Though it is a virtual given that Gates will sell out his business partner and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, less understood is the direct threat Gates could pose to President Donald Trump.
While Gates now wears a GPS monitor around his ankle, in 2016 he wore a Secret Service lapel pin that gave him easy access to Trump on the campaign trail and at Trump Tower.
“He saw everything,” said a Republican consultant who worked with Gates during the campaign. The consultant called Gates one of the “top five” insiders whom Mueller could have tapped as a cooperative government witness. One defense attorney in the case said Gates’ plea has triggered palpable alarm in Trump world.
Manafort may have struck a larger public profile, but Gates spent more time in Trump’s orbit. Manafort left the Trump campaign under a cloud of scandal in mid-August 2016. Gates, his right-hand man, stayed on through the election before assisting the Trump inauguration and Trump’s early presidency.
Worst of all for the White House, Gates lacks hard-wired loyalty. He is not family, like Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., or his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nor is he among true Trump believers like Corey Lewandowski and Brad Parscale.
“Let’s be honest, Don Jr. is not ratting out his dad. Gates is different,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who served as a senior counsel to Whitewater independent counsel Ken Starr.
Yeah, while we are all distracted by the Stormy Daniels' three ring circus, the truly damaging evidence to the Trump presidency might be filling the notebooks of Mueller's investigators as we speak.
As for Paul Manafort well he is still trying to get the case against him dismissed.
Courtesy of Axios:
Paul Manafort's legal team has filed a motion to dismiss the indictment, filed in Virginia, brought against him by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which includes three charges for tax fraud from 2010 to 2014, failing to file reports from his foreign bank accounts, and bank fraud related to various property loans in the U.S.
This follows a nearly identical motion to dismiss his team filed on March 14, which dealt with the charges brought against him in D.C.
Manafort's legal team argues that the charges do not “arise directly from” the Special Counsel’s investigation. His team argues that they cover things Manafort disclosed to the DOJ himself in 2014. They also write that Mueller's team acted outside of its authority, “without the discipline of limits on the public resources they consume," according to the document.
This will likely be just as unsuccessful as the last one, but it shows that Paul Manafort has a lot to hide and that he is desperate to keep it hidden from Mueller's team.
There is a lot of speculation as to what Manafort is guarding to aggressively, but there might have been a hint revealed just recently.
Well now, isn't THAT interesting?This new Mueller filing says Trump’s campaign chair *and* deputy campaign manager *knew* their associate was a former Russian intelligence officer. As they say in court, Um. https://t.co/oPyGU1Fnl7— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) March 28, 2018
Trump's Number One Problem? The Base Is Waking Up
ReplyDelete..."President Trump's most urgent political problem doesn't involve Robert S. Mueller III, Stormy Daniels or the hundreds of voters who marched for gun control. It's that his die-hard supporters might be starting to realize how thoroughly he has played them for suckers."
https://crooksandliars.com/2018/03/trumps-number-one-problem-base-waking
‘Heartbroken’ Trump Critic Ann Coulter:
DeleteAt a ‘debate’ Tuesday night with neoliberal blogger Mickey Kaus, Coulter explained how she went from Trump diehard to bitter angst—and what her prescription for him would be.
...“I knew he was a shallow, lazy ignoramus, and I didn’t care,” Coulter admitted to an audience largely composed of College Republicans and a few hecklers at Columbia University on Tuesday night.
It was the sort of anti-Trump invective that Coulter would share privately with pals, including this reporter, over a wine-soaked dinner during the first year of the new administration, but in recent weeks she has increasingly voiced her displeasure in public forums.
...Both Coulter and Kaus agreed that, in large part due to an “anti-Trump surge,” the GOP is likely to lose the House and possibly even the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections.
“It kind of breaks my heart,” Coulter acknowledged of her disappointment with the president, and she recounted a profanity-laced shouting match she had with Trump in the Oval Office last year over what she saw as his lackluster follow-through on immigration policy. “He’s not giving us what he promised at every single campaign stop.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/heartbroken-trump-critic-ann-coulter-hes-a-shallow-lazy-ignoramus
Brace Yourself, Trumpsters: 'Outnumbered' Is Doubting Your'Wall'
ReplyDeleteThings are not looking good for the Monument to White Supremacy known in Trump circles as "The Wall."
When the crotch couch over at "Outnumbered" takes to managing expectations by pointing out little details like, the US government doesn't own even a fraction of the land needed to dig the holes to START a wall, let alone have negotiated the funding for the multiple eminent domain lawsuits that will inevitably be brought, let alone have the funding needed to build 25 miles of wall instead of 2000.
Or, as Judge Napolitano said, "The budget that was signed last week to which a lot of conservatives objected, paid for 25 miles of a wall that the president wants to be 2000 miles long, did not pay for any of the acquisition of real estate. You can't put a shovel into the earth until you own the earth."
https://crooksandliars.com/2018/03/brace-yourself-trumpsters-outnumbered
Wtf?!
ReplyDeleteA local matter?!
Why are you u s a citizens paying taxes?!
Most inept pres ever!
Yeah, wish manabut and gates were in prison.
Traitors. All of them, and all for money. Hope when they are sitting behind bars they can reflect on whether it was all worth it. Manafort will die in jail and he knows it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdlLbRPB9ic
ReplyDeleteThere is no reason that Trump would have John Dowd raise the prospects of pardons to the attorneys of Manafort and Flynn unless he knows that his campaign and likely he, himself, broke the law.
DeleteThis is as clear an indication of perceived guilt as anything I've seen.
He will not have hair, brows waxed ewww he will be like...us.
DeleteWhen Manafort didn't cut a deal early on, I said he had to be holding out hope for a federal pardon. Now we have evidence that Trump's personal attorney was dangling that precise possibility before Manafort's eyes for weeks or months in an effort to keep him silent and compliant.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/979084611685961729
A top Trump aide admitted on live TV and radio, multiple times, that active FBI agents illegally leaked intel to him about Clinton in the month leading up to the 2016 election. I have every hope—if not confidence—that that'll be a bigger focus for Horowitz than the Page warrant.
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/979084291408834562
To those digging on Trump's new attorney because he's a state-level litigator who also has a Ph.D. in another subject (ahem): maybe take a step back and realize that *client control* is a primary issue here and Trump's previous high-powered federal attorneys failed on that score.
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/978994095506026496
Mueller's office says FBI agents determined that a person who worked with Manafort and Gates "has ties to a Russian intelligence service." He told Van Der Zwaan that he was a former GRU intelligence officer.
https://twitter.com/bradheath/status/978823498662588416
Another Sessions' recusal violation no one will do anything about.
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/978819089174024194
John Dowd was Trump's personal, criinal lawyer. The WH Counsel is the lawyer who heads up the pardon process. For Dowd to have talked pardons for Manafort & Flynn strongly suggests those pardons were being contemplated as a last ditch way to obstruct the Mueller investigation.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/979051780008042502
THREAD: What does today's report that Trump's lawyers discussed pardoning Manafort and Flynn mean for Mueller's investigation?
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/renato_mariotti/status/979048206301646848
I detest Trump and the evil folks that he has picked to surround him! (Thank God many of them have resigned!)
ReplyDeleteThey do not represent the majority of Americans which I is going to save our country (and us!) in the end!
He'll be done away with, have a massive heart attack or stroke, or be impeached never to be heard from again as to our government! I can hardly wait!
Where or where is Hillary Clinton? She would have made such a much better leader as POTUS. The idiot (Trump) is a total failure in his role as potus!
The more we learn about those around Trump, the more likely it becomes that he will be joining his cronies in prison.
ReplyDeleteTrump is not nearly intelligent enough to have kept himself out of the way of his own crookedness, I don't think he has the brains to make certain to always create plausible deniability, and it really looks like those around him were so focused on getting into bed with Putin that they didn't take much notice of where he was or what he was doing.
I just hope I live long enough to see the mini series, it's going break television.
Trump has his huge man boob in a ringer.
ReplyDeleteOT?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/mar/28/julian-assange-internet-connection-ecuador-embassy-cut-off-wikileaks
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-aide-rick-gates-communicated-140850705.html
ReplyDelete"A campaign aide toDonald Trump directly communicated a month before the 2016 presidential election with a man he knew was a onetime Russian spy, according to a court filing by Special CounselRobert Mueller.
Rick Gates, the former aide, told an attorney for a U.S. law firm that a Russian they worked with in Ukraine was a former military intelligence officer, according to the filing late Tuesday in Washington."
"The filing identifies the ex-spy only as Person A. The description of him by prosecutors, a person living in Moscow and Kiev who worked with Manafort and Gates in Ukraine, matches that of Konstantin Kilimnik. After van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to false statements on Feb. 20, Kilimnik declined to comment on whether he was Person A."
Witch or WARlock
ReplyDeletehttps://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5abc050de4b06409775ccf5d