Robert Mueller has made no public comment since he was named to lead the Department of Justice investigation into Russian interference in last year's election.
Instead, he has let his actions do the talking. The former FBI director and decorated U.S. Marine has submitted a budget and quietly hired an all-star team that includes 15 Justice Department prosecutors. And, a spokesman for Mueller said, he's not done bringing on new lawyers.
That has gotten the attention of supporters of President Trump, who recently made an attack ad calling the investigation a "rigged game" and blasting the special counsel for hiring at least four lawyers who have donated to Democrats.
But don't expect Mueller to mount a defense. He does his talking in the courtroom, not on social media.
Mueller has not described the scope of what his team will examine.
But members of Congress and other lawyers involved in the probe described the main lines of inquiry as: Russian meddling in the presidential election; whether anyone inside the United States conspired to help; and whether any wrongdoing has been committed in the surprise firing of FBI Director James Comey, who said he believed he was let go to relieve pressure on the Russia probe.
Many of the legal experts that Mueller has hired are the top in their field.
Courtesy of WaPo:
Mueller has hired 16 lawyers to work with him. Together, the team is a formidable collection of legal talent with experience prosecuting national security, fraud and public corruption cases, arguing matters before the Supreme Court and assessing complicated legal questions.
In other words if Donald Trump has not started sweating bullets yet, he soon will be.
My prediction is that Trump will try to find someway to fire Mueller, but that it will ultimately back fire on him.
Dems have, in my lifetime, gone out of their way to select wingnut prosecutors to avoid the appearance of partisanship in crucial investigations.
ReplyDeleteWingnuts, otoh, kick sand in Dem faces out of contempt and then replace investigators with Independent Inquisitors cum extremely partisan wingnut rat bastards- like Kenny Boy Starr to lead hatchet jobs against Dems.
Wingnuts selected Mueller. but apparently, he isn't investigating the right stuff to satisfy the enemy wingnuts.
Drumpf needs an Alberto Gonzalez to assure him everything he does is perfectly legal-according to wingnut's thinking.
Robert Mueller is a Republican, appointed by Republicans. The lawyers that he brought on board for Trump/Russia are one or the other party. It's what they specialize in that Mueller is interested in & hired them for. Presently, from the Eastern Div. of Virginia there are two(2) sealed indictments awaiting the FBI. There is Mueller's investigation. House & Senate Intel. committees. Also, The Cherry ON TOP is NYAG Eric Schneiderman
Deletewho has constructed a RICO case against Trump Company for money laundering w/Russians. BIG, very BIG. May I suggest that you stop watching Fox & Friends only. Stop reading Breitbart news. Educate your self by looking at all three(3)cable channels to balance your views and read as many online MAJOR newspapers as you can. Radical thinking only hurts you and everyone around you.
Deletehttp://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/trump-refuses-to-give-up-his-twitter-feed-its-my-voice/
ReplyDelete“It’s my voice”
tiny djt
Because he's an idiot. He's the king of American junk culture and of course he won't give up twitter, since it is the highest form of our junk culture.
DeleteWhen Fox News' on-screen graphic conveniently edits out mention of the Russian gov't when showing Trump Jr.'s emails
Deletehttp://mm4a.org/2tFaxXC
https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/884854197354733568
In Emin Agalarov’s music video for “In Another Life,” the Azeri singer and real estate scion parties at his estate outside Moscow with Miss Universe contestants — only to wake, realise it was all a dream and have Donald Trump tell him, “You’re fired!”
ReplyDeleteMr Agalarov could hardly have dreamt that four years after Mr Trump’s Miss Universe pageant, he would be at the centre of a sprawling scandal about alleged Russian government interference to tip the US presidential election campaign in favour of Mr Trump.
It was 37-year-old Mr Agalarov and his oligarch father Aras who lobbied for a meeting in Trump Tower, New York in June 2016 between Mr Trump’s eldest son Donald Jr and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer for small-time Russian officials implicated in a tax fraud case, according to Rob Goldstone, the music publicist who organised it. The details emerged in emails released by Donald Trump Jr on Tuesday.
Donald Jr agreed to the meeting after Mr Goldstone told him he was being offered “information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and dealings with Russia” provided by a Russian prosecutor, Yuri Chaika. The information was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump”, Mr Goldstone added.
According to the emails, Ms Veselnitskaya was intended to be the messenger for the damaging information. She told NBC on Tuesday that she had been invited to the meeting by a man she did not know.
Both Ms Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Jr say she provided no information about Mrs Clinton. “They wanted it so badly,” she said.
Instead, she raised the issue of US sanctions on Russian officials implicated in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian whistleblower who exposed an alleged $230m tax fraud before dying in mysterious circumstances in jail. Ms Veselnitskaya had been engaged in a lobbying campaign to have the US sanctions lifted.
It is unclear whether Mr Chaika, the Russian prosecutor, ever intended to pass dirt on Mrs Clinton to the Trump campaign, or indeed whether he had any such dirt at all. But he did have an interest in the Magnitsky sanctions.
Bill Browder, the US financier who employed Magnitsky and inspired the sanctions on Russian officials, has accused Mr Chaika of covering up the real causes of Magnitsky’s death in prison and of closing down the investigation into the $230m tax fraud. Some of Mr Chaika’s fellow prosecutors are on the Magnitsky list of sanctioned officials.
A former prosecutor, Ms Veselnitskaya is a formidable presence in the murky courtrooms of suburban Moscow, where the Agalarovs’ firm Crocus Group built the concert hall that hosted the Miss Universe pageant in 2013.
The Agalarovs’ social circle is nonetheless more rarefied than hers; they hobnob with oligarchs and Russia’s top pop stars.
The Agalarovs’ ties to Mr Trump are more obvious: the family organised the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which Mr Trump owned, in Moscow. Mr Trump appeared in Emin’s music video, partied with the Agalarovs during the pageant and announced a deal with them to build a Trump Tower in Moscow that never got off the ground.
“He’s a very caring person,” Mr Agalarov said. “He will give you extra attention if he likes you.”
Mr Agalarov and Crocus’ spokeswoman did not return requests for comment on Tuesday.
Mr Trump spent less than 24 hours in Moscow, according to a person involved in the pageant. He attended a dinner with Herman Gref, chief executive of Sberbank, Russia’s largest state bank and Mr Agalarov’s biggest creditor. Russian president Vladimir Putin declined to meet Mr Trump but sent him a note and a lacquered gift box, according to the Agalarovs.
Aras Agalarov implied in an interview with Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda last month that Mr Trump was not then considered important enough to meet Mr Putin. “It’s one thing if he talks to me. That’s one level, probably. It’s another thing if he’s going to talk to the president of the Russian Federation,” he said.
ReplyDeleteIn March, Emin Agalarov told Forbes that his family was still in touch with Mr Trump.
The Agalarovs’ real interest, however, appeared to be staging the pageant as a vehicle to promote Emin’s music career internationally, according to Olivia Wells, who competed as Miss Australia. Instead of taking part in the usual events to promote tourism in the host city, contestants spent several days hobnobbing with the Agalarov family at their estate outside Moscow.
“We were all laughing about how easy life would be if you had a dad who could just buy you [a] TV event to try and make you famous,” Ms Wells said.
The pageant itself was a family affair. Aras Agalarov’s wife Irina was on the preliminary judging panel. Emin performed during the ceremony — much to the horror of attending executives from NBC, who believed his schmaltzy pop was not up to standard, according to a person involved in the organisation.
“Us girls all knew he had zero talent,” Ms Wells said. “That was the joke, that Miss Universe was in Russia because Agalarov wanted to buy his son a big break even though he was shockingly bad.”
https://www.ft.com/content/25c0d7d0-6640-11e7-8526-7b38dcaef614?desktop=true
Legal experts say Donald Trump Jr has just confessed to a federal crime
ReplyDelete...But experts on national security and election law say this “defense” is, legally speaking, no defense at all.
“The emails are simply put damning as a legal matter,” explains Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department special counsel and current editor of the legal site Just Security. “The text of the emails provide very clear evidence of participation in a scheme to involve the Russian government in federal election interference, in a form that is prohibited by federal criminal law.”
Jens David Ohlin, a law professor at Cornell University, is even blunter: “It’s a shocking admission of a criminal conspiracy.”
Trump Jr.‘s decision to take the meeting in and of itself likely violated campaign finance law, which does not require you to actually get anything useful from foreigners. In other words, the mere fact that Trump Jr. asked for information from a Russian national about Clinton might have constituted a federal crime.
“The law states that no person shall knowingly solicit or accept from a foreign national any contribution to a campaign of an item of value,” Goodman tells me. “There is now a clear case that Donald Trump Jr. has met all the elements of the law, which is a criminally enforced federal statute.”
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/10/15950590/donald-trump-jr-new-york-times-illegal
Two days before Jr met with Russia, Donald Trump announced he would imminently reveal dirt on Hillary Clinton
ReplyDeleteDonald Trump has now announced through his attorneys, and again through a White House press briefing, that he had no idea his son Donald Trump Jr. met with a Kremlin representative during the campaign to discuss dirt on Hillary Clinton. But in what essentially amounts to a public confession in hindsight, during a public speech just before his son’s meeting, Donald Trump bragged during a speech that he was just days away from having dirt on Clinton.
Donald Trump Jr. met with the Kremlin representative on June 9th, 2016, according to the New York Times. The Kremlin rep had told him in advance that they meeting would be to discuss dirt on Hillary Clinton. Two days before that meeting, on June 7th, Donald Trump said the following during his New Jersey primary victory speech: “I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting”
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/two-days-before-jr-russia-donald-trump-announced-dirt-hillary-clinton/3795/
New evidence says the Republican Party was officially in on the Russian plot to rig the election for Donald Trump
The idiocy of Donald Trump Jr. may end up doing more than merely taking down his father. It may end up taking down an entire political party. Junior’s meeting with a Kremlin representative has been identified as the epicenter of the Trump-Russia plot to rig the election for Donald Trump. And now it very much appears that the head of the Republican Party at the time was also in attendance at the meeting between Junior and the Kremlin.
It turns out Reince Priebus was also at Trump Tower in New York on the day Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with the Russian government representative. ProPublica dug up old documentation confirming that Priebus arrived at the building just before the meeting (link). At the time, Priebus was the head of the Republican Party in his role as RNC Chair.
If Priebus was indeed in on the meeting, and wasn’t merely at Trump Tower to buy a hot dog, it means that the Republican Party – or at least its leader – was officially in on the plot with Russia and the Trump campaign to rig the election.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/evidence-republican-party-russia-rig-election-donald-trump/3799/
Someone is brilliantly rope-a-doping Donald Trump Jr. into incriminating himself
ReplyDelete...First came the report that Junior had met with a Kremlin operative during the campaign. So he admitted to it, but he claimed the meeting was about adoption. Then the next day came the escalating report that the meeting was about dirt on Hillary Clinton. So Junior admitted to that as well, but he tried to retain a sliver of legal deniability by claiming that he didn’t know the meeting was going to be with a Kremlin operative. And then came the devastating third report about an email which proved Junior knew in advance that the meeting would be about getting dirt on Hillary from the Kremlin.
By using this rope-a-dope strategy, the New York Times source has managed to get Donald Trump Jr. to change his story repeatedly. And as any prosecutor will tell you, significantly changing ones story is evidence of consciousness of guilt. So Junior is effectively incriminating himself in a manner that goes beyond the incriminating facts being reported about him.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/someone-rope-a-doping-donald-trump-jr-incriminating-himself/3801/
I am sure Mueller will do an outstanding job. Trump has done so many bad things that we are all aware of already.
ReplyDeleteMueller will seal Trump's fate is my prediction and I'm not a Democrat, 9:03 AM!
Will Trump Take Revenge on the Justice Department?
ReplyDeleteWith his son in the crosshairs of federal investigators, you can bet on it.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-federal-investigation-justice-department-215363
Yay, finally an adult in our government that doesn't engage in social media.
ReplyDeleteFFS regarding the rest of them, social media? What, are they 14 year old girls, I mean really, what mature individual engages in social media. It's a low-brow platform that should be reserved for personal chitchat and family photos, not serious business, especially government business.
I know Obama did and still does it, but it doesn't make it right and any official who does it is playing to the lowest common denominator and the prevalence of junk culture in our society.
The Intercept's parent company First Look Media will fund the legal defense of accused NSA leaker Reality Winner, who was charged with violating a section of the Espionage Act after mailing classified documents to the news outlet.
ReplyDeleteWinner, who was a government contractor with top-secret clearance, was arrested by FBI agents last month for leaking classified documents to The Intercept.
The Intercept will provide funding for an additional law firm and as a separate grant, $50,000 in matching funds to Stand With Reality, a crowd-funding campaign to support public awareness and legal work around Winner’s case, the news outlet said in a statement from Betsy Reed, its editor-in-chief.
The NSA report was the basis of a story published by The Intercept that described efforts by Russian military intelligence to hack into the voting infrastructures of several states.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/341478-intercept-will-fund-alleged-leakers-legal-defense