Yahoo has a
Huffington Post article by
Jesselyn Cook about some of
Trump's boys:
Paul Manafort, (photo, top) onetime campaign chairman to President Donald Trump, and former Manafort business associate Rick Gates (photo, bottom, hiding) were charged with conspiracy and money laundering in an intensifying investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Manafort left his Virginia condo and, with his attorney, walked into the FBI field office in Washington early Monday. A twelve-count grand jury indictment includes charges of conspiracy against the US, conspiracy to launder money, failure to file foreign bank reports, and false statements.
Manafort and Gates are the first to be charged in the probe led by the office of special counsel Robert Mueller. The arrests come three days after news broke that a Federal grand jury in Washington had filed charges stemming from Mueller’s investigation.
“Manafort and Gates generated tens of millions of dollars in income as a result of their Ukraine work,” the indictment says. “In order to hide Ukrainian payments from United States authorities, from approximately 2006 through at least 2016, Manafort and Gates laundered the money through scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnerships, and bank accounts.”
Failing to pay taxes allowed Manafort a “lavish lifestyle in the United States”, according to the indictment, which alleges he “spent millions of dollars on luxury goods and services for himself and his extended family through payments wired from offshore nominee accounts to United States vendors.”
Reports have suggested Federal investigators could use criminal charges as way to pressure those arrested into providing more information about alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin to influence the election.
Trump has aggressively denied allegations that his team colluded with Russia to win the election.
A former prosecutor and FBI director, Mueller partnered with New York attorney General Eric Schneiderman in August to look into Manafort’s possible financial crimes, including money laundering.
Manafort ran Trump’s presidential campaign from June 2016 until his resignation in August of that year, after reports surfaced about his past lobbying work for pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs. He retroactively registered as a foreign agent and disclosed more than seventeen million dollars in payments for his firm’s consulting work in the Ukraine, which occurred before he joined Trump’s campaign.
“You can get rid of Manafort,” said Robby Mook, who was the campaign manager for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, “but that doesn’t end the odd bromance Trump has with Putin.”
Manafort met with Senate Intelligence Committee investigators in July to discuss a meeting between Trump associates and a Russian lawyer that was held during the election campaign to obtain dirt on Clinton. The next day, FBI agents seized documents and other items from Manafort’s house in Virginia without warning.
Investigators have also issued subpoenas seeking testimony from a number of people linked to Manafort throughout the probe.
Trump described the pre-dawn raid of Manafort’s home as “pretty tough stuff.”
“I’ve always found Paul Manafort to be a very decent man,” Trump said at the time. “He’s like a lot of other people, probably makes consultant fees from all over the place, who knows, I don’t know, but I thought it was pretty tough stuff to wake him up, perhaps his family was there.”
Trump fired FBI director James Comey, who was leading the agency’s investigation into Russian interference in the election, in May of 2017. The following week, the Justice Department appointed Mueller as special counsel to oversee the Federal inquiry into the Trump campaign’s alleged Russian ties. “Led by some very bad and conflicted people,” Trump tweeted in June, the Russia probe is “the single greatest witch hunt in American political history.”
Ryan Reilly has a
Yahoo article (originally on
Huffington Post) about yet more:
A foreign policy adviser to President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to FBI agents.
George Papadopoulos (photo) pleaded guilty on 5 October 2017, but the case wasn’t unsealed until Monday, when two other Trump associates were indicted by a Federal grand jury. Papadopoulos reached a plea deal with prosecutors, and has since been cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Prosecutors’ statement of the offense alleges Papadopoulos “made material false statements and material omissions” during a 27 January 2017, interview with the FBI. He was arrested on 27 July 2017. Prosecutors agreed to recommend between no prison time to six months under the plea agreement.
Papadopoulos told the FBI an overseas professor had “told him about the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails’, but stated multiple times that he learned that information prior to joining the campaign,” according to court documents. In fact, Papadopoulos was contacted after he learned he’d be joining the campaign, and the professor only mentioned the “thousands of emails” after he’d been on the Trump campaign for more than a month.
The professor, the statement indicates, had “substantial connections to Russian government officials” even though Papadopoulos claimed the professor was “a nothing.”
Rico says this is what
Watergate looked like in the beginning...
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