The Russian Connection 2

[Destiny]

And to you as well.
Also, welcome back. You were missed.

[fraurosena]

So, Seth Abramson has a (long) twitter thread about the indictments. He starts off with the analysing the Manafort/Gates story and then halfway through the thread the news about Papadopoulos is released and... well, you should just read it, it's so good seeing (ok reading) his utter amazement about it all in 'real time'. His analysis of the Papadopolous indictment is incredibly detailed and extremely interesting.

 

[SilverBeach]

2 minutes ago, iweartanktops said:

Ohhhhh, I'm absolutely giddy at the idea that Papadopoulos may have worn a wire! 

Happy Indictment Monday, friends! 

So glad to see you posting, I have missed you in the threads!

[iweartanktops]

Thanks for the welcome back! Life gets crazy.

I'm laughing my ass off at a Facebook comment that says, "I heard Hilary will be indicted in Neveruary."

[onekidanddone]

Okay everybody..just STOP IT.. I'm laughing so hard I'm crying. 

[candygirl200413]

I'm really wanting to make Russian mules but I also have class soon

[fraurosena]

2 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Okay everybody..just STOP IT.. I'm laughing so hard I'm crying. 

But it's just such a happy day, you're supposed to laugh and rejoice. It's the beginning of the end of this presiduncy!

 

[formergothardite]

29 minutes ago, iweartanktops said:

idea that Papadopoulos may have worn a wire! 

You know Trump is about to lose it. He can't control the narrative, things are closing in and nobody but his base is buying "but Hillary". I'm afraid he will do something drastic. 

[onekidanddone]

6 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

But it's just such a happy day, you're supposed to laugh and rejoice. It's the beginning of the end of this presiduncy!

 

There needs to be a Snoopy dance reaction emoji

Just now, formergothardite said:

You know Trump is about to lose it. He can't control the narrative, things are closing in and nobody but his base is buying "but Hillary". I'm afraid he will do something drastic. 

I just hope he doesn't go invade or bomb a country just for the deflection 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an excellent analysis: "Mueller’s moves send message to other potential targets: Beware, I’m coming"

Spoiler

The one-two punch delivered Monday by special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III — an indictment of President Trump’s former campaign chairman and a guilty plea from a former campaign adviser — is designed to send a powerful message to everyone else caught up in the probe: the prosecutors aren’t bluffing.

“This is the way you kick off a big case,’’ said Patrick Cotter, a white-collar defense lawyer in Chicago who once worked as a federal prosecutor in New York alongside Andrew Weissmann, who is spearheading the prosecution of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates.

On the same day the indictment was unsealed, prosecutors also announced a guilty plea and cooperation from former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos about his interactions with people linked to the Russian government. Papadopoulos has admitted to lying to FBI agents who questioned him about those contacts, according to court records.

“Oh, man, they couldn’t have sent a message any clearer if they’d rented a revolving neon sign in Times Square,’’ Cotter said. “And the message isn’t just about Manafort. It’s a message to the next five guys they talk to. And the message is: ‘We are coming, and we are not playing, and we are not bluffing.’ ’’

Cotter pointed to several details in the Manafort indictment that suggest how steep a climb it will be to beat the charges. First, $18 million in alleged money laundering carries the likelihood of many years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines. Second, the charges may be tough to defend because they involve not reporting bank accounts on tax forms for multiple years. And finally, the indictment goes out of its way to kneecap a standard defense argument in such cases — that the defendant got bad advice from their accountant.

The indictment charges that Manafort wrote specifically to his accountant that he did not have such accounts.

“In fighting these kind of cases, the first line of defense is usually, ‘My accountant should have told me,’ or something like that,’’ Cotter said. “Here, the prosecutor is sending a shot across the bow, saying, ‘Don’t even try it.’ And even a really good lawyer will have a hard time getting past that.’’

Cotter said that if he were one of the lawyers for the subjects in the Mueller probe, “I would be telling my clients, ‘This is real, and whatever hope we had that maybe they wouldn’t get anywhere, those rosy scenarios, we need to forget that.’ ’’ Prosecutors, he said, “have now primed the pump, but that doesn’t mean they will get all the way to the top.’’

As important as the Manafort indictment is, the Papadopoulos plea “is a big deal,’’ said Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor with expertise in national security, that “goes much closer to the issue of collusion.’’

And the fact that he’s been cooperating for three months is important, too, he said. “Who else is cooperating that we don’t know about? That’s what people in the White House need to be worried about.’’

Nick Akerman, a former assistant special Watergate prosecutor, said the court filings “all spell bad news for Trump.’’

Akerman said he could not see any defense to the Manafort indictment.

“He has no choice but to plead guilty. That’s what the indictment says to me,’’ he said. “The only defense that you’ve got is to go in there and start singing like a canary to avoid jail time. And once he starts singing, one of the tunes is bound to be Donald Trump.’’

But Jay Nanavati, a former Justice Department tax prosecutor, said the filing of the indictment shows that so far, prosecutors have “not been able to convince Manafort to cooperate, but this is still how you start moving up the ladder in any organization.’’

What’s striking about the indictment, Nanavati said, is the number of people who worked for Manafort — accountants, lawyers and others — who provided key evidence against him. And the unidentified lobbying firms, he said, “are in significant trouble’’ because of the written exchanges referenced in the indictment alleging that some people at the firms were aware that Manafort was lying about their work together.

Nanavati said a key change in U.S. tax enforcement that began in 2008 — going after foreign bank accounts controlled by Americans — probably played an important role in the case against Manafort. Before the Justice Department started cracking Swiss banking secrecy in 2008, he said, the requirement on Americans to declare foreign bank accounts was on the books but “basically, nobody ever did it, and almost no one ever got prosecuted for it. That changed in 2008, and tax-return preparers started asking.’’ With the decline of bank secrecy, Nanavati said, crimes such as tax evasion and money laundering through foreign accounts became harder to hide.

 

[GrumpyGran]

24 minutes ago, candygirl200413 said:

I'm really wanting to make Russian mules but I also have class soon

Haha, you! So I googled it and also saw Russian money mules and thought, how appropriate! I don't have limes so I'm having a Russian Money Mule made with OJ, vodka and ginger beer.

Don't worry, I'm not having it yet.

[GreyhoundFan]

CNN is saying that Manfort and Gates are pleading not guilty. Bail is being requested at $10 million for Manafort and $5 million for Gates.

[AmazonGrace]

I love this story. https://www.thedailybeast.com/putins-niece-catfished-george-papadopoulos-offered-kremlin-meeting

You're a foreign policy advisor and never even bother to check if Putin's niece is really Putin's niece and if the moon is really made of cheese. 

I suppose if you can't trust Putin's niece you can't really trust anybody huh?

[GreyhoundFan]

The WaPo has published an annotated list of the indictments against Manafort and Gates. Because of the notes, I can't quote, but there is some good info.

[AnywhereButHere]

59 minutes ago, iweartanktops said:

Ohhhhh, I'm absolutely giddy at the idea that Papadopoulos may have worn a wire! 

Happy Indictment Monday, friends! 

Ha! All those empty threats to Comey about how Caligula was recording their conversations. Wouldn't it be great if an actual recorded conversation took down his administration. Irony or retribution? Either one works for me!

29 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

You know Trump is about to lose it. He can't control the narrative, things are closing in and nobody but his base is buying "but Hillary". I'm afraid he will do something drastic. 

This does make me nervous. He tends to ramp up the crazy when he feels threatened and thinks the FAKE NEWS/BUT HILLARY tweets just aren't cutting it.

 

I thought it was going to be Flynn before Manafort, but hey, I'm not picky. If they are starting with the small fish, it's' going to be a bloodbath when they get around to the sharks. The timing is pretty good too. 2018 election season is going to be very interesting if the democrats can get their shit together.

[onekidanddone]

19 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

CNN is saying that Manfort and Gates are pleading not guilty. Bail is being requested at $10 million for Manafort and $5 million for Gates.

I don't understand how they even got bail.  This whole thing screams flight risk. But white men, white color crimes. Do I sound bitter?

[iweartanktops]

17 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

I don't understand how they even got bail.  This whole thing screams flight risk. But white men, white color crimes. Do I sound bitter?

Rich. White. Male. 

Ugh. 

[GreyhoundFan]

3 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

I don't understand how they even got bail.  This whole thing screams flight risk. But white men, white color crimes. Do I sound bitter?

I don't believe they've been released. That's just the request.

 

"With money laundering charges against Paul Manafort, Trump’s ‘fake news’ claim is harder to defend"

Spoiler

The independent investigation into Trump-Russia collusion just made its most serious move since it began in May. Three former campaign officials have been charged with crimes; one has pleaded guilty. President Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his former business partner Rick Gates have been charged with 12 counts of financial crimes related to their work in Ukraine over the past decade.

And the special counsel announced that Trump's foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty earlier this month to giving false statements to the FBI about his ties to a Russian who promised "dirt" on Hillary Clinton.

Nothing to see here, Trump said of the news:

,,, < tweets from TT >

But those definitive statements are very hard to make, since legal experts say this is very likely to be the beginning, not the end, of the probe by special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III. And no, collusion is not ruled out.

"While the White House could say that these indictments don't advance the collusion narrative, they don't negate it either," said Ira Matetsky, a partner at New York City-based Ganfer and Shore law firm.

Here are some of Trump's common claims about the investigation — and why the facts don't necessarily back them up yet.

Trump claim No. 1: There's no evidence of collusion

... <more tweets from TT >

Trump's main argument here is that the FBI, in some form or another, has been looking into this for more than a year and that because it hasn't come to a conclusion about collusion, there must be none.

It's true that the Manafort and Gates indictment doesn't mention the Trump campaign and refers to alleged crimes over the past decade.

But that doesn't mean the probe is over. He could indict Manafort or anyone else of collusion-connected crimes any time he has evidence to do so, said Jens David Ohlin, a vice dean at Cornell Law University.

"You can't rule out that [Mueller] didn't rule out Manafort colluding with Russia," Ohlin said.

We do know he's also looking into Donald Trump Jr.'s meetings with Kremlin-connected Russians,  whether the president obstructed justice when James Comey was the FBI director and Jared Kushner's business dealings.

“Mueller wouldn't have hired 16, 17 people to investigate these events just to indict some tangential person unrelated to the campaign,”said white-collar lawyer Jeffrey Jacobovitz.

The timing of the indictments is noteworthy, too. In just five months, Mueller's team has impaneled a federal grand jury and now is charging Trump's former campaign chairman. Those are both significant escalations.

Nor has Congress dropped its investigation into collusion. Earlier this month, top Senate Republican and Democratic investigators said that after eight months of investigating, hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 100 people and nearly 100,000 pages of documents, they aren't ready to rule out collusion.

Translation: At the very least, accusations that the Trump campaign worked with Russia are not a hoax. It's worth significant time and resources for three committees in Congress and one independent investigation to continue to look into on a variety of fronts.

Claim No. 2: These charges have nothing to do with the Trump administration

Manafort and Gates are charged with something that does not seem directly related to Russia collusion, and Trump has used that fact to argue that this has nothing to do with his campaign.

Except, Trump may be getting out ahead of himself. Many legal experts think Mueller is putting pressure on these outside figures to get them to cooperate by sharing what they know about Trump's inner circle. If true, that would explain the FBI knocking on Manafort's door in an aggressive predawn raid or the special counsel looking into former national security adviser Michael Flynn's son.

"Charging Person A can be  way to put pressure on Person B or Person C to testify," said Jack Sharman, a white-collar lawyer in Alabama and former special counsel for Congress during the Bill Clinton Whitewater investigation.

And then we get to Papadopoulos. His guilty plea is directly related to Russia, in that he gave false statements to the FBI about his interaction with a Russian who had ties to the Russian government. Even though Papdopoulos is not a key campaign figure like Manafort was, Mueller telegraphed on Monday that he has someone on the inside of Trump world, which underscores that this is far from over.

Claim No. 3: Mueller and his team are politically motivated

Some of Trump's allies have tried to draw lines between the prosecutors Mueller has hired and their ties to Democrats. Since Mueller's team is operating behind closed doors, it's been hard to directly rebut that.

But that logic falls into a gaping hole with this indictment. Mueller has persuaded a federal judge to set up a grand jury, he has presented the evidence his team has found, and that independent grand jury decided to return an indictment.

“This is out of Mueller's hands,” Jacobovitz said. “It's an independent jury. They could have declined the indictment, but apparently they did not.”

“It's a first step, and it could be one of many,” he said.

 

[AmazonGrace]

So y'all thought that MAGA stands for Make America Great Again. 

But in reality it stands for Manafort And Gates Arrested. 

[onekidanddone]

2 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I don't believe they've been released. That's just the request.

I think somebody is going to pay their bail. I wonder however if the wouldn't be safer on the inside. You know what Putin Trump does to people who might flip on him.

[Rachel333]

On CNN they were saying that the prosecution is asking for house arrest and the bail money is what they would forfeit if they did flee. The experts they had on said it looks like these men are indeed being considered flight risks.

[VelociRapture]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

So, Seth Abramson has a (long) twitter thread about the indictments. He starts off with the analysing the Manafort/Gates story and then halfway through the thread the news about Papadopoulos is released and... well, you should just read it, it's so good seeing (ok reading) his utter amazement about it all in 'real time'. His analysis of the Papadopolous indictment is incredibly detailed and extremely interesting.

 

I should be napping while the baby naps. Instead, im watching a horror movie and reading through this. Abramson says the Campaign Supervisor is probably Sessions (headed the team), Clovis (did the hiring), or Lewandoski. He says Sessions could face perjury charges which is likely why he hasn’t been interviewed yet and that Sessions is a target of the investigation. He also says if Trump weren’t a narcissist then we’d expect him to resign this week because he’s done.

[GrumpyGran]

I doubt Trump would be involved in the bail. He wants to pretend he doesn't know them and he would want them to run if they get out. They better have some other rich friends.

[iweartanktops]

I love how Sanders says this has nothing to do with the campaign. 

Guess what? He was the campaign manager. 

[VelociRapture]

There was also this:

And:

Spoiler

 

ETA:

Spoiler