Tag: prosecutor

Mueller went out of his way to not bring conspiracy charges while simultaneously describing the conspiracy Edit: PASTING my previous comments here again, because I want people who have not read the report themselves to do so and to come away with what seems like the only real explanation for Mueller's decision: Mueller chose not to bring conspiracy charges against Trump or his family because he did not want to single-handed torpedo the presidency and destroy the Republican Party. Yet Mueller basically said he can't PROVE an agreement with agents who were related TO THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT which is why no one was charged with criminal conspiracy. Yet Mueller in the next breath says "the report did not ESTABLISH that Trump himself wanted the change." Regarding Kusher and Don Jr, the report itself states the Kushner and Don Jr were not indicted because Mueller claimed "they could have claimed ignorance, so that would make it difficult to prove intent." Mueller says he "did not identify evidence" that Kushner or Sessions—who had contact with Simes—passed info to the Kremlin. So we can't therefore know that Dimitri Simes is part of the "russian government" THAT is what Mueller is saying in the report. Sure seems like Mueller, once again, is giving Kushner (and Simes) such unbelievable benefit of the doubt, because you can't PROVE that Simes was a direct agent of the Kremlin, so he's not technically part of the conspiracy. I mean, seriously, Mueller? What we're being told from the report: Don Jr. speaks of Clinton dirt to: (1) Manafort (2) Kushner (3) Ivanka (4) Hope Hicks (5) Eric Trump (6) Donald J. Trump—his dad, the man who's going to leave him billions, and the GOP president candidate So all three Trump kids knew the campaign was getting Clinton dirt; Trump's campaign manager knew; his communications director knew; his son-in-law knew; his lawyer says Trump knew... yet the report concludes there's insufficient evidence that Trump himself was told. Mind you, all this despite the fact that, on the day Don Jr. told everyone, his father went out and made a public statement saying he'd {checks notes} shortly be giving a "very interesting" speech on Clinton dirt.

Three cases of defendants who threatened the life of political figures came to various stages of resolution in federal courtrooms last week. In one, an upstate New York man was convicted of threatening to kill former president Barack Obama and congresswoman Maxine Waters, the California Democrat. In another, a California man was sentenced for threatening the lives of Obama, former presidents George H.W. A Secret Service spokesman declined to say how many open threats they are investigating against the president and the other individuals the agency protects. He noted that in the weeks, months and years following the 9/11 attacks of 2001, there was a surge in prosecutions of defendants with links to Muslim-majority countries. “These arrests subsided in the Obama years as US strategy changed focus, and Obama shifted focus to extrajudicial assassinations overseas,” Loadenthal tells Quartz. It’s the highest rate in the past two years, but down 8% as compared to 2013. “You go backwards and look at past incidents—problems at work, behavioral problems, does this person have access to firearms?” Agents then assign a risk rating to each person who make a threat that is discovered. That’s when Trump fans began appearing at Harrigan’s San Diego, California home, threatening to kill him and his family. A few days later, the Secret Service showed up.

Another top prosecutor has left special counsel Robert Mueller's team, marking the second high-profile departure announcement this month and raising speculations that the Russia probe will soon be wrapped up. Zainab Ahmad, a U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York who worked on extensively on counterterrorism cases, was one of the prosecutors who signed former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI concerning his contacts with a Russian official. But the special counsel’s office said on Monday that Ahmad is done with her work on the investigation concerning alleged cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russia. News. Her name came up last year during Justice Department official Bruce Ohr’s closed-doors interview as part of the Republican-led House Oversight and Judiciary Committee probes. Ohr told lawmakers that he shared details about his meetings with former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the salacious anti-Trump dossier, with a number of his expansive circle of contacts in the department and other officials, including Ahmad. The departures are likely to fuel the speculations that the Russia investigation is nearing its end following years of legal battles that netted sentences against President Trump’s associates. Yet both the Justice Department and Mueller team are tight-lipped when the report on the alleged collusion could see the light. The report produced by the special counsel will have to undergo the DOJ scrutiny and it will be up to Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr to determine how much information Congress will see. Fox News' Catherine Herridge, Cyd Upson, Brooke Singman and Louis Casiano contributed to this report.

Rachel Maddow reports on Donald Trump nominating Jessie Liu for the number three spot in the DOJ, allowing him to name her replacement as the U.S. attorney for D.C., overseeing such cases as Paul Manafort, Maria Butina, Roger Stone, and…

State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan hit back Sunday at claims that political considerations motivated Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit to recommend charges against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his three corruption investigations. The attorney general made a decision in which he believed according to his conscience and his best judgment, and not because of any pressure." News website in return for regulatory benefits to telecommunications giant Bezeq, which owns the site. Netanyahu lashed out at the attorney general following the publication of his recommendations, calling the timing of the announcement "outrageous" and accusing members of the judiciary and his political opponents of carrying out an "unprecedented witch hunt." Nitzan stressed Sunday that the prime minister will have the opportunity to present his case at a hearing before any final decision on indictments is reached. "Last Thursday the attorney general decided to consider putting the prime minister on trial in three cases for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, subject to a hearing," Nitzan said. Considerations on whether to put the prime minister on trial and the final decision will be made only after the prime minister has made his case to the attorney general and the State Prosecutor's Office." He added: "It is important to clarify that the final decision is made by the attorney general. I have a great deal of respect for the attorney general, who has led this process thoroughly and deeply over the last few months. "There were no political considerations with the decision to indict (Ehud) Olmert, the former prime minister who was the head of the Kadima party on the other side of the map, and in exactly the same way there were no political considerations with the Netanyahu case," Nitzan said as he ended his remarks on the affair.

A neo-Nazi serving as a lieutenant in the US coast guard has been caught plotting to attack Democratic members of Congress, including congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and well-known media personalities, according to prosecutors. Christopher Hasson intended “to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country”, according to a filing to federal court in Maryland. Law enforcement officers seized 15 guns and 1,000 rounds of ammunition from his home. Prosecutors said Hasson was a “domestic terrorist” and should be detained. The filing said Hasson, a fan of the Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, compiled a spreadsheet of apparent targets, including representatives Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and anchors from CNN and MSNBC. Since early 2017, Hasson had “routinely perused” a copy of a manifesto drawn up by Breivik, the Norwegian far-right extremist who killed 77 people in the country in 2011, according to US investigators. Prosecutors said that on 17 January, Hasson began compiling a spreadsheet of prominent people “consistent with the types of people who Breivik identifies as ‘traitors’ and targets for an attack”. Many on the list have also been frequent subjects of abuse from Republicans including Trump. The list included “poca warren”, which prosecutors said was an apparent reference to senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. It also included cable news presenters such as Scarborough, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Ari Melber, and CNN’s Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo and Van Jones.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday claimed in a new court filing that prosecutors have evidence that former Trump adviser Roger Stone communicated with WikiLeaks, the organization that released hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign. Stone -- who was indicted last month on charges of obstruction, making false statements and witness tampering -- denied to Fox News that evidence of such communications exists. “There is no such evidence,” Stone said in a text message. In a Friday motion, Mueller’s team said that “search warrants were executed on accounts that contained Stone’s communications” with an organization widely believed to be WikiLeaks. Last month’s indictment does not charge Stone with conspiring with WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website that published the emails, or with the Russian officers Mueller says hacked them. Instead, it accuses him of witness tampering, obstruction and false statements about his interactions related to WikiLeaks' release. The indictment says Stone spoke to Trump campaign officials during the summer of 2016 about WikiLeaks and information the organization had that might be damaging to the Clinton campaign. It also says Stone was contacted by “senior Trump campaign officials” to inquire about future WikiLeaks releases of hacked Democratic emails. Stone has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Earlier Friday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the federal court for the District of Columbia instituted a partial gag order, ordering that Stone “refrain from making statements to the media or in public settings that pose a substantial likelihood of material prejudice to this case.” Jackson further ordered that any participants in the case, including witnesses and counsel, “refrain” from making any statements to the media or public when they are near the courthouse that could “influence any juror, potential juror, judge, witness or court officer or interfere with the administration of justice.” Fox News’ Eben Brown, Brooke Singman and Bill Mears and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, had breached his plea agreement by lying multiple times to prosecutors after pledging to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The decision by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of United States District Court in Washington may affect the severity of punishment that awaits Mr. Manafort. Judge Jackson is scheduled to sentence him next month on two conspiracy counts, and he is also awaiting sentencing for eight other counts in a related fraud case. After Mr. Manafort agreed in September to cooperate with the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, the judge found, he lied about his contacts with a Russian associate during the campaign and after the election. Judge Jackson decided that prosecutors failed to prove that Mr. Manafort, 69, had deceived them about two other matters: Mr. Kilimnik’s role in a conspiracy with Mr. Manafort to obstruct justice, and whether Mr. Manafort had been in contact with Trump administration officials. Although the defense won on those points, the judge’s split decision bodes poorly for Mr. Manafort. But like transcripts of earlier hearings, it is likely to be heavily redacted to protect the secrecy of the special counsel’s inquiry. The prosecutors also told the judge that Mr. Manafort deceived them about transferring Trump campaign polling data to Mr. Kilimnik during the campaign. Mr. Manafort’s lawyers had suggested that Mr. Manafort had only wanted to share public data in the interest of promoting himself and maybe winning lucrative work overseas. He suggested that Mr. Manafort might have been trying to cover up the data transfer because it might hurt his chances of winning a presidential pardon for his crimes.

In the narrative that prosecutors are building, President Trump continued to secretly seek to do business in Russia well into his presidential campaign even as Russian agents made more efforts to influence him. At the same time, in this account he ordered hush payments to two women to suppress stories of impropriety in violation of campaign finance law. Mr. Giuliani pointed to that outcome on Saturday to argue that the president should not be similarly charged. “The President is not implicated in campaign finance violations because based on Edwards case and others the payments are not campaign contributions,” Mr. Giuliani wrote on Twitter. But he added that did not necessarily mean that the committee should vote to impeach Mr. Trump. And while the prevailing view at the Justice Department is that a sitting president cannot be indicted, that does not mean a president cannot be charged after leaving office. Representative Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said that if the campaign finance case as laid out by prosecutors was true, Mr. Trump would likely meet the criteria for an impeachable offense. Mr. Trump’s lawyers feared that Mr. Mueller was trying to cast Mr. Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator. Mr. Trump’s lawyers held off sending the answers and demanded a meeting with Justice Department officials and Mr. Mueller’s team, according to one person close to the president. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, said the standard set during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton for lying under oath certainly puts Mr. Trump “in impeachment territory” because of the campaign finance issue.

New York (CNN)Federal prosecutors said for the first time Friday that Michael Cohen acted at the direction of Donald Trump when the former fixer committed two election-related crimes during the 2016 presidential campaign, as special counsel Robert Mueller outlined a previously undisclosed set of overtures and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian nationals. Those revelations came in a set of court filings in which federal prosecutors in New York said Cohen should receive a "substantial" prison sentence of roughly four years for tax fraud and campaign-finance crimes, and as Mueller's office accused the President's former attorney of lying about his contacts with Russia. Mueller's disclosures also exposed deeper entanglements than previously known between Trump, his campaign apparatus and the Russian government, including that a Russian national who claimed to be well-connected in Moscow spoke with Cohen in 2015 and offered "political synergy" with the Trump campaign. In August, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes after being charged by Manhattan federal prosecutors. In one instance, Cohen spoke in November 2015 to a Russian national who offered "synergy on a government level" to the Trump presidential campaign and "repeatedly proposed" a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to court papers. Mueller's sentencing memo also provided the first explanation of the Trump Tower Moscow project's relevance to Russia's interference during the 2016 campaign. According to the special counsel, Cohen's false statements to investigators about the Trump Tower Moscow project "obscured the fact that the Moscow Project was a lucrative business opportunity that sought, and likely required, the assistance of the Russian government." That Cohen continued to work on the Trump Tower Moscow project -- and discuss it with Trump -- was material to both the ongoing congressional and special counsel investigations, prosecutors said, noting in particular that "it occurred at a time of sustained efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the U.S. presidential election." "The defendant amplified his false statements by releasing and repeating his lies to the public, including to other potential witnesses," prosecutors wrote. In the New York federal prosecutors' case, the sentencing guidelines call for a term of 51 to 63 months in prison, and prosecutors on Friday asked the court to "impose a substantial term of imprisonment, one that reflects a modest downward variance from the applicable guidelines range."