn't technically prevent him from doing it. (As a Minnesotan, I'll gladly try to use this excuse going forward.)

The strained explanation speaks to just how problematic this could be for Clovis. The campaign and the Trump transition team claimed over and over again that it had no contact with Russians during the campaign. Here we have a former Trump foreign policy aide actively setting up a potential meeting with the Russians, and Clovis giving him the thumbs-up. At one point, Papadopoulos specified that the meeting was requested by the Russian MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), so there was no mistaking who was requesting the meeting.

If nothing else, Clovis is a microcosm of Trump's problems right now. Trump seems to surround himself with people who either aren't terribly qualified for their jobs or haven't been carefully vetted, and many of those decisions have come back to bite him.

The latter was certainly the case when it came to Paul Manafort, his former top campaign aide who was indicted on Monday, and Papadopoulos, whom the White House is now seeking to dismiss as basically a gadfly who campaign aides said nice things to and then disregarded. Trump's affinity for former national security adviser Michael Flynn certainly fits into this category. And the appointments of Ben Carson as housing and urban development secretary and other lower-level appointees have led to plenty of questions about qualifications.

We'll see how the Clovis confirmation process pans out, but his nomination certainly fits a pattern of Trump playing fast and loose — and potentially dealing with the consequences later.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... 6104891373

and surely here at RI there would be no one that would want this guy for the Science Post

[ BLOG ] UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS



Scientists to Senate: Reject Sam Clovis for USDA Science Post
KAREN PERRY STILLERMAN, SENIOR ANALYST, FOOD AND ENVIRONMENT | OCTOBER 31, 2017, 9:00

For months, controversy has swirled around the Trump administration’s…shall we say…deeply flawed nominee for USDA chief scientist. A former business professor, talk radio host, and Trump campaign advisor, Sam Clovis has embraced unfounded conspiracy theories and espoused racist and homophobic views. And did I mention he has no scientific training whatsoever?

It’s true. And while Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue is standing by the nomination, thousands of the nation’s scientists are having none of it.


Experts say no way to unqualified “chief scientist”

In a highly unusual move, a group of more than 3,100 scientists and researchers—including leading experts in agriculture and food systems from all 50 states and the District of Columbia—today sent a letter to the Senate agriculture committee expressing opposition to the president’s choice to lead science at the USDA. The letter describes the nomination of the severely under-qualified Sam Clovis to be under secretary for research, education, and economics and chief scientist as “an abandonment of our nation’s commitment to scientifically-informed governance,” and calls on the Senate committee to reject it.

One of the letter’s lead signers is Dr. Mike Hamm, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Regional Food Systems, and C.S. Mott Professor of Sustainable Agriculture at Michigan State University. Dr. Hamm has a PhD in human nutrition and decades of experience at the intersection of food and agriculture, and his research interests include community-based food systems, food security, sustainable agriculture and nutrition education. In addition to his academic posts, he served as a member of the governor-appointed Michigan Food Policy Council from 2005 to 2013 and was instrumental in developing the Michigan Good Food Charter.

I asked Dr. Hamm why this nomination has him so concerned, and what the practical impacts might be if Clovis were to take charge of scientific research at the USDA.


Dr. Mike Hamm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Regional Food Systems and C.S. Mott Professor of Sustainable Agriculture at Michigan State University.

KPS: Scientists don’t usually rally by the thousands to oppose nominees for relatively obscure government positions. Why is this nomination so alarming to you personally?

MH: I was really concerned when I heard about this nomination, as were a number of colleagues. We look to the USDA as an authoritative source of scientific, economic, and statistical information about the nation’s food system, and it seemed extremely careless to put all that into the hands of an unqualified person. Also, we rely on the USDA to develop research funding programs that not only tackle issues of concern to agricultural production and the food system right now but also look for probable challenges down the road—finding solutions takes time and thoughtfulness, and it is clear to me that the nominee hasn’t demonstrated the ability to do this in a scientific manner.

KPS: This under secretary position holds the purse strings for $3 billion in annual research grants to universities and other institutions. How significant is that investment in the universe of agricultural and food systems research?

MH: It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this. Whether it’s developing strategies to improve current yields while reducing environmental impacts of agricultural production, or identifying resilience strategies for increasingly prevalent issues, the person in this position has to be both reactive to current events and proactive about likely future scenarios. The under secretary controls the budget for this very broad range of research needs.

KPS: What worries you most about the prospect of the USDA going backward on science?

MH: The breadth of knowledge we now have on a wide range of strategies for agricultural production and the food system is remarkable. We know a great deal about strategies for producing a greater variety and quantity of crops under different conditions and with increasingly agro-ecosystem strategies. To lose this momentum would be a disservice to the agricultural community and to consumers and the general public. Whether it’s water use in California, Texas, and other water challenged states, or late frosts for tart cherries in Michigan, we can ‘see’ an increasing range of challenges in the near future. Going backwards means not thinking about these. Going backwards means not looking for ever more ecologically sound solutions to emerging issues and recognizing that we can often improve the situation to a range of societal issues while improving agriculture. This is frightening.

Scientists speak…but is the Senate listening?


Ecologist Irit Altman speaks to a staff person for Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) in August about the need for a qualified chief scientist to oversee USDA research on climate change and agriculture.

Scientists and their allies around the country have been mobilizing for months to oppose Clovis’s nomination. They’ve published letters to the editor in newspapers across the country, including Chicago, Illinois; Bloomington, Indiana (paywall); Wichita, Kansas; Missoula and Great Falls, Montana; Scottsbluff, Nebraska; Nashville, Tennessee; and Spokane, Washington. They’ve also met with Senate staff and delivered petitions from UCS supporters directly to key Senate offices in Maine, Colorado, and Ohio (see photos from the Maine petition delivery below).


Dr. Altman was joined by local Maine farmers Lindsey and Jake Roche in delivering a petition opposing the Clovis nomination to Senator Collins.

Sam Clovis to (finally) get a hearing

Today’s letter comes as the Senate agriculture committee is expected to announce that it will hold a long-awaited hearing on November 9 to hear directly from the nominee, and to dig into Clovis’s credentials and suitability for the chief scientist position. While many Senators, including key Senate leaders, have expressed opposition to the Clovis nomination, others are still uncommitted or even supportive.

Those Senators had better think hard about it, because the scientific community is watching. As 3,100+ experts have now told them, “We expect that when your committee evaluates Clovis’ record and qualifications, you will similarly conclude that he is unfit for this position.”

ACTION NEEDED! The time to act is now, and we can win this fight. The scientists’ letter has been delivered to the Senate, but you can still tell the Senate to reject the Clovis nomination.
http://blog.ucsusa.org/karen-perry-stil ... ience-post

Iowa Farmers Union opposes nomination of Sam Clovis at the USDA
http://www.ktiv.com/story/36553364/2017 ... t-the-usda

Sam Clovis, campaign "supervisor" of Papadopoulos, is due for confirmation hearing as USDA top scientist next week

THE KREMLIN ASSET IN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN: “IF THIS ISN’T COLLUSION, I DON’T KNOW WHAT COLLUSION IS.”
The administration says it hardly knows George Papadopoulos. But he knows Jeff Sessions and Paul Manafort and Donald Trump, and now he’s a cooperating witness for Robert Mueller's investigation.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10 ... estigation

[mentalgongfu2]

Clovis is from my home state. He is a piece of crap right-wing ideologue and fits well with the others Trump has assembled. Like Terry Branstad, he hitched himself to Trump early and has proved willing to throw away any semblance of ethics and honesty in favor of supporting the now-President in hopes of earning the political favor he has now cashed in with his USDA job.

[Elvis]

hey this is fantastic you agree with the racist General Kelly

Enough of this kind of disgusting smear against other members. Please! It's sickening.

You should apologize to 8bit.