The Russian Connection 2

[OtterRuletheWorld]

5 minutes ago, iweartanktops said:

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

Guess what? He was the campaign manager. 

She was saying the indictments having nothing to do with the campaign.

We also were told that Trump is not [currently] planning on dismissing Mueller.

[onekidanddone]

10 minutes ago, iweartanktops said:

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

Guess what? He was the campaign manager. 

When it comes down to Jared he would even deny knowing him.  "Hey I hardly know the guy who married and knocked up my daughter".

[AmazonGrace]

2 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

When it comes down to Jared he would even deny knowing him.  "Hey I hardly know the guy who married and knocked up my daughter".

If they arrest Don Jr, Trump will be all like, "Don who? I don't even think he's my son,  and I've hardly seen him three times in my life." 

Ivana was interviewed a while ago saying Donald couldn't talk to his kids before they were in university so it's even believable lol. 

[cascarones]

I'm not surprised it was Manafort before Flynn, there's a lot of nuances underlying that. The altered executive order last week on recalling previous military officers has been widely tangled up in a pilot shortage front, but might very well have a lot more to do with Trump and "his generals", affecting how they are charged. I'm not an expert on the nuances between military law, federal law and what supersedes what, but Flynn's case will be much more complicated because of it. Most certainly processed slower, especially depending on who is charging him with what and all the shifting motions it will take to sort it out. 

Progress is being made

[fraurosena]

Seth Abramson has another thread out, this one on SHS's lies today.

 

 

[onekidanddone]

18 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Ivana was interviewed a while ago saying Donald couldn't talk to his kids before they were in university so it's even believable lol. 

Couldn't or wouldn't talk to them? Is it any wonder there are children of the evil corn.

[AmazonGrace]

2 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Couldn't or wouldn't talk to them? Is it any wonder there are children of the evil corn.

Well she says  he "had no idea how" and "he was not able to"  but it could be that he wasn't making much of an effort either because he wasn't interested in anyone who couldn't make him more money. 

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-ivana-children-engage-first-wife-ivanka-eric-us-president-a8027566.html 

[fraurosena]

The NYT has an annotated version of Papadopoulos's indictment.

Highlights of the Special Counsel’s Case Against George Papadoupoulos

 

[fraurosena]

Oh wow. Seth Abramson was right in guessing who Papadapolous's campaign connections were!

My, oh my, this is the day the dominoes start toppling.

[fraurosena]

It seems we get to learn more and more by the minute!

Sources: Podesta Group, Mercury Are Companies ‘A’ and ‘B’ in Indictment

Quote

The lobbying firms the Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs are the unnamed companies in the grand jury indictment of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, according to three sources with knowledge of the investigation.

The indictment, unsealed Monday, refers to "Company A" and "Company B" as the firms Manafort and Gates solicited in 2012 to lobby on behalf of the Ukranian government. Company A is Mercury Public Affairs and Company B is the Podesta Group, the sources said.

The revelation of the companies’ identities points to more details about the players involved in the high-stakes venture run by Manafort and Gates to push the interest of a pro-Russia Ukranian political party inside the United States. It also provides a glimpse into the material special prosecutor Robert Mueller has corroborated on both companies and the potential legal repercussions both groups could face.

Tony Podesta, who founded the left-leaning Podesta Group in 1988, stepped down from his position with the firm on Monday morning, an employee told NBC News.

NBC News reported last week that Podesta and the Podesta group had become a subject of Mueller’s probe into ties between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.

Tony Podesta is the brother of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, who is not under investigation.

The Podesta Group previously withheld from disclosing its work under the Foreign Agents Registrant Act (FARA), claiming they believed the group was not affiliated with the Ukrainian government.

According to the indictment, the lobbying firms were paid $2 million from offshore accounts controlled by Manafort.

Their work included lobbying "multiple members of Congress and their staffs about Ukraine sanctions, the validity of Ukraine elections" that the reasons for imprisoning Yulia Tymoshenko, the political rival of Russian-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

The indictment also revealed that Gates told Company A, now known to be Mercury, in February 2012 that it would be "representing the Government of Ukraine in [Washington] D.C."

A spokeswoman for Mercury could not be reached for comment. A spokeswoman for the Podesta Group declined to comment.

Manafort and Gates attempted to distance themselves from the work of the lobbying firms after press reports in August 2016, according to the indictment

Wanna bet the WH is going to use the Podesta name to blame the Dems for everything?

[Howl]

Hubs was flipping channels and caught some Fox.  There was an unsettling mix of indignation, high dudgeon and apoplexy on the Trish Regan "Intelligence" Report.  Comments tended to be along the lines of, "This is ALL they've got? Seriously?  Millions spent on the investigation and THIS IS ALL THEY'VE GOT?????"  

Well, no, it isn't all they've got.  Papadopoulos has been cooperating since late July (a "proactive cooperator", as noted in the VOX excerpt below), and as part of the cooperation, has been having lots and lots of conversations and many are speculating that he did so whilst wearing a wire.  Oh please, puh-leeeeze, pleeeeeze let it be so!  Or maybe his calls were recorded, which is less dramatic but still highly effective. 

What the Manafort and Papadopoulos indictments tell us about Mueller’s strategy:  Monday’s big news revealed Mueller’s strategy: treat the Trump campaign like the mafia.

Spoiler

The charges against Papadopoulos go back to this January, when he was interviewed by the FBI about his conversations with Russians during the campaign. Papadopoulos had in fact worked with multiple individuals claiming to be able to connect him with the Russian government — one of whom, called “the Professor” in the indictment, promised to get “thousands” of Clinton emails acquired by Russia into the Trump campaign’s hands.

Papadopoulos didn’t tell the FBI any of this, and instead chose to lie to its investigators — which is a felony. The Mueller team put together proof that he lied as the year progressed, quietly arresting him on July 27. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty on October 5, but the plea wasn’t unsealed until October 30.

Those precise dates are crucial. During that July 27 to October 30 time frame, there had been little public indication that Papadopoulos had been scooped up. This appears to be because Papadopoulos was needed as a state’s witness: The government’s motion to seal his guilty plea described him as a “proactive cooperator,” a legal term suggesting he was actively assisting in some fashion with Mueller’s probe, and that revealing his plea “may alert other subjects to the direction and status of the investigation.”

Papadopoulos was, in the mob investigation analogy, wearing a wire for the past several months. In fact, it’s possible he was literally wearing a wire; that’s something that “proactive cooperators” occasionally do, according to one former prosecutorinterviewed by the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale.

And what’s more, it appears to have yielded real and valuable information. The indictment against Papadopoulos contains previously unknown examples of him talking about contacts with the Russians with a number of different unnamed Trump associates — including a “Senior Policy Advisor,” “Campaign Supervisor,” and “High-Ranking Campaign Official.”

 

[fraurosena]

Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennesy had this to say on the Lawfare blog:

Robert Mueller’s Show of Strength: A Quick and Dirty Analysis

Quote

The first big takeaway from Monday morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III and George Papadopoulos is this: The president of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.

The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some of them.

Before we dive any deeper into the Manafort-Gates indictment—charges to which both pled not guilty to Monday—or the Papadopoulos plea and stipulation, let’s pause a moment over these two remarkable claims, one of which still must be considered as allegation and the other of which can now be considered as admitted fact. President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had "nothing to do with Russia."

The release of these documents should, though it probably won’t, put to rest the suggestion that there are no serious questions of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the latter’s interference on the former’s behalf during the 2016 election. It also raises a profound set of questions about the truthfulness of a larger set of representations Trump campaign officials and operatives have made both in public and, presumably, under oath and to investigators.

And here’s the rub: This is only Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s opening salvo.

As opening salvos go, it’s a doozy.

Let’s start with the surprise unsealing of the Papadopoulos plea agreement and stipulation of fact. Papadopoulos first became publicly affiliated with the Trump campaign in March 2016. That month, Trump faced significant pressure to announce foreign policy advisers after numerous Republican foreign policy and national security experts publicly vowed never to work for him. In response, Trump produced a list of names of purported experts, a list that included both Papadapoulos and Carter Page.

The Washington Post reported in August of this year that Papadopoulos, between March and May of 2016, had “offered to set up ‘a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russia ties under President Trump,’” but that the campaign had rebuffed his numerous attempts. It turns out he did a lot more than that.

His guilty plea is for lying to FBI investigators in a Jan. 27, 2017, interview regarding his conduct and contacts. As we’ve discussed in the past, it isn’t uncommon for false statements to the FBI to be prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 offenses in these sorts of cases. Proving that someone is lying is often easier than proving that the underlying offense violates the law. Here, for example, Papadopoulos’s underlying activity—working with Russian government officials to obtain “dirt” on Clinton and set up a Putin-Trump meeting—may have been legal, if wholly disreputable. Lying about it, however, is a crime. We can assume that Mueller had the goods on Papadopoulos beyond lying to the bureau in some manner. The lying, after all, is merely the charge he pleaded to in the context of a plea deal in which prosecutors have cut him a break. 

That said, the Papadopoulos stipulation offers a stunningly frank, if probably incomplete, account of what occurred during the spring of 2016 in the Trump campaign. To wit, during that period, Trump campaign officials were actively working to set up a meeting with Russian officials or representatives. And from a very early point in the campaign, those meetings were explicitly about obtaining hacked, incriminating emails.

It isn’t clear which emails the various parties might have been discussing here. There are, after all, the hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee, which first became public on June 14, 2016, though the breach had occurred more than a year earlier. There are the hacked emails of Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, abreach that occurred on March 19, 2016, but that did not become public until Oct. 9, 2016. There are also the purported 30,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department, a matter dating to 2015, which may not have ever been hacked but which Trump campaign folks clearly believed had been. There is also possibly some other category of alleged emails that wasn’t a matter of public discussion. But it’s clear that Trump campaign officials were after emails and, well, let’s just say they didn’t go to the FBI when they found themselves in conversations with Russian officials about them.

The stipulation also contains some rather damaging information about President Trump himself. Papadopoulos says he attended a “national security” meeting on March 31, 2016, at which Trump himself was present, along with his other foreign policy advisers. In that meeting, Papadopoulos told the group that he had connections to arrange a meeting between Trump and Russian President Putin. This means that Trump either knew or should have known about his campaign’s effort to interface with Russia, even as news of various criminal hacking and attempts to interfere with the U.S. election were becoming public.

The Manafort-Gates indictment is, in a different way, also dramatic. The amount of money allegedly at issue in breathtaking. According to Paragraph 6 of the indictment, “more than $75,000,000 flowed through the offshore accounts” that Manafort and Gates controlled. Eighteen million of these dollars are specifically alleged to have been laundered. This money laundering “to hide Ukraine payments from United States authorities” allegedly took place through the entire period of Manafort’s service in the Trump campaign.

Manafort’s alleged unregistered foreign agency on behalf of Ukraine and its Party of Regions, by contrast, reportedly ended in 2014, when then-Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych was ousted. So President Trump can at least claim that his campaign manager is not under indictment for being an unregistered foreign agent at the time he was running Trump’s campaign.

But that’s about the only good news in the indictment for the president. Because Manafort is alleged to have lied about his foreign-agent status and made false statements into this year. In other words, at the same time Papadopoulos admits he was working Russian government officials for Clinton emails and for a Trump-Putin meeting, Manafort was allegedly still laundering the money he had obtained by illegally representing one of Putin’s allied strongmen.

In the wake of the document releases, Trump turned to Twitter to dismiss it all:

[-TT tweets-]

We offer no prediction as to how this will play politically or whether such antics will carry any water with Republicans who must be feeling a little uneasy today.

We will say this: Mueller’s opening bid is a remarkable show of strength. He has a cooperating witness from inside the campaign’s interactions with the Russians. And he is alleging not mere technical infractions of law but astonishing criminality on the part of Trump’s campaign manager, a man who also attended the Trump Tower meeting.

Any hope the White House may have had that the Mueller investigation might be fading away vanished Monday morning. Things are only going to get worse from here. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From the WaPo: "The Fox News-Murdoch effect: Mueller must resign! Or be fired!"

Spoiler

The headline on the FoxNews.com story sounds foreboding. “Mueller facing new Republican pressure to resign in Russia probe,” reads the headline of the piece by Brooke Singman. Its gist is that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who’s investigating possible collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia, is now dealing with a “fresh round of calls from conservative critics for his resignation from the Russia collusion probe, amid revelations that have called into question the FBI’s own actions and potentially Mueller’s independence.”

Just what are the grounds for resignation? The quasi-logic spreads out over a few points:

• Mueller is a buddy of James B. Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director. “The federal code could not be clearer — Mueller is compromised by his apparent conflict of interest in being close with James Comey,” Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), told Fox News in a statement on Friday. “The appearance of a conflict is enough to put Mueller in violation of the code. . . .  All of the revelations in recent weeks make the case stronger.”
• Mueller was serving as the director of the FBI back in 2010, when the U.S. government was reviewing a controversial deal in which a Russian company acquired a Canadian mining company with uranium holdings in the United States — a transaction that would become known as the Uranium One deal. In a masterful piece of distraction, The Hill on Oct. 17 published a “scoop” that Mueller’s FBI was investigating criminal conduct involving a subsidiary of the company involved in the Uranium One deal.
• The Washington Post reported last week that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee retained research firm Fusion GPS to develop the infamous dossier on Trump’s ties to Russia — a document put together by a former MI6 officer. As it turned out, the FBI considered paying the agent to continue his work but backed out after the whole thing blew up in the media. Therefore, the FBI needs to be investigated, and Mueller, a former director, can’t possibly do that.

Please excuse the Erik Wemple Blog if you don’t fully understand how those circumstances could disqualify Mueller from pursuing his investigation. Truth be told, we don’t either.

What we do understand is that the best explanations are available at media properties under the control of Rupert Murdoch, the 21st Century Fox mogul. Admire the way that his folks breathe conspiratorial life into a story: In her Fox News piece, for example, Singman quotes New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) as saying this about recent events: “If the facts that you just laid out are true, then somebody with Bob Mueller’s integrity will step aside and should — if in fact those facts, as you laid them out, are true.”

Where did he say that? On “Fox & Friends,” the record-breaking creator of idiocies on morning television.

What other source material did Singman find out there in the newsphere? Oh, a piece from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, that storied newspaper that Murdoch pulled out all the stops to acquire a decade ago. Here’s what it said about Mueller in an Oct. 25 editorial:

All of this also raises questions about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The Fusion news means the FBI’s role in Russia’s election interference must now be investigated—even as the FBI and Justice insist that Mr. Mueller’s probe prevents them from cooperating with Congressional investigators.

Mr. Mueller is a former FBI director, and for years he worked closely with Mr. Comey. It is no slur against Mr. Mueller’s integrity to say that he lacks the critical distance to conduct a credible probe of the bureau he ran for a dozen years. He could best serve the country by resigning to prevent further political turmoil over that conflict of interest.

The American public deserves a full accounting of the scope and nature of Russian meddling in American democracy, and that means following the trail of the Steele dossier as much as it does the meetings of Trump campaign officials.

Preposterous, every word of it. This is called conflict-of-interest sniping, and we see it all over the place, including in the media. Remember how Harvey Weinstein & Co. attempted to push Ronan Farrow off the story of the mogul’s sexual harassment by arguing that he was conflicted through his relationship with his movie-making father, Woody Allen? Or the time that the Daily Caller attempted to conflict ABC News’s Martha Raddatz out of hosting a Joe Biden-Paul Ryan vice-presidential debate in 2012 because of some weak ties to President Barack Obama?

Mueller is investigating actors in the Trump campaign — a pursuit for which he appears as ethically fit as anyone in the country.

There’s yet another Murdoch-sponsored attack on Mueller, however. Writing in the New York Post on Saturday, columnist Michael Goodwin argued, “special counsel Robert Mueller will never be able to untangle the tangled webs with any credibility and needs to step aside.” Again, the argument here is that recent events — Uranium One and the dossier situation — require that the Mueller investigation be broadened. Once broadened, that investigation couldn’t possibly be headed by Robert Mueller. According to Goodwin, “events showed that any honest probe must examine the Obama White House and Justice Department. Mueller served as head of the FBI for more than four years under President Barack Obama and cannot be expected to investigate his former colleagues and bosses.”

Funny how folks in the Murdoch empire — a place where the merits of tax cuts and limited government are commonly saluted — want to see Mueller’s investigation creep into new corners of the federal bureaucracy.

Jeanine Pirro, the host of “Justice with Judge Jeanine” on Fox News, did away with the moderate approach of asking for Mueller’s resignation. Better to just destroy American democracy and be rid of Mueller all at the same time: “Special Counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller must be fired immediately. His role as head of the FBI during the uranium deal and the Russian extortion case, his friendship with Jim Comey, demand his firing.”

i think Jeanine Pirro must have rabies. She certainly acts rabid.

[fraurosena]

Ha! The "who is" questions I had after reading Papadapolous's indictment are being answered, one after the other!

Mystery Professor in Mueller Case Had Contacts With Russian Officials

Quote

The statement made public by special counsel Robert Mueller on Monday morning announcing the guilty plea of former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos produced a stunning revelation: a professor who touted his close ties to Russian officials told Papadopoulos in late April 2016 that he had learned on a trip to Moscow that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” (This was two months before the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee became public.) This professor was not named in the statement, but according to the document, he is based in London, a citizen of a Mediterranean country, and on April 18, 2016 flew to Moscow to attend a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, an academic forum in Russia known for connecting Russian officials with Western diplomats.

This mystery professor is likely Joseph Mifsud of the University of Stirling in Scotland. According to a calendar entry on the Valdai club’s website, Mifsud spoke on a Valdai panel on April 19, 2016, titled, “World Energy: Key Trends and Political Risks.” Mifsud grew up in the Mediterranean nation of Malta, where he served in various government posts; he was the only Londoner and the only professor on the panel. The Mueller legal filing revealed that Papadopoulos had extensive contacts with the professor as part of an effort to set up a meeting between Trump campaign representatives and Russian officials. Papadopoulos told his campaign supervisors about this effort and was encouraged to proceed. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with the professor and others connected to Russia. 

The Washington Post noted on Monday that Mifsud is probably the professor cited in the Mueller statement. One of the emails quoted in the document, according to the Post, “appears to match one described to the Washington Post in August in which Papadopoulos identified the professor with whom he met as Joseph Mifsud, the director of the London Academy of Diplomacy.” But the Post reported that in August Mifsud told the newspaper he had “absolutely no contact with the Russian government,” and he insisted his ties to Russia were purely academic.

The public record, though, contains information contradicting Mifsud and showing that he has had contacts with Russian government officials. According to photos on the website of Russia’s embassy in the United Kingdom, Mifsud met with embassy representative Ernest Chernukhin in July of this year (weeks before he issued his denial to the Post). A biography from a 2013 business conference says Mifsud “has advised Governments on international education issues in many countries including Morocco, Syria, Russia, Tunisia, and Italy.” 

Additionally, in early 2017, Mifsud invited Alexey Klishin, a department head and professor in the international law division of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, a school run by Russia’s Foreign Ministry, to the London Academy of Diplomacy to present a lecture. Klishin was a former member of the upper house of the Russian parliament. According to a January 2017 press releasefrom the Institution of the Russian Academy of Sciences, “Klishin’s presentation was devoted to international law and national legal systems [and] to their coexistence in the era of Brexit and the new presidency in the United States.” The release noted that Klishin had “visited the London Academy of Diplomacy at the University of Stirling…at the invitation of the Director Joseph Mifsud.” Here’s a photo with Mifsud (second from the right) and Klishin (center) standing next to each other:

[pic]

Mifsud did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

One obvious question for the professor is why he told the Post he had “absolutely” no contacts with Russian officials when on-line material suggests he has. There are no indications in the Mueller statement whether his team has questioned Mifsud about the Clinton “dirt” or Papadopoulos’s initiative to create a back-channel bond between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin’s office. 

There’s another reason why Mifsud could be of interest to Mueller and his investigators. In the past year, the New York Times has reported that US intelligence agencies collected information in the summer of 2016 indicating that top Russian intelligence and political officials were looking to gain influence over Trump through his advisers and that US spy agencies had intercepted calls showing that Trump campaign aides and other Trump associates had repeated interactions with senior Russian intelligence officials, perhaps unwittingly. (In June, former FBI chief James Comey, in congressional testimony, disputed the Times story disclosing contacts between the Trump aides and Russian intelligence, but he did not specify what was wrong with the article.) So Mueller is no doubt looking for possible instances of when Russian intelligence infiltrated—or tried to infiltrate—the Trump campaign, either directly or through witting or unwitting cut-outs. And the Papadopoulos episode could be a case not only of a Trump aide trying to establish a campaign connection with the Kremlin but of Russian intelligence attempting to score a contact within the Trump campaign.

Mueller’s Papadopoulos statement tells the story of one Trump campaign effort to hook up with the Kremlin. But elements of this tale still require further explanation. 

 

Seth Abramson is very prolific today. I wonder why? 

 

[AmazonGrace]

4 hours ago, iweartanktops said:

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

Happy Indictment Monday, friends! 

Like they say,

Lordy I hope there are tapes

[fraurosena]

12 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Like they say,

Lordy I hope there are tapes

According to the latest in Abramson's ongoing thread I posted above...

 

and...

so...

 

[iweartanktops]

3 hours ago, OtterRuletheWorld said:

She was saying the indictments having nothing to do with the campaign.

We also were told that Trump is not [currently] planning on dismissing Mueller.

Uhhhh, yes, I'm aware of what she was talking about. 

[Destiny]

2 minutes ago, iweartanktops said:

Uhhhh, yes, I'm aware of what she was talking about. 

Summer of 60 children have to overly explain everything related to politics to poor, stupid us.

Some things never change no matter how many times we see it.

[iweartanktops]

7 minutes ago, Destiny said:

Summer of 60 children have to overly explain everything related to politics to poor, stupid us.

Some things never change no matter how many times we see it.

I've missed a few things around here, apparently. 

[onekidanddone]

15 minutes ago, Destiny said:

Summer of 60 children have to overly explain everything related to politics to poor, stupid us.

Errr Okay, I'm slow on the uptake tonight.  What does "Summer of 60" mean?

[Destiny]

Errr Okay, I'm slow on the uptake tonight.  What does "Summer of 60" mean?

Look up the user summer60.

[onekidanddone]

17 minutes ago, Destiny said:

Look up the user summer60.

Ugh. Got it now, thanks.  I didn"t find it at first because I typed it wrong in the search bar. The best thing is to not feed the trolls, but that does not always work, and like a fungus they sometimes keep coming back.

[GreyhoundFan]

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

Spoiler

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 who 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.

Rachel Maddow just said that Manafort and Gates had to surrender their passports. Can anyone say flight risk?

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, iweartanktops said:

I've missed a few things around here, apparently. 

You have no idea! I'm surprised I didn't have to pay $39.99 for it on HBO.

[Botkinetti]

I keep hearing the Jaws theme music in my head when I read this thread. Mueller circling ever closer trump and his cohorts.