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Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
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Report: Trump Organization planned to give $50 million penthouse to Putin amid Moscow deal
The Trump Organization planned to offer a $50 million penthouse suite to Russian President Vladimir Putin amid negotiations over a real estate deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to a report by BuzzFeed News.

The bombshell report includes Felix Sater, a longtime Donald Trump associate accused of having Russian mafia ties, telling BuzzFeed News that he and Michael Cohen, the president's former attorney and fixer, thought giving the suite to Putin could help sell other apartments.

"In Russia, the oligarchs would bend over backwards to live in the same building as Vladimir Putin," Sater told BuzzFeed News. "My idea was to give a $50 million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units. All the oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin."
Cohen Pleads Guilty and Details Trump’s Involvement in Moscow Tower Project
Donald J. Trump was more involved in discussions over a potential Russian business deal during the presidential campaign than previously known, his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen said Thursday in pleading guilty to lying to Congress. Mr. Trump’s associates pursued the project as the Kremlin was escalating its election sabotage effort meant to help him win the presidency.

Mr. Trump’s participation in discussions about building a grand skyscraper in Moscow showed how the interests of his business empire were enmeshed with his political ambitions as he was closing in on the Republican nomination for president. During the early months of 2016, when the business discussions were taking place, he was publicly pressing for warmer relations between the United States and Russia and an end to economic sanctions imposed by the Obama administration, policy positions that might have benefited his family business.

Court documents made public by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, detailed new accusations against Mr. Cohen, the president’s former fixer, who already pleaded guilty this year to committing campaign finance violations and financial crimes. Mr. Cohen was the point person at Trump Organization for negotiating a deal for the Moscow project, and on Thursday he admitted lying to congressional investigators about the duration of the negotiations and the extent of the involvement of Mr. Trump — who is identified in the court documents as “Individual 1.”

After pleading guilty in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday morning, Mr. Cohen said that he made the false statements to Congress out of loyalty to the president and to align with Mr. Trump’s “political messaging.”

Mr. Cohen’s cooperation with the special counsel’s investigation raises the possibility that he might have information about the central focus of the inquiry: whether President Trump or any of his associates conspired with Russia’s efforts to disrupt the 2016 election. And it was the second time that Mr. Cohen has imperiled the presidency; he said in court in New York in August that Mr. Trump directed hush money payments during the 2016 campaign to conceal potential sex scandals.

The Trump Tower discussions were occurring as Russia ramped up its sabotage campaign, the information provided on Thursday by Mr. Cohen showed, though the documents do not say whether any of Mr. Trump’s advisers were aware of the Russian disruption effort. According to a grand jury indictment made public this year, Russian intelligence operatives hacked the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman in March 2016. That same month, an obscure professor whom Mr. Mueller’s team has identified as a likely cutout for Russian intelligence began courting a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos.
Mr. Cohen admitted that the discussions about Trump Tower Moscow went on for at least six months after he had told Congress they had ended. They lasted until at least June 14, 2016, when Mr. Cohen met in New York with an associate who had been trying to arrange his trip to Russia, and told him he would not be traveling “at that time,” court documents said. Mr. Cohen also discussed the deal in a 20-minute phone call with a Russian government employee.

That same day, The Washington Post reported that Russian operatives had infiltrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee — the first public evidence of Moscow’s campaign to disrupt the election.

Mr. Cohen said on Thursday that he discussed the status of the project with Mr. Trump on more than the three occasions he had previously acknowledged and briefed Mr. Trump’s family members about it.

Some of those exchanges, which continued until January 2016, included the president’s children Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., both of whom are executives at the Trump Organization, according to three people familiar with the documents that the company turned over to Mr. Mueller’s team.

In one email exchange in 2015, Ms. Trump made a suggestion about the architecture, according to two of the people familiar with the messages.

Donald Trump Jr. appeared to have replied to only one message, saying “Cool” in response to an update about the project, the people said.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen discussed Mr. Trump himself traveling to Russia after the Republican National Convention, though that trip never materialized.

Mr. Trump defended his role in the Trump Tower Moscow discussions, brushing aside concerns that he was advancing his business interests at the time he was hoping to become president.

“There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?” he said to reporters as he left Washington for the Group of 20 meeting in Buenos Aires.


Each morning, get the latest on New York businesses, arts, sports, dining, style and more.

“We decided — I decided ultimately — not to do it,” he said, adding, “There would have been nothing wrong if I did do it.”

Mr. Trump accused his former fixer of lying to receive a reduced sentence for the crimes he has pleaded guilty to. Under his earlier plea agreement, Mr. Cohen faced about four to five years in prison.

“He was convicted of various things unrelated to us,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “He’s a weak person and what he’s trying to do is get a reduced sentence.”

The proceedings in Lower Manhattan appeared to have global repercussions. After Mr. Cohen’s appearance in court, Mr. Trump abruptly canceled a planned meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia while both leaders are in Argentina. The president said he called off the meeting because of Russia’s recent hostilities with Ukraine.

[Read about Trump associates’ connections with Russia and Ukraine.]

The new revelations were certain to increase the strain between Mr. Trump and the Justice Department. In recent days, the president and his lawyers have increased their attacks on the department and the Russia investigation, including Mr. Mueller. This week, the special counsel’s office accused Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, of repeatedly lying to investigators in breach of his plea agreement.

The acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, was told of Mr. Cohen’s impending plea Monday or earlier, a person familiar with the special counsel’s investigation said. The White House learned of it late Wednesday, people close to Mr. Trump said.

The new revelations also came a week after Mr. Trump’s lawyers provided Mr. Mueller with written responses to a set of questions.

The special counsel identified Mr. Cohen’s false statements to Congress in testimony and materials that Mr. Cohen provided to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, which have been conducting their own investigations into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“There’s a reason people shouldn’t lie when they’re in front of a congressional investigation,” Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said on Thursday. The committee’s top Democrat, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, said that the panel had made additional criminal referrals to Mr. Mueller, but he gave no specifics.
Trump’s Recall of Moscow Deal Matches Cohen’s, President’s Lawyers Say
The latest criminal charges against Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s longtime fixer, for lying about a Moscow hotel deal raised questions of whether Mr. Cohen created new legal risks for Mr. Trump or his family members, possibly by contradicting what they told investigators about the same project.

The answer, at least according to the president’s lawyers and people close to his family, is no. Although Mr. Trump’s lawyers have long worried that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is trying to catch Mr. Trump in a lie, they said Mr. Cohen’s new account of the Trump Organization’s abortive hotel project in Moscow essentially matches what Mr. Trump himself stated in written answers delivered to prosecutors just nine days ago.

Mr. Cohen might have lied to the authorities about aspects of the deal, as the complaint charges, they said, but the president did not.

“The president said there was a proposal, it was discussed with Cohen, there was a nonbinding letter of intent and it didn’t go beyond that,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, who with others negotiated the president’s responses to Mr. Mueller’s questions for nearly a year. He said prosecutors did not raise certain details that Mr. Cohen now says he misled Congress about — including how long the hotel project stayed alive — and that the president did not volunteer those details.

According to the new documents released by the special counsel, Mr. Cohen lied when he told Congress last year that he had talked to Mr. Trump about the project only three times and that the proposal died in January 2016 — before the first primary in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. He also concealed his interactions with Russian officials and the fact that he asked Mr. Trump to travel to Russia to promote the deal because, he said, he wanted to support Mr. Trump’s “political messaging.”

Mr. Giuliani refused to disclose Mr. Mueller’s precise questions to Mr. Trump about the deal or exactly how the president responded. He said only that Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization, his company, provided the prosecutors “with every document about this from the beginning,” adding, “That’s the only reason they know about it.”

Notes by the president’s lawyers this year show that prosecutors were trying to scrutinize Mr. Trump’s business dealings in Russia during the campaign, including what he knew about the hotel deal that Mr. Cohen was pursuing with Felix Sater, another business associate.

“What interaction and communication did you have with Michael Cohen, Felix Sater and others, including foreign nationals, regarding real estate developments in Russia during the period of the campaign?” Mr. Mueller’s team asked in a meeting with Mr. Trump’s lawyers, according to the notes.

Mr. Cohen’s new account of the hotel deal will inevitably be compared not only to the president’s, but also to those of Donald Trump Jr., his eldest son, who testified repeatedly before congressional committees last year about that project and other matters. The complaint states that Mr. Cohen misled Congress about the fact that he had briefed Trump family members about the project. Although the family members were not named, a person familiar with the situation said Mr. Cohen discussed the deal with Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017, the younger Mr. Trump said that he was only “peripherally aware” of the proposed venture to build a new Moscow hotel bearing the Trump name. Most of what he knew about it, he said, he had learned recently while preparing to testify. He told the committee that Mr. Cohen pursued the project in 2015 and told the House Intelligence Committee that the deal fell dormant as of June 2016 — an accurate date, according to Thursday’s court documents.

Lawyers for Ms. Trump and her brother declined to comment on their interactions with Mr. Cohen about the project. But people close to the Trump family said that while emails indicate that both of them were aware of Mr. Cohen’s efforts to get it off the ground in 2015, their involvement appears to end in January 2016. If Mr. Cohen tried to continue with the project after that, these people added, they did not know.

The president’s critics will also inevitably seek to learn whether he knew that Mr. Cohen, then still a trusted aide, falsely testified to Congress last year. As they continue to do, Mr. Trump’s lawyers then closely monitored what witnesses like Mr. Cohen were telling the authorities through joint defense agreements with their lawyers.

But even if the president knew that Mr. Cohen misled Congress, legal experts said, he is not in legal jeopardy as long as he did not ask Mr. Cohen to lie. And there is no allegation that he did so.

The latest complaint, on its face, seems less worrisome for the president than the previous one lodged against Mr. Cohen in August, said Chuck Rosenberg, a former United States attorney and senior F.B.I. official. In that case, Mr. Cohen directly implicated Mr. Trump in a crime, saying he instructed him to pay money to two women to cover up a potential sex scandal that he feared could endanger his presidential candidacy. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and a host of other charges for which he has yet to be sentenced.

The president lashed out fiercely at Mr. Cohen on Thursday, calling him a “weak” prevaricator who concocted a false tale about the hotel deal in hopes of winning a lesser punishment. That charge conflicts with Mr. Giuliani’s assertion that Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump have now given prosecutors much the same account.

Asked how he reconciled the seeming contradiction, Mr. Giuliani blamed Mr. Cohen.

“He has so many different versions of the same stories, so by definition he is a liar and we can’t trust him,” Mr. Giuliani said. “Given the fact that he’s a liar, I can’t tell you what he’s lying about.”
Federal agents raid office of lawyer who previously did tax work for Trump
Federal agents have reportedly raided the Chicago City Hall office of a lawyer who previously did tax work for President Trump.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that federal agents removed everyone from the office of Chicago Finance Committee Chairman Ed Burke on Thursday morning, covering the floor-to-ceiling windows with brown paper.

View: https://twitter.com/fspielman/status/1068177373684817923

Burke worked for Trump for more than a decade doing property tax work.

Burke’s law firm of Klafter & Burke has worked with Trump’s companies repeatedly to reduce the property tax that Trump Tower and his other properties in Chicago have had to pay, according to the Sun-Times.

Over his 12 years working for Trump, Burke was allegedly able to cut the property taxes on the downtown tower by more than $14 million.

Burke stopped working for Trump this summer, citing “irreconcilable differences” in letters filed with the Illinois State Property Tax Appeal Board.
 
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Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,743
State Propaganda: EPA Cites Koch-Funded Article to Attack Climate Report
While still in college, Daily Caller energy editor Michael Bastasch began a career heavily financed by the billionaire Charles Koch, CEO of the fossil fuels, chemicals and materials conglomerate Koch Industries.

Several years later, Koch’s investments appear to be paying off: In a Wednesday press release, the Environmental Protection Agency attacked the Trump administration’s own grave climate assessment by citing a Bastasch article published that day. This Daily Caller piece amplified EPA Acting Director Andrew Wheeler’s inaccurate speculation that former President Barack Obama directed climate scientists at the White House National Science and Technology Council to focus its National Climate Assessment on worst-case scenarios.

The recently released National Climate Assessment, the product of more than four years of work by hundreds of scientists from 13 government agencies, predicts a deadly and costly climate catastrophe unless the United States takes drastic measures immediately. How the government reacts to this assessment will likely impact Koch Industries’ bottom line, since any meaningful greenhouse gas reduction plan will involve a significant decrease in fossil fuel production.

The EPA’s press release, billed as a “fact check,” quotes and links to the Daily Caller piece. Instead of consulting outside experts to fact check its own administration’s climate report, the EPA relied on one Koch-funded journalist.

A Koch-Funded Career
During the fall semester of 2010, while a college student, Bastasch was an intern at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate bill mill that unites business lobbyists and state lawmakers who together craft conservative model legislation. Koch nonprofits have funded ALEC for some time and increased their sponsorship of the organization in 2017.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Bastasch scored a Koch-sponsored fellowship in summer 2011 from the Institute for Humane Studies, an on-campus free-market think tank at George Mason University. The fellowship appears to have funded Bastasch’s work as a research associate at the Cascade Policy Institute, an anti-environmental think tank in Oregon. That fall, Bastasch was a government affairs intern at the climate change-denying Heritage Foundation, which is partially funded by the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF).

In 2012, Bastasch was part of an internship program funded by the Charles Koch Institute, another 501(c)(3) nonprofit. He joined the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) in January as a researcher while wrapping up his internship at the Heritage Foundation. Bastasch became a DCNF reporter that June, and he’s been there ever since.


As Sludge recently reported, CKF has been a major funder of DCNF, which provides much of the content published on The Daily Caller website. In 2016, CKF and the Charles Koch Institute combined to donate nearly $950,000 to DCNF—83 percent of its revenue that year. In 2017, per a new tax document, the Koch nonprofits increased their DCNF funding by roughly $20,000. CKF told Washington Post opinion writer Radley Balko—who previously worked at Reason, a libertarian publication partially funded by CKF—that its donations to DCNF fund fellowships for reporters with the intent “to create an incubator for young journalists with a free market bent, and to move them into mainstream journalism.”

As HuffPost environmental reporter Alexander Kaufman pointed out on Twitter, Bastasch, who has been employed by DCNF for nearly seven years, published numerous articles this year defending disgraced then-EPA director Scott Pruitt.

“Make no mistake: Working for the Daily Caller is an evolution of his career as a Koch operative,” wrote Kaufman.

Earther reporter Brian Kahn explained falsehoods uttered on Tuesday by White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, claims that were echoed by the EPA the next day. “This report is based on the most extreme model scenario, which contradicts long-established trends,” claimed Sanders.

In reality, the climate assessment was based on a range of future possibilities, including worst-case and numerous other scenarios, as is the custom in these reports. The world is heading towards a worst-case scenario, many climate reports project, and including an analysis of that potential outcome is extremely important, writes Kahn.

Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist who has questioned the link between fossil fuels and climate change, may use this seemingly manufactured criticism of the National Climate Assessment to help manipulate how the next assessment is drafted, reported Kaufman and Sara Boboltz.

The Kochtopus
Koch has helmed Koch Industries, a network of companies that operate oil refineries and gas pipelines and produces chemicals, fertilizers and paper products, for decades. The corporate behemoth, which took in over $110 billion in revenue last year, is among the nation’s biggest polluters, having racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for violating environmental and other regulations.

Koch, a conservative libertarian billionaire, also manages a huge rightwing political operation to churn out research attacking regulations and taxes, mobilize advocacy groups around these issues, and elect Republican politicians who largely legislate in lockstep with his ideology. Until a recent illness, Koch’s brother, David, was involved in leading Koch Industries and the political network as well.

Connor Gibson, a Greenpeace researcher and co-founder of the activist group UnKoch My Campus, elaborated on this political pipeline for Sludge. “Koch’s strategy is to own the policy conversations that affect his wealth…The politicians he funds are armed with research published by Koch professors and broadcast by Koch media outlets. This is how Mr. Koch is advancing protections for white collar criminals, fending off anti-pollution regulations and keeping his taxes lower than the rest of ours.”

While the Kochs portray themselves as having strong disagreements with President Donald Trump, their business has benefited enormously from the Trump administration’s removal of key environmental regulations, support for the giant tax cut of 2017, and installation of numerous business-friendly judges. Trump recently said he doesn’t believe the findings of the new climate assessment.

The appointment of Wheeler as acting director of the EPA surely came as welcome news to the Koch family. Now the agency is promoting the work of an anti-environmental writer who owes his career to its most powerful member.

View: https://twitter.com/rebleber/status/1067914715542753281


View: https://twitter.com/AlexCKaufman/status/989900620009299969
 

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
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26,743
Subpoenas Coming Soon In Trump Emoluments Lawsuit
The attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia are preparing to move forward with subpoenas for President Trump's businesses in their lawsuit alleging he is in violation of the U.S. Constitution's emoluments clause.

U.S. District Court Judge Peter J. Messitte gave the order for discovery in the case to proceed to D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine and Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, who have accused Trump of illegally profiting off the presidency. The list of subpoena targets will be released on Tuesday.
"We will now serve subpoenas to third-party organizations and federal agencies to gather the necessary evidence to prove that President Trump is violating the Constitution's emoluments clauses — our nation's original anti-corruption laws," Racine said in a statement.

The lawsuit has zeroed in on the Trump International Hotel, only blocks from the White House, and whether or not he has profited from both foreign and state government spending at the hotel.

There have been questions about Trump's legal and business entanglements since he took office, which have been compounded by the president's refusal to release his personal tax returns and hesitation to sever ties with his business empire.

The Trump hotel is the Old Post Office building and is leased from the federal government. The lease with the General Services Administration explicitly says that no elected official of the government of the United States may hold that lease.

Last month, Messite agreed that the lawsuit against Trump could go ahead, marking the first time an emoluments case has ever gone to trial in U.S. history. Trump and the Justice Department had requested a stay.

View: https://twitter.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/1069285771444740102


Mueller is about to have his say -- in a big way
Throughout his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, special counsel Robert Mueller has imposed on his team an ironclad rule: nobody leaks and nobody speaks -- out of court, that is. But when it comes to official court filings -- indictments, plea agreements, sentencing memos -- Mueller has been loquacious and at times downright chatty, disclosing in compelling narrative fashion crucial details about his investigation and tantalizing clues about what might happen next.

This week, Mueller is due to make three crucial court filings -- sentencing memos for Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort. Each document will tell us something important about what the future holds for these defendants and, more importantly, about what Mueller knows and where he might be headed. By the end of this week, we will know much more about the strength of Mueller's hand and the threat his investigation poses to President Donald Trump and his administration.
Michael Flynn
Ever since his December 2017 guilty plea, Flynn has been something of a mystery man. Trump's former national security adviser, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn falsely told the FBI he had not asked Kislyak to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the outgoing Obama administration had imposed on Russia.
Flynn pleaded guilty via a cooperation agreement, which means that Mueller now knows everything that Flynn knows. Yet Mueller has not made any moves or brought any new charges that are obviously based on Flynn's cooperation.
The only clue we have gotten is that Mueller has postponed Flynn's sentencing four times. Mueller has explained to the court that the postponements were necessary "due to the status of the special counsel's investigation." Translation: we are still using Flynn as a cooperator against somebody. Flynn's attorney added further intrigue, announcing that "General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit,"

Michael Cohen
Cohen's sentencing memo, filed last week in the Southern District of New York ("SDNY"), lobbed two grenades in Trump's direction -- one right at him and another close by. The direct hit came in Cohen's assertion that he "participated in planning discussions" with Trump regarding hush money payments to Stephanie Clifford and Karen McDougal, and that Cohen paid Clifford "in coordination with and at the direction of" Trump (as Cohen previously stated under oath when he pleaded guilty in August to campaign finance violations).
If true -- and the Wall Street Journal recently published an investigative piece containing extensive corroboration for Cohen's contentions -- then Trump almost certainly participated in a violation of federal campaign finance law. When Cohen pleaded guilty, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said "the President in this matter has done nothing wrong, and there are no charges against him."
The indirect damage arises from Cohen's assertion in the memo that he lied to Congress about the timing of Trump's efforts to build a tower in Moscow "to support and advance (Trump's) political messaging." Cohen claims that he "remained in close contact with White House staff and counsel to (Trump)" about the Moscow project and his testimony to Congress. Cohen stops short of saying that he lied at Trump's direction or that he discussed his false testimony with Trump. Nonetheless, Cohen's false testimony to Congress poses political problems for Trump (who repeatedly and falsely denied that he had business dealings with Russia during a time when he plainly did, according to Cohen) and criminal problems for anyone in the White House who advised or encouraged Cohen to testify falsely. Anyone else who testified falsely to Congress about the timing of the Moscow project could be in Mueller's line of fire as well.
The big question remaining is whether Mueller will agree with Cohen's account of his own conduct. The smart bet is that he will. Cohen's lead attorney, Guy Petrillo, is a widely respected veteran of the SDNY with an impeccable reputation for candor. (Disclosure: Petrillo was a colleague and supervisor of mine at the SDNY). Petrillo knows how the cooperation process works; there is little chance he would make an assertion in a sentencing memo to a stern judge unless he knew that prosecutors would sign onto it.
If Mueller and the SDNY do concur with Cohen's version of the facts -- particularly on the campaign finance violation -- then we will have, officially, federal prosecutors stating on the record that the President has committed a federal offense -- causing an unlawful corporate campaign contribution and excessive campaign contribution.
Paul Manafort
This one should be the main event. Last week, Mueller dropped a bombshell when he notified a federal judge that Manafort had breached his cooperation agreement by lying repeatedly to federal prosecutors and agents "on a variety of subject matters." Mueller told the judge he would "file a detailed sentencing submission ... in advance of sentencing that sets forth the nature of the defendant's crimes and lies, including those after signing the plea agreement."
Mueller is due to file that sentencing memo by Friday, December 7, and it promises to be a barnburner. Mueller has promised to lay it all out: the specifics of Manafort's lies and the proof establishing the truth of the underlying matters. We do not yet know specifically what Manafort lied about, but we will learn this week.
Based on my own experience as a federal and state prosecutor, cooperators most often get in trouble because they lie by omission. They leave out facts that would incriminate themselves, or others they want to protect. Cooperation in the federal system typically is all-or-nothing. Cooperators do not get to pick and choose what information they provide to prosecutors, or who they cooperate against -- and when they try to do so, the cooperation blows apart.
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Here, Manafort might have lied in an effort to protect himself. He might have illicit money stashed away that he did not want to turn over to Mueller, or he might have committed other crimes that he did not want to admit. Both are common scenarios.
Manafort also likely failed to tell Mueller about crimes that other people committed. Cooperators do this for various reasons: personal or familial relationships, fear of reprisal, or a belief that they will be rewarded. By lying to Mueller, Manafort took a reckless gamble and put himself in a tenuous position. At 69 years old, he now faces a sentence likely to keep him locked up for the rest of his life. Whoever Manafort tried to protect, he believed it was worth it to take the risk of dying behind bars (or -- perhaps -- that that person might pardon him).
We know that Mueller knows Manafort lied, and we know that Mueller will prove those lies to the court "in detail" in his filing this week. We soon should know who Manafort tried to protect, what crimes those people committed with Manafort (or to Manafort's knowledge), and what proof Mueller has of those crimes. This is going to get interesting, and soon.
 

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,743
DC and Maryland send subpoenas to Trump Org over hotel payments
The attorneys general of the District of Columbia and Maryland began sending subpoenas to the Trump Organization as well as five federal agencies and the state of Maine for financial records involving payments to President Donald Trump's businesses.

Subpoenas are expected to begin going out as early as Tuesday, with targets required to provide information within the next six months.

"At this time we are not seeking information from President Trump in his individual capacity and we have not issued any notices of deposition to date," a spokesperson from the office of DC Attorney General Karl Racine said Tuesday.

The case is proceeding just as the Trump Organization braces for a flurry of investigations from House Democrats once they take control of Congress in January.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit by DC and Maryland claims Trump is in violation of the Constitution's ban on emoluments, or payments, from foreign or domestic government entities to the president because of his continued interest in the Trump International Hotel.

DC and Maryland have said the Trump International Hotel's operations put other nearby hotels and entertainment properties at a competitive disadvantage, and that the Trump hotel got special tax concessions. The hotel won its lease on federally owned property before Trump's election.

The luxury property, which opened three blocks from the White House shortly before Trump was elected in 2016, has become a favorite hangout for lobbyists and others interested in doing business with the administration.

DC and Maryland have indicated they intend to subpoena 13 business entities operating under the umbrella of the Trump Organization, including the trust that currently holds the President's business assets, the Trump International and the Trump Organization itself.
Flynn has given "substantial" assistance to the special counsel
Special counsel Robert Mueller told a federal court Tuesday that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn has given "substantial assistance" to the Russia investigation and should not get jail time.
Roger Stone cites fifth amendment and says he won't give documents to Senate – as it happened
Roger Stone’s attorney sent letter saying longtime Trump adviser will not provide documents or testimony to judiciary committee
 

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
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26,743
I think Rudy linked the wrong page, or did he? Is he a hostage asking for help?

View: https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1068570837459050496?s=20
Rudy Giuliani is furious about getting pranked on Twitter, still doesn’t get how it worked
Dot in is a domain extension, no different than dot com, dot gov, or dot edu. So when Giuliani neglected to put a space when writing G-20.In, a hyperlink was generated. Someone bought that domain and had it redirect to a site that makes fun of Donald Trump.

Tonight, Rudy Giuliani tweeted his anger over the prank, and proved he has no idea how it happened.


View: https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1070118915139923968


The reason Giuliani’s “same thing-period no space-occurred later” didn’t become a URL is because there he wrote “Helsinki.Either.”

Dot either is not a domain extension recognized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. So it did not become an active URL.

Before he took office, Trump named Giuliani a cybersecurity adviser