Marcy Wheeler has another interesting post today. In it, she argues against Andrew McCarthy’s conclusion that Mueller only has obstruction in his sights because his conspiracy indictments have included only Russian actors.
She concludes with:
Whoever is running against him in Utah should use that dinner picture in every single ad. Yeah, it’s Utah. But the Mormons hate Trump and they should be constantly reminded how Trump played Romney for a fool.
Not only have they only included Russian actors, but Mueller’s mandate had nothing to do with investigating Russians. He’s allowed to follow up on crimes that become evident as part of investigating Americans, but his objective is firmly to do just that and investigate Americans. And not just any Americans, a specified, named list of them.
If that ended up as an indictment of Russians, then it means that there was a direct jump off point from those Americans to those Russians.
There’s also the matter that his team is personally prosecuting Paul Manafort. Other matters were handed off to other agencies and teams. Why prosecute Manafort for old financial misdeeds but not Cohen?
The only possibilities that make sense are either that Manafort was a named target, so he wanted to keep him, even if the particulars weren’t relevant to the investigation. Or, that he wants to have direct access to Manafort when and if he flips, because he has reason to believe that Manafort is directly linked to his mandate.
And so again, let’s remind ourselves of the mandate:
Did these specific, named Americans commit a conspiracy with Russian agents?
They may hate Trump, but that didn’t stop the state from voting Republican thus helping that clown we have in the White House today.
And they will forgive Mitt anything short of hookers and blow.
By which I mean, Utah, so salty language and coffee.
I think you mean ankle-revealing prairie dresses and CocaCola.
Eye bleach! Eye bleach!
When one of the judges in the Manafort case questioned this, a partially redacted copy of the original document describing the scope of Mueller’s investigation was released.
“The memo also authorizes Mueller to investigate whether Manafort “committed a crime or crimes arising out of payments he received from the Ukrainian government”.”
My guess is that Manafort and his Ukrainian dealing have been of interest to law enforcement for some time. This indicates to me that the preliminary investigation indicated that there was some link between the Manafort /Gates schemes and Trump/Russia. But I have long held that the Manafort crimes were serious and would’ve been of interest to investigators even if there wasn’t a Trump connection.
I know that there is a general perception that the feds only went after Manafort to get to Trump. I disagree with this and I think that there were at least factions in the FBI that saw the Trump investigation as a way to get Manafort.
The Manafort stuff is much more closely related to the original investigation - in that it at least involves contacts with Russians and such - than the Cohen stuff which is about taxi medallions and payments to strippers.
…payments to strippers which are illegal campaign contributions. oops. The money for which may well have come from yet more illegal campaign contributions from Russian. Total nothingburger.
Are you capable of looking at these matters in any other context other than whether or not it’s a “nothingburger”?
The discussion here is about why Mueller chose to hand off the Cohen prosecution while he did not do so for Manafort.
Mueller has limited bandwidth. Let NY go after Cohen, and possibly file State charges now or in the future that are exempt from a Presidential pardon. Mueller still gets all the dirt, and if Cohen wants to tell all, Mueller can come back in.
Also, Mueller is going after the big stuff. Catch and kill payoffs using campaign funds are illegal, but it’s not a charge so obviously bad that clearly implicates a sitting President beyond all shadow of doubt for something that rises to conspiracy and treason with Russia or laundering billions of dollars in Oligarch money.
$50 bucks - same as down the street.
What if you have a coupon?
Is it a groupon?
That costs extra.
It’s a grope-on.
Strippers? Did I miss something? What strippers?
I think he means Stormy.
Oh. Okay.
So, no-one was stupid enough to take donors to a strip club and expense it as such. Pity, I love when that happens.