Tag: Mueller

  • If we had had confidence

    Mueller made a statement.

    Mueller’s 10-ish minute statement came after a nearly two-year-long investigation into Russia’s attempted interference in the 2016 election and whether the President, or anyone close to him, had obstructed that probe. Mueller’s words on the charge of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign largely comported with the 400+ page report released by the special counsel’s office this spring, making clear that there was “insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.”

    But it was Mueller’s words on the possibility that Trump had sought to obstruct the investigation where Mueller clearly wanted to leave his mark. He emphasized two things of real importance — both of which, with a bit of reading between the lines, provided a glimpse into what Mueller really thinks regarding Trump and obstruction. Here they are:

    1) “If we had had confidence that the President had clearly not committed a crime, we would have said so.”

    Which means they had no such confidence.

    2) “Charging the President with a crime was, therefore, not an option we could consider.”

    Because of DoJ policy. And because they couldn’t charge him, they also couldn’t say “but there’s reason to think he’s not innocent” because it’s not fair to do that when a trial is ruled out.

    Mueller knew — or at least hoped — this would be his last major moment in the klieg lights.

    He chose his words carefully. He emphasized certain elements of his report, particularly where he and Barr seemed to differ, purposely. He wanted to make clear where his hands were tied, why they were tied and what that tying them meant for his ability to bring a case against Trump.

    What Mueller was saying Wednesday is actually better understood by what he was not saying — and what he was not saying was that the President of the United States was an innocent victim in all of this.

    If he had meant that, he would have said so.

    The upshot is that Trump has to be impeached. Whether that will happen or not is another question.

  • Very legal & very cool

    This is a highly enjoyable read by a professor at the US Naval War College and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer:

    This was the week that the bottom fell out of Donald Trump’s presidency. After almost two years of White House denials that Candidate Trump had any ties to Russia in 2016, that turns out to be just one more Trumpian lie. No amount of “NO COLLUSION” tweets from the Oval Office can undo the damage that has now been done.

    See what I mean by enjoyable?

    Cohen explained that he knowingly lied to the Senate and House intelligence committees regarding his client’s efforts during Trump’s presidential run to develop a luxury hotel and condominium complex in Moscow. This relationship is something the president repeatedly denied, most famously with his January 2017 tweet, days before his inauguration: “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

    His own attorney just stated that was a flat-out lie. Cohen reached out to Russians multiple times during 2016 in futile efforts to get Trump Tower Moscow going, at last. Donald Trump sought to develop “his” luxury tower in Russia’s capital for decades. This was the reason for Trump’s flashy trip to the Soviet Union way back in the summer of 1987. Three decades later, Trump Tower Moscow remained a mirage that the presidential contender was determined to make reality. This clearly mattered more to Trump than winning the White House.

    That forlorn quest will cost President Trump more than he could possibly imagine. Cohen and other members of the Trump Organization amateurishly reached out to Kremlin officials. They even tried to entice the Kremlin by offering to give Russian President Vladimir Putin a penthouse in Moscow’s Trump Tower, valued at $50 million.

    Putin didn’t take the bait and this bizarre offer reveals the stunning ineptitude of Cohen and everybody else involved in the failed ploy to make Trump Tower Moscow happen. They tried hard to get the Kremlin to play ball with their development plans, to no avail. Trump’s representatives reached out to senior Russian government officials, not just private businesspeople. They seem never to have realized that the line between Kremlin bigwigs, Russian spies, and organized crime players, never thick in Moscow, has been erased entirely during two decades of Putin’s rule.

    Hey, listen here, they’ve watched the Godfather trilogy several times, what more do you want?

    Just how bad Cohen’s flipping is for the president would be difficult to overstate.

    Such a delightful read.

    Just how bad Cohen’s flipping is for the president would be difficult to overstate. For starters, Cohen kept detailed records of his work for Trump, including taping phone calls; it’s safe to assume that whatever Cohen tells Mueller about his former client can be backed up with evidence.

    Worse, Cohen is the first direct public connection made by Mueller and the Special Counsel between President Trump and his concealed business ties to Russia. In a revealing flourish, Mueller personally signed Cohen’s cooperation agreement with the Special Counsel’s office.

    As in: Gotcha, homey!

    It seems the president knows that Mueller is coming for him and his family, and at this point there’s nothing he can do except buy a bit of time with his customary histrionics before the Special Counsel’s boom falls. Twitter rage may still motivate the dwindling ranks of MAGA true believers, but it does nothing to deter Team Mueller.

    This morning, President Trump finally admitted that, lo-and-behold, he had business interests in Russia in 2016 after all. As hetweeted from Argentina, where he arrived for the G20 summit: “I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail…Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!”

    Well I’m sure Mueller will take that as sworn testimony and wholly exculpatory.

    But Putin not so much. Putin is pissed at Trump for not backing him all the way on Ukraine.

    Then Trump had the impudence to cancel (via tweet, naturally) his scheduled sidebar meeting with Putin at the G20 summit in Argentina because of “the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia.”

    Moscow’s response was furious, not least because they learned of the meeting’s cancellation from Trump’s tweet. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov stated, “We regret the decision of the U.S. administration to cancel the scheduled meeting of the two presidents in Buenos Aires,” adding that Trump’s rude move “means that discussion of serious issues on the international and bilateral agenda is being postponed indefinitely.”

    In other words: you don’t get to cancel meetings, we do—and if you think the Kremlin will help you out, Don, have we got news for you. Peskov’s statement leaves no doubt who the Kremlin thinks runs the Trump-Putin relationship. Given how distracted President Trump is with the Mueller investigation as it closes in on the Oval Office, it would be tempting for the White House to ignore the Kremlin.

    That would be a bad idea, as Moscow just made clear. As always, the threat of what Vladimir Putin knows about Donald Trump is unspoken but indelible. Kompromat is the coin of the realm in Putin’s Russia, and his Kremlin wants everybody—above all President Trump—to know it.

    Between Mueller and Putin…Donnie Two-scoops is going to be squashed like a bug.

  • Graham’s pledge

    We’re on a knife edge, it appears.

    That’s terrifying. On the other hand Haberman seems to have overlooked something. Lindsay Graham made an actual promise on CNN this morning.

    Sen. Lindsey Graham gave a stern warning Sunday to President Donald Trump against firing special counsel Robert Mueller.

    “As I said before, if he tried to do that, that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency,” the South Carolina Republican said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

    Mueller can only be fired for cause, he said, and he sees no cause.

    Graham called for Mueller to be able to carry out his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election “independent of any political influence.”

    “I pledge to the American people, as a Republican, to make sure that Mr. Mueller can continue to do his job without any interference,” he said.

    Now to hold him to it.

  • New charge

    Bloomberg reports:

    An attorney who worked for a prominent law firm was charged with making false statements to federal authorities as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election.

    Alex Van Der Zwaan was charged Feb. 16 in federal court in Washington with lying to investigators about conversations related to a report he helped prepare on the trial of a Ukrainian politician, Yulia Tymoshenko. Van Der Zwaan was charged with a criminal information, which typically precedes a guilty plea.

    Van Der Zwaan, identified on his LinkedIn page as an associate in the London office of Skadden, Arps, Slate Meagher & Flom, was questioned regarding the firm’s work in 2012 on behalf of the Ukraine Ministry of Justice. He allegedly lied to investigators about his last communications with Richard Gates, who was indicted in October with ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort over their consulting work in Ukraine.

    What Manafort and his assistants were doing in Ukraine was helping Putin and Yanukovych grab it back for Russia. Not a good thing to do.

    The firm produced a report earlier in the decade for the pro-Russian government in Ukraine that largely defended the prosecution and conviction of Tymoshenko. The report defied the view held by the U.S. and the European Union that the case against her was politically motivated. The firm’s $12,000 fee was modest, just below the amount that required public bidding.

    The following year, however, with no further work done, Ukraine sent Skadden $1 million. After the pro-Russian government was run out of town in 2014, the new authorities began investigating.

    So it was “$12,000” for the sake of avoiding public bidding and then later when no one was looking, a little sweetener of $1,000,000 was added. Sounds legit.

  • The indictment

    Rosenstein announced the indictment about 2o minutes ago.

    Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is announcing Friday the indictment of Russian nationals and entities accused of breaking U.S. laws to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, CBS News’ Paula Reid reports.

    On Friday, a D.C. federal grand jury returned an indictment against the Internet Research Agency, a Russian organization which has connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin — it names 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities that accuses them of violating U.S. criminal laws to meddle in U.S. elections and political processes. According to a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, the indictment charges all of the defendants with conspiracy to defraud the U.S., as well as “three defendants with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and five defendants with aggravated identity theft.”

    According to the indictment, “Some Defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.”

    Working with the Internet Research Agency, the defendants “posted derogatory information” about several candidates, the indictment says, and by mid-2016, their efforts included “supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton,” the indictment says.

    In other words they did things that genuine US citizens were doing, but they gave those doings an artificial outside-actor boost…and given how tight the election was and how carefully targeted the boosting was, they are why we are stuck with this immoral empty hateful monster of a “president.”

    Starting around 2014, the defendants began to track and study groups on U.S. social media dedicated to American politics and social issues.  They used metrics to track the performance of various social media groups. They then travelled to the U.S. (or in some cases, tried to travel to the U.S.) to collect intelligence for their interference operations.  They posted [probably “posed”] as Americans and contacted U.S. political and social activists and learned they should target “purple” states, those that were undecided in the campaign.

    And by god it worked, damn them to hell.

    They created hundreds of social media accounts and used them to develop fictitious U.S. personas into “leaders of opinion in the U.S.” The defendants worked day and night shifts to pump out messages, controlling pages targeting a range of issues, including immigration, Black Lives Matter, and they amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. They set up and used servers inside the U.S. to mask the Russian origin of the accounts. The Internet Research Agency employed hundreds of people for these purposes — administrators, creators of personas, technical support — and spent the equivalent of millions of dollars for these efforts.

    In addition to disparaging Clinton, they denigrated other candidates, “such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio,” and they supported Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump. In the latter half of 2016, they used groups to discourage minorities from voting in the 2016 presidential election.

    They what?

    They used groups to discourage minorities from voting in the 2016 presidential election. 

    We’re living in Putin’s world.