Russian Connection 4: Do Not Congratulate

[fraurosena]

After yesterday's analysis of the HSPCI's majority report, Seth Abramson now has added his analysis of the minority's report.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Here is a story about a Mueller witness I don't remember hearing of before:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/29/pro-trump-pr-guy-mueller-probe-218112

[AmazonGrace]

 

[onekidanddone]

42 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Jill Stein collected a yuge amount of money after the election for a "recount". I fell down the Stein rabbit hole watching the ticker as people donated. Where did all that money go?

[AmazonGrace]

Not sure Trump needs to be "seduced" into long ramblings, it seems to come to him naturally. If they get him to agree to an interview he will ramble

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

More legal headache for Manafort, not from Mueller this time. 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

The fact that these questions got out in the public have got me wondering what Mueller's play is here.

We all know how close Mueller holds his cards to his chest, and he and his team have never (unintentionally) leaked any information, or commented on journalist's questions so far. Therefore, I believe that these questions getting into the hands of journalists is not by accident. Note how none of these questions aren't questions we, the public at large, haven't already formulated ourselves based on the little we know. That little tidbit about Manafort is just a snippet of 'new' information that isn't all that surprising either.

And note also, this little sentence in the NYT article about where the information came from:

Quote

 

That document was provided to The Times by a person outside Mr. Trump’s legal team. 

 

And this sentence in the Politico article: 

Quote

Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor, said Monday night’s leak of Mueller’s questions was “unheard of in FBI investigations.”

So why do we have access to these questions? 

The Politico article mentions this theory:

Quote

“The most likely explanation is that they are trying to justify Trump’s decision not to be interviewed, by demonstrating how broad the questions are,” Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor, said of the questions’ release, which she said had the fingerprints of a source sympathetic to the president’s arguments.

Now, I'm not a three-dimensional chess player, nor am I a highly experienced law professional. But I do have quite a suspicious mind, and here's my theory.

The presidunce actually sitting down for an interview isn't clear as yet. There's still a 'will he, won't he' game being played right now. Could it be that by releasing (either indirectly by Mueller's team, or indirectly by giving the questions to the presidunce's team knowing they would be leaked -indirectly or directly - by them), these particular softball questions, ones that everybody knows already, Mueller is signalling that the presidunce needn't be afraid of him surprising the presidunce with knowledge of other, more damaging, information? The presidunce and his team can carefully prepare the answers to these questions (if they haven't already), and prep the presidunce as much as possible for the interview. (They could even dope him up on whatever they dope him up on when he needs to give scripted speeches. It'll make him slur a little, but hey, at least he won't go off script as much.) The presidunce and his team might believe they can control the situation, and even come out relatively unscathed. And best of all, by agreeing to the interview, they will finally be putting an end to the investigation. Or so they think.

In reality, Mueller will be sitting there, like a spider, content at having enticed the presidunce into his web.

Mueller is sure to have more, quite damaging, information up his sleeve. He will ask more profound and piercing questions that the presidunce hasn't prepared the answers to. Or maybe he doesn't have other questions (far less likely, but possible). Whatever the case, like Alan Dershowitz says, the presidunce will be in that interview seat, and Mueller will let him ramble and self-incriminate, and ramble and incriminate others, and ramble and give even more incriminating information than they already have.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

Ooooh, I wonder what this is about... 

Although it could very well be nothing, of course, and just a reaction to the leaked questions, but I rather hope there is some kind of 'big' (and good) development about to break. 

[Howl]

In terms of the ultimate source of the leak, Señor Howl sees Rudy "We'll wrap this up in a few weeks" Giuliani's finger prints all over it.  

It would be so outstandingly delicious if Donald "Two Scoops, No Collusion" Trump testifies directly to Mueller.  So delicious. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

4 hours ago, Howl said:

In terms of the ultimate source of the leak, Señor Howl sees Rudy "We'll wrap this up in a few weeks" Giuliani's finger prints all over it.  

It would be so outstandingly delicious if Donald "Two Scoops, No Collusion" Trump testifies directly to Mueller.  So delicious. 

 

I agree that Rudy is likely involved.

As far as Dumpy testifying, if it was sold as a pay-per-view event, it would be the bigliest event ever. We could probably cut the national deficit by at least 25% off the revenue. Popcorn and adult beverage sales would also skyrocket. I'm picturing the orange streaking down his face as he gets more and more upset and digs himself further into a deep hole. Normally I boycott listening to anything Dumpy says, since his voice causes my ears to bleed, but I'd make an exception for that interview.

[onekidanddone]

6 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Normally I boycott listening to anything Dumpy says, since his voice causes my ears to bleed, but I'd make an exception for that interview.

I believe I've found my twin

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Ooh, this just popped up as breaking news on the WaPo home page: "Mueller raised possibility of presidential subpoena in meeting with Trump’s legal team"

Spoiler

In a tense meeting in early March with the special counsel, President Trump’s lawyers insisted he had no obligation to talk with federal investigators probing Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

But special counsel Robert S. Mueller III responded that he had another option if Trump declined: He could issue a subpoena for the president to appear before a grand jury, according to four people familiar with the encounter.

Mueller’s warning — the first time he is known to have mentioned a possible subpoena to Trump’s legal team — spurred a sharp retort from John Dowd, then the president’s lead lawyer.

“This isn’t some game,” Dowd said, according to two people with knowledge of his comments. “You are screwing with the work of the president of the United States.”

The flare-up set in motion weeks of turmoil among Trump’s attorneys as they debated how to deal with the special counsel’s request for an interview, a dispute that ultimately led to Dowd’s resignation.

In the wake of the testy March 5 meeting, Mueller’s team agreed to provide the president’s lawyers with more specific information about the subjects that prosecutors wished to discuss with the president. With those details in hand, Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow compiled a list of 49 questions that the team believed the president would be asked, according to three of the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly. The New York Times first reported the existence of the list.

The questions focus on events during the Trump campaign, transition and presidency that have long been known to be under scrutiny, including the president’s reasons for firing then-FBI Director James B. Comey and the pressure he put on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign.

Now Trump’s newly reconfigured legal team is pondering how to address the special counsel’s queries, all while assessing the potential evidence of obstruction that Mueller might present and contending with a client who has grown increasingly opposed to sitting down with the special counsel.

Without a resolution on the interview, the standoff could turn into a historic confrontation before the Supreme Court over a presidential subpoena.

Sekulow and Dowd declined to comment. Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the special counsel, declined to comment.

The president has repeatedly decried the investigation as a “witch hunt.”

“Oh, I see...you have a made up, phony crime, Collusion, that never existed, and an investigation begun with illegally leaked classified information. Nice!” Trump tweeted Tuesday.

Trump’s remade legal team is now led by former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who told The Washington Post on Tuesday that he views Mueller as the utmost professional, but is still reviewing documents and considering conditions he might set before deciding whether to recommend that Trump agree to an interview.

“Hopefully we’re getting near the end. We all on both sides have some important decisions to make,” Giuliani said. “I still have a totally open mind on what the right strategy is, which we’ll develop in the next few weeks.”

In the meantime, Trump’s lawyers are also considering whether to provide Mueller with written explanations of the episodes he is examining. After investigators laid out 16 specific subjects they wanted to review with the president and added a few topics within each one, Sekulow broke the queries down into 49 separate questions, according to people familiar with the process.

Paul Rosenzweig, who worked as a senior counsel on independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation during the Clinton administration, predicted that the president would face a long interview if the special counsel hewed to the list Sekulow compiled.

“This isn’t a list of 49 questions. It’s 49 topics,” Rosenzweig said. “Each of these topics results in dozens of questions. To be honest, that list is a two-day interview. You don’t get through it in an hour or two.”

For his part, Trump fumed when he saw the breadth of the questions that emerged out of the talks with Mueller’s team, according to two White House officials.

The president and several advisers now plan to point to the list as evidence that Mueller has strayed beyond his mandate and is overreaching, they said.

“He wants to hammer that,” according to a person who spoke to Trump on Monday.

“Mueller is in Kenny Starr territory now,” said another Trump adviser, referring to how the controversial independent counsel investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s real estate deals in Arkansas ended up examining the president’s lies about his sexual relationship with a White House intern.

Trump advisers are particularly frustrated by the Mueller team’s focus on whether Trump was obstructing justice by trying to push last summer for Sessions to resign. If the attorney general had stepped down, Trump could have chosen a replacement who was not recused from running the Russia investigation.

Dowd has repeatedly argued that the president has ultimate authority under the Constitution to fire or demote any of his appointees and that his firing decisions cannot be used as evidence of obstruction.

The revelation of the scope of the questions before the president’s team could further complicate recently renewed talks between the special counsel and Trump’s attorneys about a possible interview.

Last week, Giuliani met with Mueller to reopen negotiations over a presidential interview.

Giuliani conveyed the ongoing resistance of Trump and his advisers to a sit-down but did not rule out the possibility. Still, Trump remains strongly opposed to granting Mueller an interview — resistance fueled largely by the raids last month on the office and residences of his personal attorney Michael Cohen.

Trump’s anger over the Cohen raids spilled into nearly every conversation in the days that followed and continues to be a sore point for the president. One confidant said Trump seems to “talk about it 20 times a day.” Other associates said they often stay silent, in person or on the phone, as he vents about the Cohen matter, knowing there is little they can say.

Alan Dershowitz, a well-known lawyer and Trump advocate, said Tuesday that it would be dangerous and unwise for the president to agree to an interview.

“The strategy is to throw him softballs so that he will go on and on with his answers,” he said. “Instead of sharp questions designed to elicit yes or no, they make him feel very comfortable and let him ramble.”

In that setting, Dershowitz said, prosecutors could catch Trump in a misstatement.

Should Mueller seek to compel Trump’s testimony using a subpoena, a legal battle could ensue that could delay the investigation and force the issue into the courts, potentially to the Supreme Court.

Trump’s team could argue that Mueller was seeking information about the president’s private conversations that are protected by executive privilege or that a grand jury interview would place an unnecessary burden on the president’s ability to run the country.

Judges have generally held that the president is not above the law and can be subjected to normal legal processes — but the issue of a presidential subpoena for testimony has not been tested in court. Starr subpoenaed President Bill Clinton for grand jury testimony in 1998 but withdrew it after Clinton agreed to testify voluntarily. He was interviewed at the White House, appearing before the grand jury via video.

Rosenzweig, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said judges generally like to accommodate a president because he has to be free to “manage the affairs of the world and deal with nuclear war without having to worry about whether he has to show up for an interview the next day.”

But, he added, courts are loath to say the president can’t be investigated.

“The opposite argument is that no man is above the law, and if it’s a lawful investigation, then he must respond,” Rosenzweig said.

Some legal experts believe that two Justice Department opinions prohibit federal prosecutors, including Mueller, from charging a president with a crime. Instead, they said, the Constitution relies on Congress’s power to impeach as the route to hold a president accountable for potentially criminal behavior.

Trump’s lawyers could then argue that he cannot be forced to testify under subpoena, unless his testimony is necessary to indict someone else.

 

[onekidanddone]

19 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Ooh, this just popped up as breaking news on the WaPo home page: "Mueller raised possibility of presidential subpoena in meeting with Trump’s legal team"

  Reveal hidden contents

In a tense meeting in early March with the special counsel, President Trump’s lawyers insisted he had no obligation to talk with federal investigators probing Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

But special counsel Robert S. Mueller III responded that he had another option if Trump declined: He could issue a subpoena for the president to appear before a grand jury, according to four people familiar with the encounter.

Mueller’s warning — the first time he is known to have mentioned a possible subpoena to Trump’s legal team — spurred a sharp retort from John Dowd, then the president’s lead lawyer.

“This isn’t some game,” Dowd said, according to two people with knowledge of his comments. “You are screwing with the work of the president of the United States.”

The flare-up set in motion weeks of turmoil among Trump’s attorneys as they debated how to deal with the special counsel’s request for an interview, a dispute that ultimately led to Dowd’s resignation.

In the wake of the testy March 5 meeting, Mueller’s team agreed to provide the president’s lawyers with more specific information about the subjects that prosecutors wished to discuss with the president. With those details in hand, Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow compiled a list of 49 questions that the team believed the president would be asked, according to three of the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly. The New York Times first reported the existence of the list.

The questions focus on events during the Trump campaign, transition and presidency that have long been known to be under scrutiny, including the president’s reasons for firing then-FBI Director James B. Comey and the pressure he put on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign.

Now Trump’s newly reconfigured legal team is pondering how to address the special counsel’s queries, all while assessing the potential evidence of obstruction that Mueller might present and contending with a client who has grown increasingly opposed to sitting down with the special counsel.

Without a resolution on the interview, the standoff could turn into a historic confrontation before the Supreme Court over a presidential subpoena.

Sekulow and Dowd declined to comment. Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the special counsel, declined to comment.

The president has repeatedly decried the investigation as a “witch hunt.”

“Oh, I see...you have a made up, phony crime, Collusion, that never existed, and an investigation begun with illegally leaked classified information. Nice!” Trump tweeted Tuesday.

Trump’s remade legal team is now led by former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who told The Washington Post on Tuesday that he views Mueller as the utmost professional, but is still reviewing documents and considering conditions he might set before deciding whether to recommend that Trump agree to an interview.

“Hopefully we’re getting near the end. We all on both sides have some important decisions to make,” Giuliani said. “I still have a totally open mind on what the right strategy is, which we’ll develop in the next few weeks.”

In the meantime, Trump’s lawyers are also considering whether to provide Mueller with written explanations of the episodes he is examining. After investigators laid out 16 specific subjects they wanted to review with the president and added a few topics within each one, Sekulow broke the queries down into 49 separate questions, according to people familiar with the process.

Paul Rosenzweig, who worked as a senior counsel on independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation during the Clinton administration, predicted that the president would face a long interview if the special counsel hewed to the list Sekulow compiled.

“This isn’t a list of 49 questions. It’s 49 topics,” Rosenzweig said. “Each of these topics results in dozens of questions. To be honest, that list is a two-day interview. You don’t get through it in an hour or two.”

For his part, Trump fumed when he saw the breadth of the questions that emerged out of the talks with Mueller’s team, according to two White House officials.

The president and several advisers now plan to point to the list as evidence that Mueller has strayed beyond his mandate and is overreaching, they said.

“He wants to hammer that,” according to a person who spoke to Trump on Monday.

“Mueller is in Kenny Starr territory now,” said another Trump adviser, referring to how the controversial independent counsel investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s real estate deals in Arkansas ended up examining the president’s lies about his sexual relationship with a White House intern.

Trump advisers are particularly frustrated by the Mueller team’s focus on whether Trump was obstructing justice by trying to push last summer for Sessions to resign. If the attorney general had stepped down, Trump could have chosen a replacement who was not recused from running the Russia investigation.

Dowd has repeatedly argued that the president has ultimate authority under the Constitution to fire or demote any of his appointees and that his firing decisions cannot be used as evidence of obstruction.

The revelation of the scope of the questions before the president’s team could further complicate recently renewed talks between the special counsel and Trump’s attorneys about a possible interview.

Last week, Giuliani met with Mueller to reopen negotiations over a presidential interview.

Giuliani conveyed the ongoing resistance of Trump and his advisers to a sit-down but did not rule out the possibility. Still, Trump remains strongly opposed to granting Mueller an interview — resistance fueled largely by the raids last month on the office and residences of his personal attorney Michael Cohen.

Trump’s anger over the Cohen raids spilled into nearly every conversation in the days that followed and continues to be a sore point for the president. One confidant said Trump seems to “talk about it 20 times a day.” Other associates said they often stay silent, in person or on the phone, as he vents about the Cohen matter, knowing there is little they can say.

Alan Dershowitz, a well-known lawyer and Trump advocate, said Tuesday that it would be dangerous and unwise for the president to agree to an interview.

“The strategy is to throw him softballs so that he will go on and on with his answers,” he said. “Instead of sharp questions designed to elicit yes or no, they make him feel very comfortable and let him ramble.”

In that setting, Dershowitz said, prosecutors could catch Trump in a misstatement.

Should Mueller seek to compel Trump’s testimony using a subpoena, a legal battle could ensue that could delay the investigation and force the issue into the courts, potentially to the Supreme Court.

Trump’s team could argue that Mueller was seeking information about the president’s private conversations that are protected by executive privilege or that a grand jury interview would place an unnecessary burden on the president’s ability to run the country.

Judges have generally held that the president is not above the law and can be subjected to normal legal processes — but the issue of a presidential subpoena for testimony has not been tested in court. Starr subpoenaed President Bill Clinton for grand jury testimony in 1998 but withdrew it after Clinton agreed to testify voluntarily. He was interviewed at the White House, appearing before the grand jury via video.

Rosenzweig, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said judges generally like to accommodate a president because he has to be free to “manage the affairs of the world and deal with nuclear war without having to worry about whether he has to show up for an interview the next day.”

But, he added, courts are loath to say the president can’t be investigated.

“The opposite argument is that no man is above the law, and if it’s a lawful investigation, then he must respond,” Rosenzweig said.

Some legal experts believe that two Justice Department opinions prohibit federal prosecutors, including Mueller, from charging a president with a crime. Instead, they said, the Constitution relies on Congress’s power to impeach as the route to hold a president accountable for potentially criminal behavior.

Trump’s lawyers could then argue that he cannot be forced to testify under subpoena, unless his testimony is necessary to indict someone else.

 

Okay so good and bad news here. Good: Trump will crap his pants. Bad: Trump will crap his pants and fire Sessions so he can fire Muller.

[Cartmann99]

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

As far as Dumpy testifying, if it was sold as a pay-per-view event, it would be the bigliest event ever. We could probably cut the national deficit by at least 25% off the revenue. 

I've said this before, but you scare me when you crawl inside my head like that. 

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Normally I boycott listening to anything Dumpy says, since his voice causes my ears to bleed, but I'd make an exception for that interview.

We'd need to have closed captions for our hearing impaired citizens, so I'd recommend turning the closed captions on and just muting the television. I propose that whoever does the closed captioning should get a percentage of the take for trying to translate orange gibberish into something approximating English. 

[Alisamer]

12 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

I've said this before, but you scare me when you crawl inside my head like that. 

We'd need to have closed captions for our hearing impaired citizens, so I'd recommend turning the closed captions on and just muting the television. I propose that whoever does the closed captioning should get a percentage of the take for trying to translate orange gibberish into something approximating English. 

Perhaps whoever does the captioning could save some time by setting up shortcuts for words like "tremendous" and "collusion" and phrases like "the best" and "believe me", plus one to repeat whatever word was just said. 

It would also be nice if all false statements were colored orange, or something. That would be 90% of the text, though...

[Cartmann99]

3 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

It would also be nice if all false statements were colored orange, or something. That would be 90% of the text, though...

Mueller:  Mr. Trump, you said earlier that you've never met Ivanka Trump, Tiffany Trump, Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Melania Trump, or Barron Trump. Do you wish to amend your statement?

Trump: *sniffs loudly* I've never heard of any of those people before.

*a box pops up on the television screen with orange text inside*

 "Trump is lying again. Melania is his wife, the others are his children. Do you wish to administer a light shock to Mr.Trump for lying? If so, press the yellow button on the remote you received for this program to vote 'yes' or the blue button for 'hell, yes!'."

*Trump winces on screen, says a word that gets bleeped out, and threatens to sic his lawyers on whoever did that*

*A box pops back up on the screen with orange text inside*

 "He's lying again, he has no lawyers. His last lawyer got so fed up with his nonsense that he left the legal profession and started a beef jerky and beer stand in Hoboken, NJ.  If you wish to shock him again, press the yellow or blue button on your remote. If you'd like Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti to appear at a window next to his room and wave at him, press the purple button on your remote."

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Meanwhile in the UK 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

From @GreyhoundFan   link:

Quote

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow compiled a list of 49 questions that the team believed the president would be asked, according to three of the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly.

If the list was just speculation by Sekulow Trump was either clueless or a lying deceiving liar when he tweeted the following, as if the questions in Sekulow's list in any way prove what Mueller knows or doesn't know about collusion:

@realDonaldTrump

Quote

So disgraceful that the questions concerning the Russian Witch Hunt were “leaked” to the media. No questions on Collusion. Oh, I see...you have a made up, phony crime, Collusion, that never existed, and an investigation begun with illegally leaked classified information. Nice!

 

Also, people were commenting on the list  saying things like some questions seemed to imply that Jared was guilty or that Manafort made overtures to Russia, and wondering if it means Mueller knows those things are true.

If it's a Trump legal team list, we might have to  question if the Trump legal team knows those things to be true.