Tag: Special Counsel investigation (2017–present)

Washington (CNN)After months of vowing to fight for his innocence, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort conceded to committing several federal crimes and agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department, including in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Manafort's decision to cooperate with Mueller comes just weeks after President Donald Trump called Manafort a "brave man" who would not "make up stories in order to get a 'deal'" after he was convicted in a separate trial in Virginia. He also admitted to all the other crimes Mueller accused him of since last October -- from money laundering and bank fraud to foreign lobbying violations related to his work for pro-Russian Ukrainians. Special counsel's office senior prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told the judge that under Manafort's plea agreement, the other charges will be dropped after he is sentenced in both Virginia and DC "or at the agreement of successful cooperation." Manafort was separately convicted of eight crimes by a Virginia federal jury last month. It was the second version of the statement. A legal source, supportive of the President and familiar with the Manafort case, said the Trump team does not believe Manafort has anything significant on the President to share with the special counsel. He paid the firm largely out of his offshore accounts more than $4.6 million for its services, the filing said, while Yanukovych's government publicly said the report cost only $12,000. Even following his eight convictions in last month Virginia, Manafort still faced seven charges in Washington and another 10 possible charges in Virginia, which had been declared as mistrials after the jury hung on them last month. Kilimnik has not appeared in court, though Manafort's plea Friday admits that he committed his crimes in conspiracy with both Gates and Kilimnik.

Jerome Corsi, a rightwing author and conspiracy theorist, has been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury as part of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Corsi, an associate of the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, was asked to appear at 9am in Washington on Friday, according to his attorney, David Gray. “We intend to cooperate fully with the special counsel’s office and we suspect that the focus of the questions will be about my client’s communications with Roger Stone,” Gray said in an email. Corsi noted to his followers three times that agents had taken Malloch’s cellphone, warning: “Ted OUT OF CONTACT”. That evening, Corsi joined an “emergency broadcast” on InfoWars, the far-right conspiracy website, to discuss Malloch’s detention. Stone has said that he, Corsi and Malloch dined together at a New York steak restaurant during 2016 but denied the meeting related to the election. Stone has made contradictory statements about being in contact with Assange during the campaign. Stone tweeted on 21 August 2016 that “it will soon [be John] Podesta's time in the barrel”. Several have testified to the grand jury, including Stone’s protege Sam Nunberg, his former social media adviser Jason Sullivan, and his housemate Kristin Davis. Randy Credico, a radio DJ and comedian previously identified by Stone as his go-between for communications with Assange, is also scheduled to testify before the grand jury on Friday, following a subpoena from Mueller’s team.

It did not quote the president directly about Sessions being safe until November. Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to lead the investigation, which Trump has called a “witch hunt”. Trump also told Bloomberg he viewed the Russia investigation as “illegal”, and said he would “see what happens” if Mueller issued him with a subpoena to secure an interview. “Great scholars” had said “there never should have been a special counsel”, the president was quoted as saying. Some Republicans have predicted Trump will replace Sessions, a former senator from Alabama, after the elections on 6 November. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina senator who is close to Trump and a defender of Sessions, said last week he believed the president would appoint a new attorney general but should wait until the elections. Bloomberg said Trump also spoke approvingly of Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of the Trump Organization who agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors in their investigation of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer. The campaign finance charges concerned Cohen’s facilitation of payments to women who claim to have had affairs with Trump. He’s a wonderful guy.” Weisselberg’s cooperation, the president added, was related to “a very limited period of time”. “I put a man in there who I like and respect,” Trump said.

“Truth isn’t truth? Mr Mayor, do you realize … I mean, this is going to become a bad meme.” The Mr Mayor to whom he was referring, creator of the bad meme, was Rudy Giuliani, legendary New York mayor on 9/11. Now Trump’s attorney on the Russia investigation, he was trying to justify why the White House has been dragging its feet over granting an interview between the president and special counsel Robert Mueller. Trump's 'good person' defence could affect jurors in Manafort trial Read more “No, no, don’t do this to me,” Giuliani said, head in hands, when he realized the hole he had dug for himself. “Don’t do ‘Truth isn’t truth’ to me,” Todd replied, still scarcely holding it together. At which point, Giuliani did the only thing that came to mind: he dug deeper, into competing versions of events regarding former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Russia and fired FBI director James Comey. “Donald Trump says, ‘I didn’t talk about Flynn with Comey’, Comey says, ‘You did talk about it’. So tell me what the truth is, you’re such a genius.” Chuck Todd may not be a genius. But he was smart enough not to answer the question. Still bearing a broad grin, he let the new bad meme soar into the digital firmament.

Let's begin this hour with that and security clearances with Mara Liasson. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So that first item about President Trump's White House lawyer Don McGahn comes to us via The New York Times. All of this goes to Mueller's investigation of whether Trump obstructed justice when, among other things, he told McGahn at one point to try to fire Mueller, which McGahn didn't do. But the most extraordinary thing about The New York Times story is that it suggests that McGahn talked to Mueller to show Mueller that he did nothing wrong. And today, the president tweeted that he didn't like The New York Times suggesting that McGahn was a, quote, "John Dean type rat." LIASSON: Well, the president is threatening to revoke the security clearances of a whole bunch of critics of his. LIASSON: The impact could be pretty chilling, according to a lot of former intelligence officials. In other words, the president talked about removing the security clearance of a top Justice Department official. If you're going to tell the president about intelligence that he might not like, you might be worried that he'll yank your security clearance. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's NPR national political correspondent, Mara Liasson.

“The president and Don have a great relationship,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement on Saturday. Trump subsequently tweeted his own response to the report, writing: “I allowed White House counsel Don McGahn, and all other requested members of the White House staff, to fully cooperate with the special councel [sic]. In addition we readily gave over one million pages of documents. Most transparent in history. McGahn cooperated with Robert Mueller’s team as a regular witness, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, as the White House asked many staffers to do. The person also said he did not believe McGahn provided Mueller with incriminating information about Trump. McGahn provided the facts but nothing he saw or heard amounted to obstruction of justice by Trump, the person told Reuters. The newspaper reported McGahn’s motivation to speak with the special counsel as an unusual move in response to a decision by Trump’s first team of lawyers to cooperate fully. But it also said McGhan feared he could be placed in legal jeopardy because of decisions in the White House that could be construed as obstruction of justice. Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment.

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — President Donald Trump on Sunday offered his most definitive and clear public acknowledgment that his oldest son met with a Kremlin-aligned lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign to "get information on an opponent," defending the meeting as "totally legal and done all the time in politics." It is, however, against the law for U.S. campaigns to receive donations or items of value from foreigners, and that June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya is now a subject of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe. While "collusion" is not mentioned in U.S. criminal statutes, Mueller is investigating whether anyone associated with Trump coordinated with the Russians, which could result in criminal charges if they entered into a conspiracy to break the law, including through cyber-hacking or interfering with the election. "Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower," the president wrote in one of several early morning tweets Sunday, many of which took aim at the media. He concluded by further distancing himself from the meeting his son arranged, writing: "I did not know about it!" — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018 Trump was responding to a Washington Post report this weekend that although he does not think his eldest son intentionally broke the law, he is worried that Trump Jr. may have unintentionally stumbled into legal jeopardy and is embroiled in Mueller's investigation largely because of his connection to the president. The Trump Tower meeting also included Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, who is on trial over tax and bank fraud charges after being indicted by Mueller. In that statement, Trump Jr. had indicated that the meeting had been "primarily" about the issue of the adoption of Russian children by Americans. Amid public uproar over the meeting, the president's son was forced to release follow-up statements, ultimately acknowledging that the meeting's true purpose had been to get dirt about Hillary Clinton from a lawyer he had been told was working for the Russian government. The president's attorneys at first denied that Trump's involvement in drafting the response to the Times, but months later, in a letter intended to explain why Mueller should not interview Trump, they agreed that the president had, in fact, authored the statement.

SIMON: The first week of the Manafort trial - let me ask you. Prosecutors say Manafort made tens of millions of dollars working for foreign politicians, including some who were friendly to Moscow. He goes on trial as soon as next month, I believe, too. Another trial in a separate federal court on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent when he was working for these foreign governments. The Koch brothers, who, of course, have been major donors to many Republican causes and candidates - not President Trump, it must be said. They said they're going to be a little more choosy in the future with their money. SIMON: Before we move on, we want to note - the Koch brothers have contributed to NPR. President's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh - we keep hearing he's a shoo-in, so why hasn't he been shooed in already? That's nearly a million pages of documents. SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving, thanks so much.

Whatever your feelings may be about the FBI or the Mueller investigation or the Hillary Clinton email investigation (full disclosure: I’m a former Clinton campaign staffer), it is undeniable that Strzok strongly disliked then-candidate Donald Trump and displayed a political preference for Clinton. Sure, his texts were ill-advised, but can anyone point to any explicit wrongdoing on his part? Citing a 2009 article in which Kavanaugh argued that indicting a sitting president “would ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national-security crisis,” Democrats claimed his view on the issue is clearly prejudiced and, should such a case come before the Supreme Court, he cannot be trusted to rule objectively. Some on the left went so far as to argue, “Without an absolute and unequivocal commitment to recuse from any deliberations involving Trump’s alleged wrongdoing, which no one expects Kavanaugh to make, this nomination cannot possibly be seen by Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, as a credible choice to serve on the Supreme Court.” Those on the right responded, “Read any of the more than 300 cases that Kavanaugh has decided and the judge consistently strives to interpret the law as it is written, not as he would like it to be.” Politics is treated like sports, with loyalists on each side unwilling to question their own team or hear out the other. If you want to legitimize the investigation into Trump, then it’s important that Strzok’s work not be seen as biased. For decades, conservatives and liberals have fought over the issue of defining free speech. When Trump and his allies speak against the FBI, Democrats sound the alarm about undermining the rule of law. Can Kavanaugh put aside his personal views and make an impartial ruling on an investigation involving the president? The very nature of bias itself makes it easy to see it in others and difficult to see in ourselves. It is easy to spot impropriety on the part of our opponents if we spend all our time searching for them.

We begin the hour by sorting through the week with NPR's Ron Elving, our senior editor and correspondent at NPR. ELVING: Well, you know, it seemed like there was Mueller news pretty much every day this week, Scott. So they're planning to exchange visits to each other's capital city next year. SIMON: We have no idea if the Mueller probe will be over or not though, right? And if sustained over the entire year, this will be a banner year, indeed, for the American economy. ELVING: It could be, indirectly, because Facebook was a principal platform for a lot of the Russian disinformation campaign during 2016. So Facebook had the biggest one-day loss in market history. SIMON: Did we, maybe without noting it, pass a corner this week in which the Russia investigation - Mueller, Michael Cohen, all of that - has gone from examining if there was obstruction of justice to actual collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign? SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving, thanks so much. ELVING: Thank you, Scott.