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Trump Gives Attorney General Sweeping Power in Review of 2016 Campaign Inquiry

Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt — Thu, 23 May 2019 06:37:31 +0000

President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr this week at the White House. The directive gives Mr. Barr immense leverage over the intelligence community and enormous power over what the public learns about the roots of the Russia investigation. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Trump took extraordinary steps on Thursday to give Attorney General William P. Barr sweeping new authorities to conduct a review into how the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia were investigated, significantly escalating the administration’s efforts to place those who investigated the campaign under scrutiny.

In a directive, Mr. Trump ordered the C.I.A. and the country’s 15 other intelligence agencies to cooperate with the review and granted Mr. Barr the authority to unilaterally declassify their documents. The move — which occurred just hours after the president again declared that those who led the investigation committed treason — gave Mr. Barr immense leverage over the intelligence community and enormous power over what the public learns about the roots of the Russia investigation.

The order is a change for Mr. Trump, who last year dropped a plan to release documents related to the Russia investigation amid concerns from Justice Department officials who said making them public could damage national security. At the time, the president was being encouraged by a group of Republican Congress members to declassify the information.

Mr. Barr, who has used the word “spying” to describe how the Trump campaign was investigated, has been deeply involved in the department’s review of how intelligence was collected on the campaign. Mr. Barr has told Congress that he personally authorized the review. While he has asked John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, to spearhead it, a Justice Department official said that Mr. Barr has personally met with the heads of the intelligence agencies to discuss the review and that the project was a top priority after the release last month of the special counsel’s report.

One official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said previously that Mr. Barr wanted to know more about what foreign assets the C.I.A. had in Russia in 2016 and what those informants were telling the agency about how President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sought to meddle in the 2016 election.

The C.I.A. on Thursday referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A spokeswoman for the office did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The directive is likely to irk the intelligence community, which has long prized its ability to determine what information about its operations can be released to the public. During the investigations of the C.I.A.’s enhanced interrogation programs, the agency stymied investigators by refusing to declassify documents.

There could be other implications for the intelligence agencies. The C.I.A. considers confidential sources its most highly classified and most protected assets, and any investigation that could possibly force it to reveal those identities is likely to create a standoff. Last year, the agency lost trust in the Justice Department’s ability to keep the names of informants and sources secret after the identity of an F.B.I. informant who interacted with two Trump campaign officials under investigation, Stefan Halper, was revealed as part of congressional inquiries, according to former intelligence officials.

Late Thursday, Jeremy Bash, a chief of staff at the C.I.A. under President Barack Obama, said that the president’s move was “a very significant delegation of power to an attorney general who has shown he’s willing to do Donald Trump’s political bidding.”

“It’s dangerous,” he continued, “because the power to declassify is also the power to selectively declassify, and selective declassification is one of the ways the Trump White House can spin a narrative about the origins of the Russia investigation to their point of view.”

He added that confidential sources around the globe might be fearful of talking now.

“It sends a signal that their identity may be exposed for purely political purposes,” Mr. Bash said. “If I were in charge of intelligence operations, I would be worried about sources clamming up tonight.”

Mr. Barr has said that he believes Mr. Trump’s campaign was “spied” on, appearing to bolster unfounded accusations that Mr. Trump has made about the Obama administration illegally wiretapping his associates.

The dual decisions on Thursday were announced in a presidential memorandum, and explained in a statement by the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

The directive will “help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions,” the statement said.

Despite the significant step, there are indications there may be little criminality to uncover. Mr. Durham is conducting only a limited review, not a criminal investigation, which suggests Mr. Barr may not have identified enough wrongdoing to open such an inquiry.

Mr. Durham is not the only federal prosecutor who has been examining this issue. For over a year, John W. Huber, the United States attorney in Utah, also examined aspects of the Russia investigation until Mr. Durham subsumed that part of his work. When Mr. Barr’s predecessor, Matthew G. Whitaker, was the acting attorney general, and Mr. Trump repeatedly pressed for him to appoint a second special counsel, Mr. Whitaker told people he considered Mr. Huber to essentially be serving in that role.

A Justice Department official confirmed that Mr. Barr asked the president to issue the memo, which broadens his authority in an inquiry in which he is personally interested. The order also extends to several other parts of the federal government, including the Departments of Defense, Energy and Homeland Security.

Since the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was released, Mr. Trump has repeatedly called the inquiry a “hoax” on Twitter and has expressed frustration and anger over the efforts by the Democrat-controlled House to review aspects of the report.

The White House has recently ratcheted up its messaging about the Russia investigation. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump held a hastily called news conference in the Rose Garden to denounce Democrats. There, on a lectern, hung a sign featuring statistics about the Mueller investigation, and it also said, “No Collusion, No Obstruction.”

Meantime, the official White House Twitter page has featured quotations from the president, including one saying, “The crime was committed on the OTHER SIDE.”

Officials at the F.B.I. have denied that anything improper took place in relation to the Russia inquiry.

But in an interview this month with Fox News, Mr. Barr expressed concern about a lack of answers about its origins.

“I’ve been trying to get answers to the questions, and I’ve found that a lot of the answers have been inadequate and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” he said.

Katie Benner, Julian E. Barnes and Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on May 23, 2019, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Barr Given Broad Power to Review 2016 Campaign Inquiry. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/us/politics/trump-barr-intelligence.html

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The post Trump Gives Attorney General Sweeping Power in Review of 2016 Campaign Inquiry first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Mueller completes the Russia probe report

Fox News — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 22:52:27 +0000

The post Mueller completes the Russia probe report first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Mueller Delivers Report on Trump-Russia Investigation to Attorney General

Sharon LaFraniere and Katie Benner — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 22:39:51 +0000

WASHINGTON — The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has delivered a report on his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election to Attorney General William P. Barr, according to the Justice Department, bringing to a close an investigation that has consumed the nation and cast a shadow over President Trump for nearly two years.

Mr. Barr told congressional leaders in a letter late Friday that he may brief them within days on the special counsel’s findings. “I may be in a position to advise you of the special counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend,” he wrote in a letter to the leadership of the House and Senate Judiciary committees.

It is up to Mr. Barr how much of the report to share with Congress and, by extension, the American public. The House voted unanimously in March on a nonbinding resolution to make public the report’s findings, an indication of the deep support within both parties to air whatever evidence prosecutors uncovered.

Mr. Barr wrote that he “remained committed to as much transparency as possible and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review.” He also said that Justice Department officials never had to check Mr. Mueller because he proposed an inappropriate or unwarranted investigative step — an action that Mr. Barr would have been required to report to Congress under the regulations. His statement suggests that Mr. Mueller’s inquiry proceeded without political interference.

The letter that William P. Barr, the attorney general, sent to Congress.

Since Mr. Mueller’s appointment in May 2017, his team has focused on how Russian operatives sought to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential race and whether anyone tied to the Trump campaign, wittingly or unwittingly, cooperated with them. While the inquiry, started months earlier by the F.B.I., unearthed a far-ranging Russian influence operation, no public evidence has emerged that the president or his aides illegally assisted it.

Nonetheless, the damage to Mr. Trump and those in his circle has been extensive. A half-dozen former Trump aides have been indicted or convicted of crimes, mostly for lying to federal investigators or Congress. Others remain under investigation in cases that Mr. Mueller’s office handed off to federal prosecutors in New York and elsewhere. Dozens of Russian intelligence officers or citizens, along with three Russian companies, were charged in cases that are likely to languish in court because the defendants cannot be extradited to the United States.

Only a handful of law enforcement officials have seen the report, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, said. She said a few members of Mr. Mueller’s team would remain to close down the office. Mr. Mueller will not recommend any new charges be filed, a senior Justice Department official said.

Mr. Barr told congressional leaders that he would decide what to release after consulting with Mr. Mueller and Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who has overseen the investigation from the start. A White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said, “The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course.” She added that the White House had not seen or been briefed on the report, although officials were notified that Mr. Mueller had delivered it shortly before Congress was notified.

In a joint statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Senate Democrat, warned Mr. Barr not to allow the White House a “sneak preview” of the report before the public views it. They said that he should both make the full report public and share Mr. Mueller’s underlying evidence with Congress.

“The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public,” they said.

Even though Mr. Mueller’s report is complete, some aspects of his inquiry remain active and may be overseen by the same prosecutors once they are reassigned to their old jobs within the Justice Department. For instance, recently filed court documents suggest that investigators are still examining why the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort turned over campaign polling data in 2016 to a Russian associate whom prosecutors said was tied to Russian intelligence.

Mr. Mueller looked extensively at whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice to protect himself or his associates. But despite months of negotiations, prosecutors were unable to personally interview the president.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers insisted that he respond only to written questions from the special counsel. Even though under current Justice Department policy a sitting president cannot be indicted, Mr. Trump’s lawyers worried that his responses in an oral interview could bring political repercussions, including impeachment, or put him in legal jeopardy once he is out of office.

Not since Watergate has a special prosecutor’s inquiry so mesmerized the American public. Mr. Trump has helped make Mr. Mueller a household name, attacking his investigation an average of about twice a day as an unfair, politically motivated attempt to invalidate his election. He never forgave former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia inquiry, an action that cleared the way for his deputy, Mr. Rosenstein, to appoint Mr. Mueller.

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Mr. Trump reiterated his attacks on the special counsel this week, saying Mr. Mueller decided “out of the blue” to write a report, ignoring that regulations require him to do so. But the president also said the report should be made public because of “tens of millions” of Americans would want to know what it contains.

“Let people see it,” Mr. Trump said. “There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. There was no nothing.”

In court, the evidence amassed by the Mueller team has held up. Every defendant who is not still awaiting trial either pleaded guilty or was convicted by a jury. Although no American has been charged with illegally plotting with the Russians to tilt the election, Mr. Mueller uncovered a web of lies by former Trump aides.

Five of them were found to have deceived federal investigators or Congress about their interactions with Russians during the campaign or the transition. They includes Mr. Manafort; Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser; and Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and longtime fixer. A sixth former adviser, Roger J. Stone, Jr. is to stand trial in November on charges of lying to Congress.

Those who know Mr. Mueller, a former F.B.I. director, predicted a concise, legalistic report devoid of opinions — nothing like the 445-page treatise that Kenneth W. Starr, who investigated President Bill Clinton, produced in 1998. Operating under a now-defunct statute that governed independent counsels, Mr. Starr had far more leeway than Mr. Mueller to set his own investigative boundaries and to render judgments.

The regulations that govern Mr. Mueller, who is under the supervision of the Justice Department, only require him to explain his decisions to either seek or decline to seek criminal charges in a confidential report to the attorney general. The attorney general is then required to notify the leadership of the House and Senate judiciary committees.

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Mr. Barr promised to release as much information as possible, saying “the country needs a credible resolution of these issues.” But he may be reluctant to release the part of Mr. Mueller’s report that may be of most interest: who the special counsel declined to prosecute and why, especially if Mr. Trump is on that list.

The department’s longstanding practice, with rare exceptions, is not to identify people who were merely investigative targets in order to avoid unfairly tainting their reputations, especially because they would have no chance to defend themselves in a court of law. Mr. Rosenstein, who has overseen Mr. Mueller’s work and may have a say in what is released, is a firm believer in that principle.

In a May 2017 letter that the president seized upon as justification for his decision to fire James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, Mr. Rosenstein severely criticized Mr. Comey for announcing during the previous year that Hillary Clinton, then a presidential candidate, would not be charged with a crime for mishandling classified information as secretary of state. Releasing “derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation,” Mr. Rosenstein wrote, is “a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”

Weighing that principle against the public’s right to know is even more fraught in the president’s case. If Mr. Mueller declined to pursue criminal charges against Mr. Trump, he might have been guided not by lack of evidence, but by the Justice Department’s legal opinions that a sitting president cannot be indicted. The department’s Office of Legal Counsel has repeatedly advised that the stigma and burden of being under prosecution would damage the president’s ability to lead.

Mr. Trump has said the decision about what to release it up to Mr. Barr. But behind the scenes, White House lawyers are preparing for the possibility they may need to argue some material is protected by executive privilege, especially if the report discusses whether the president’s interactions with his top aides or legal advisers are evidence of obstruction of justice.

Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the head of the House Judiciary Committee, has argued that the department’s view that presidents are protected from prosecution makes it all the more important for the public to see Mr. Mueller’s report.

“To maintain that a sitting president cannot be indicted, and then to withhold evidence of wrongdoing from Congress because the president cannot be charged, is to convert D.O.J. policy into the means for a cover-up,” he said before the House approved its nonbinding resolution to disclose the special counsel’s findings.

Some predict that any disclosures from Mr. Mueller’s report will satisfy neither Mr. Trump’s critics nor his defenders, especially given the public’s high expectations for answers. A Washington Post-Schar School poll in February illustrated the sharp divide in public opinion: It found that of those surveyed, most Republicans did not believe evidence of crimes that Mr. Mueller’s team had already proved in court, while most Democrats believed he had proved crimes that he had not even alleged.

Recent weeks have brought fresh signs that the special counsel’s work was ending. Five prosecutors have left, reducing the team from 16 to 11. Mr. Mueller’s office confirmed that Andrew Weissmann, a top deputy, is also expected to leave soon. A key F.B.I. agent, David W. Archey, has transferred to another post.

Mr. Rosenstein was expected to leave the Justice Department by mid-March, but may be lingering to see the report to its conclusion.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/politics/mueller-report.html

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Judge Orders Paul Manafort Jailed Before Trial, Citing New Obstruction Charges

Sharon LaFraniere — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 06:12:07 +0000

Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, arrived for a hearing in federal court in Washington on Friday.CreditErin Schaff for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — A federal judge revoked Paul Manafort’s bail and sent him to jail on Friday to await trial, citing new charges that Mr. Manafort had tried to influence the testimony of two government witnesses after he had been granted a temporary release.

Mr. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, had posted a $10 million bond and was under house arrest while awaiting his September trial on a host of charges, including money laundering and making false statements.

But Mr. Manafort cannot remain free, even under stricter conditions, in the face of new felony charges that he had engaged in witness tampering while out on bail, said Judge Amy Berman Jackson of United States District Court for the District of Columbia. “This is not middle school,” she said during a 90-minute court hearing. “I can’t take away his cellphone.”

The judge’s order was the latest in eight months of legal setbacks for Mr. Manafort, as prosecutors have steadily added new charges since he was first indicted in October. Mr. Trump and members of his team lashed out against the judge’s move, an attack that renewed talk about whether the president might issue pardons to curb a prosecutorial process in the special counsel’s Russia inquiry that he describes as stacked against him.

“Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other top political people and campaigns,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Friday in which he appeared to confuse the judge’s action with a sentence handed down after conviction. “Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair!”

Rudolph W. Giuliani, who serves as the president’s personal lawyer, said that the judge had gone too far. He also said in an interview that Mr. Trump should not pardon anyone while the special counsel inquiry is still going on, but “when the investigation is concluded, he’s kind of on his own, right?”

Judge Jackson’s decision that Mr. Manafort could not be trusted to abide by the law unless he was behind bars makes it harder for the White House to dismiss the case against him as the work of overzealous prosecutors. The situation is particularly fraught for Mr. Trump because he is under investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for one of the same offenses for which prosecutors have accused Mr. Manafort: obstruction of justice.

The judge went out of her way to dismiss the suggestion that Mr. Manafort was a victim of anything but his own actions. “This hearing is not about politics,” she said. “It is not about the conduct of the special counsel. It is about the defendant’s conduct.”

In a superseding indictment filed last week, the prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller claimed that Mr. Manafort and a close associate had contacted two witnesses this year, hoping to persuade them to testify that Mr. Manafort had never lobbied in the United States for Viktor F. Yanukovych, the pro-Russia president of Ukraine until 2014.

The government says that Mr. Manafort violated the law by failing to report his domestic lobbying efforts to the Justice Department and by lying to the federal authorities about his activities.

The day after he was indicted in February in connection with those offenses, prosecutors claim, Mr. Manafort began trying to influence the accounts of two members of a public relations team who had worked with him. The prosecutors said that he had reached out to the two by phone, through encrypted messages and through Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a close associate in Russia.

Greg D. Andres, a prosecutor on Mr. Mueller’s team, said Mr. Manafort’s efforts were “not random outreaches,” but part of “a sustained campaign over a five-week period” aimed at getting the witnesses to back up a false story that he had lobbied only in Europe.

Judge Jackson said she was particularly disturbed that some of the contacts occurred after Mr. Manafort had been specifically ordered by another federal judge to avoid all contacts with witnesses involved in Mr. Mueller’s investigation or the prosecution of him. That judge is overseeing a separate case in Northern Virginia, where Mr. Manafort faces additional charges of tax evasion, bank fraud and failure to report foreign bank accounts.

“I have no appetite for this,” Judge Jackson told Mr. Manafort shortly before he was led out of the courtroom to be transported to jail. “I have struggled with this decision.”

But she said that even if she explicitly ordered Mr. Manafort never to contact any of the government’s 56 witnesses, she could not be certain he would comply. “Will he call the 57th?” she asked.

She noted that she had previously warned Mr. Manafort about his conduct while on house arrest after prosecutors complained that he had broken the rules against contacts with the news media.

“I’m concerned you seem to treat these proceedings as another marketing exercise,” she said. She implied that she was running out of patience with him, saying the case “continues to be to this minute extraordinary.”

Mr. Manafort’s lawyers suggested that he had reached out innocently to his former colleagues, not knowing whether they had been contacted by Mr. Mueller’s team. But Mr. Andres said Mr. Manafort was simply deceiving the court, just as he had deceived law enforcement agencies and tax authorities over the years.

“It’s inconceivable that he did not know they were potential witnesses,” he said.

Mr. Trump has sought to distance himself from Mr. Manafort, who worked for his campaign for nearly five months, including three months as campaign chairman, before he was ousted in August 2016 amid controversy over his Ukraine work. “Mr. Manafort worked for me for a very short period of time,” the president said on Friday morning.

“He worked for me, what, for 49 days or something?” he added. “I feel badly for some people because they have gone back 12 years to find things” — an apparent reference to the allegations against Mr. Manafort.

Asked if he was considering pardons, Mr. Trump said: “I don’t want to talk about that. No, I don’t want to talk about that. But look, I do want to see people treated fairly.”

Besides violating laws that require the disclosure of lobbying on behalf of foreign interests, the government alleges, Mr. Manafort laundered more than $30 million in income he received over nine years of lobbying for Mr. Yanukovych and his political parties or allies.

As evidence that Mr. Manafort lobbied in the United States, prosecutors submitted a four-page memo that Mr. Manafort wrote to Mr. Yanukovych detailing his campaign to convince members of Congress, the State Department and the Western news media that Mr. Yanukovych was a champion of democratic reforms.

The government claims that the offenses are part of a complex financial conspiracy led by Mr. Manafort and aided by Rick Gates, Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, and Mr. Manafort’s right-hand man, Mr. Kilimnik, who has been linked to Russian intelligence.

Mr. Manafort’s first trial, in Northern Virginia, is scheduled for next month.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/politics/manafort-bail-revoked-jail.html

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Russia’s Influence Spreads

R. Emmett Tyrell — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 07:16:35 +0000

Last week, we discovered that former national security adviser Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about the import of what he told it regarding his contacts with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Yet Flynn once served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the presidency of Barack Obama. Why would he lie to the FBI about what passed between him and Kislyak? Had he forgotten that, for a certitude, the conversation of a Russian ambassador was being recorded secretly by American intelligence agencies? Moreover, when he was being interviewed by the FBI, why did he not bring with him a lawyer? When I was being interviewed by the FBI about my perfidious Arkansas Project, I most certainly brought a lawyer with me, and it helped that my lawyer looked like he once worked for Don Corleone. Thinking back on it, I should have brought two lawyers.

We are told Flynn is now cooperating with the government. Yet it appears that he has implicated President Donald Trump not at all, or at least in no criminal activity. So what is the fuss all about? Flynn presumably was acting on behalf of people high up in the Trump administration, but unless they were giving Kislyak state secrets or accepting bribes from him, there is nothing wrong with that. I have in my library the memoirs of Anatoly Dobrynin for recreational reading. Dobrynin was the ambassador representing the Soviet Union for 24 years in Washington, DC, during the Cold War. In his memoirs, the ambassador writes of meeting with then-President Jimmy Carter’s representative Averell Harriman in September 1976 before the November election. He met with other Carter advisers before and after the election. Doubtless he did the same with other presidential emissaries during his long years in Washington. No one was prosecuted. In those happy years, diplomatic contacts were not adjudged criminal acts.

How did the Russians become such an ominous force in American elections, or at least in the tragic election of 2016? I would direct you to turn to page 395 of Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, the highly acclaimed chronicle of that epochal election written by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

On election night, Hillary Clinton may have been gently soused, but slowly even she saw the light. The authors tell us that in the days after the election, she “kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia.” It was the beginning of her post-election “strategy.” The authors proceed to say, “That strategy had been set in motion within twenty-four hours of her concession speech.” Despite her Karamazovian hangover, she and her aides “went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public.” And “Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.” From that point on, Clinton and her aides kept flogging it.

Today even the FBI has taken up Clinton’s strategy, but nothing has implicated Trump, and no White House grandee is implicated in a Russian-related crime. As of this weekend, we know that a Clinton supporter working high up in the FBI, Peter Strzok, shaped then-Director James Comey’s relatively lenient — if improper — judgment of her handling of emails. Additionally, before Strzok was demoted, he had a role in investigating the Trump campaign and Russia. The FBI has a lot to answer for, and it ought to be investigated itself.

As for the Russians, they now have more say in Washington than at any time I can remember. Those in Official Washington who have adopted Clinton’s strategy have made Kislyak a powerful force in the Trump investigation and his boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, quite possibly the most powerful man in the world. Together they have power over the Trump administration through their willing agents in the FBI and the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

All Kislyak has to do is dispute what Flynn told him, or for that matter, what some other personage in the administration told him. From Mueller’s public statements there is no hint that the FBI doubts Kislyak’s good word. It is the administration’s word that the FBI finds dubious. Kislyak could tell investigators that Flynn or some other administration aide had sent him a letter or expressed himself through “body language.” Off the FBI would go chasing after Kislyak’s lead. And, by the way, other Russians could insist that they had conspired with Trump’s people in private conversations that no intelligence agency of the federal government apprehended. Flynn’s fate might well be just the beginning. This investigation ought to be shut down somehow. Mueller is compromised, and the FBI appears complicitous in Hillary Clinton’s strategy.

Source: https://patriotpost.us/opinion/52791

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The post Russia’s Influence Spreads first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Paul Manafort, Ex-Chairman of Trump Campaign, and Associate Plead Not Guilty to Money Laundering

Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fandos — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 19:26:52 +0000

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was indicted Monday on charges that he funneled millions of dollars through overseas shell companies and used the money to buy luxury cars, real estate, antiques and expensive suits.

The charges against Mr. Manafort and his longtime associate Rick Gates represent a significant escalation in a special counsel investigation that has cast a shadow over Mr. Trump’s first year in office.

The two men appeared in the Federal District Court in Washington on Monday afternoon and pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Separately, one of the early foreign policy advisers to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about a contact with a professor with ties to Kremlin officials, prosecutors said on Monday.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was assigned in May to investigate whether anyone close to Mr. Trump participated in a Russian government effort to influence last year’s presidential election. Monday’s indictments indicate that Mr. Mueller has taken an expansive view of his mandate.

The indictment of Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates makes no mention of Mr. Trump or election meddling. Instead, it describes in granular detail Mr. Manafort’s lobbying work in Ukraine and what prosecutors said was a scheme to hide that money from tax collectors and the public. The authorities said Mr. Manafort laundered more than $18 million.

“Manafort used his hidden overseas wealth to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States without paying taxes on that income,” the indictment reads.

Mr. Gates is accused of transferring more than $3 million from offshore accounts. The two are also charged with making false statements.

“As part of the scheme, Manafort and Gates repeatedly provided false information to financial bookkeepers, tax accountants and legal counsel, among others,” the indictment read.

Mr. Papadopoulos admitted that in a January interview with the F.B.I., he lied about his contacts with a Russian professor, whom he knew to have “substantial connections to Russian government officials,” according to court documents. Mr. Papadopoulos told the authorities that the conversation occurred before he became an adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign. In fact, he met the professor days after joining the campaign.

The professor took interest in Mr. Papadopoulos “because of his status with the campaign,” the court documents said.

Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates surrendered to the F.B.I. early on Monday and, through their lawyers, pleaded not guilty to all charges on Monday. The two men, wearing dark blue suits, entered the courtroom with their hands held behind their backs. Money laundering, the most serious of the charges, carries a potential prison sentence of up to 20 years.

Mr. Manafort has expected charges since this summer, when F.B.I. agents raided his home and prosecutors warned him that they planned to indict him. That warning raised speculation that Mr. Manafort might try to cut a deal to avoid prosecution. A senior White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, said last week that the president was confident that Mr. Manafort had no damaging information about him.

People close to Mr. Manafort, including his former business partner Roger J. Stone Jr., have said he had nothing to offer that would help prosecutors build a case against Mr. Trump.

“He’s not going to lie,” Mr. Stone said in September.

Mr. Gates is a longtime protégé and junior partner of Mr. Manafort. His name appears on documents linked to companies that Mr. Manafort’s firm set up in Cyprus to receive payments from politicians and businesspeople in Eastern Europe, records reviewed by The New York Times show.

Attempts to reach Mr. Gates on Monday were not successful. A spokesman for Mr. Manafort did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Manafort, a veteran Republican strategist, joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 to help keep delegates from breaking with Mr. Trump in favor of establishment Republican candidates. Mr. Trump soon promoted him to chairman and chief strategist, a job that gave him control over day-to-day operations of the campaign.

But Mr. Trump fired Mr. Manafort just months later, after reports that he received more than $12 million in undisclosed payments from Viktor F. Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president and a pro-Russia politician. Mr. Manafort spent years as a political consultant for Mr. Yanukovych.

American intelligence agencies have concluded that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia launched a stealth campaign of hacking and propaganda to try to damage Hillary Clinton and help Mr. Trump win the election. The Justice Department appointed Mr. Mueller III as special counsel in May to lead the investigation into the Russian operations and to determine whether anyone around Mr. Trump was involved.

Mr. Trump has denied any such collusion, and no evidence has surfaced publicly to contradict him. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his advisers this year repeatedly denied any contacts with Russians during the campaign, only to have journalists uncover one undisclosed meeting after another.

The New York Times revealed in July that Mr. Manafort and others close to Mr. Trump met with Russians last year, on the promise of receiving damaging political information about Mrs. Clinton.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/us/politics/paul-manafort-indicted.html

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