Maybe someone convinced him that destroying the political system will somehow enable him to make a lot of money. I think he’d cheerfully sell his own children into slavery if he’d make a chunk of money for it.
And I think they were right.
I didn’t see any such things. Maybe CNN was saying that (I don’t watch/read them). The Lawfare guy who is saying it was (if I remember right) a Federal prosecutor that worked with Kenneth Starr, so he probably has a better sense of what sorts of strategy Mueller’s team might be going with.
Papadopoulos’ indictment testimony only seemed to point to Sam Clovis in terms of catching someone, and that’s not a particularly big haul. For the rest of everything, it made Sessions look suspicious and everyone on some email chains look suspicious, but fundamentally all of them had the ability to simply say, “A lot was happening. People were talking about all sorts of things that they were working on. If they said or wrote something that seemed strange, I probably just assumed that it had been cleared by someone and I simply lacked the context, so my mind didn’t rest on it.”
Since none of us were there, if everyone who was there is unanimous in describing Papadopoulos’ contributions as the work of a loner who was outside the system and managed by no one, and there’s no clear evidence to the contrary, then they’re all in the clear. There’s a “safety in numbers” thing. Papadopoulos flipping only matters to a specific individual if they personally had a questionable conversation with him after the time where it’s plausible that he would have been wearing a wire. Outside of that case, there’s no reason for anyone to worry much.
With Flynn, though, there’s no reasonable way to make an argument that people would have been ignoring his emails, okaying his stuff because they didn’t care, etc. He was present in some of the most central events that are under investigation and was a major player in most of the action we’re looking at. If he flips, the legal jeopardy for a bunch of people immediately jumps into the red (if they know that Flynn saw them commit illegal acts).
…with the proviso that Mike Flynn turns out to be a credible and reliable witness. I have no doubt that Flynn will at least try to work with Mueller, but Flynn seems to be a bit slippery with the truth and seems to contradict himself a lot. It’s really about what the Mueller team already knows and already possesses in terms of hard evidence and whether Flynn can corroborate that evidence. More than that, Flynn and anyone who flips might be able to provide more information that hasn’t come to light, people who might have been thought to have been on the sidelines in certain situations who were, in fact, more involved. I’m guessing the federal investigators already have a shit ton of data - maybe so much that they’re still trying to comb through it and organize it. People like Flynn could perhaps expedite that process by leading them to specific coordinates within the data trove.
Another point that was raised was the question of “what pops next?”, and I do think that’s an interesting question. (And sorry for commenting so much on Lawfare here, they don’t have a comments section on their site.)
The strange thing with this investigation, as one of the presenters put it is that usually most things prove false or don’t fit together, when you dive into an investigation and start getting information and confessions. And it seems like in a case where there’s such a massive array of disparate crimes to research that surely they can’t all be true, and surely they can’t all have been accurately reported months and years in advance of genuine law enforcement investigation. It seems like the criminals can’t all have been so obvious, that they’d be so stupid and reckless as to have actually thrown themselves into the limelight and somehow not expected every single crime that they have ever committed to not come out and kick them in the nads.
Iran-Contra was Iran-Contra, Watergate was Watergate, Johnson’s johnson was Jumbo. They’re each just one thing that you can point to and accept that that’s what it is.
But like, the Trump administration investigation as a whole isn’t collusion, it’s not kidnapping, it’s not money laundering, it’s not tax evasion, it’s not lying to the FBI, it’s not obstructing justice, it’s not emoluments, it’s not ethics violations, it’s not FARA violations… And it just seems like there should be one thing. There can’t be ten or twenty things and they’re all really what they are and complete unrelated to one another.
We all are thinking in terms of “Mueller and his investigation”, but the reality just has to be that we’re looking at ten different investigations split between ~17 people, that really just have almost nothing to do with one another. The expectation that what pops next will be related in any way to what popped previously is pretty well dead and gone, I feel. These are ten independent investigations, running on their own clocks. We already saw through the last year, in the media, the reports bouncing around from one topic to another, with Kushner meeting with people, then Flynn taking about kidnapping, then Trump knowing Felix Sater. Why expect a different experience with the Mueller investigation?
Things aren’t getting faster because it went from Manafort and Papadop to Flynn in such a short time, it just took about this long for the first stages of each investigation to start proving out sufficiently to move on. The short distance between these two cases popping isn’t because of internal linkage where one leads into another, it’s just that they started around the same time, and the workload happened to be similar.
Stage one of all of the other investigations should be what we expect to see next, not stage two of the ones that Mueller has brought to light.
If we want to know what pops next, well, what haven’t we seen yet that we were expecting, that isn’t related to what Mueller has already exposed?
I feel like Sessions, early on, became a snitch on the campaign against Trump to the Republican party and the FBI. His department created the Mueller investigation and the Republican party has told Trump that he’s toast if he touches Sessions - which seems like a strange hard line for them to draw even when it’s in discussions like moving him to the DHS. His participation in anything to do with Russia, during the campaign, seems unlikely to include anything of note beyond the emails we know of where (if I recall correctly) he advised against talking to Russia. One presumes that his next step, after sending such an email and seeing his advice ignored, would be to go talk to McConnell and then McConnell would tell him to stick with it, play along, and talk to the FBI. If Sessions did do more, in regards to Russia, it may have been at the request of Comey, not as part of a Trumpian conspiracy.
I also found it a bit strange, after the Papadop revelations, that Session’s next hearing was so amiable despite having “lied” to Congress for the second time. The Democrats put in a couple of zingers for the newspapers, but it was largely a constructive hearing on a variety of topics.
So on the Kislyak/Sessions front, I don’t expect anything to come from Mueller’s office.
The Veselnitskaya meeting will pend on revelations from Manafort. No likely movement anytime soon.
I feel like they have sufficient actionable Intel on Kushner, in regards to most things Russia and his security clearance, but that they’d like Flynn to provide the ammo so that they have a human face not just s transcript to sell the audience, and so as not to compromise sources and means. Unless they can verify everything they get from the man quickly, I don’t think we should expect movement for a couple of months.
Emoluments, ethics violations, etc. are probably being left to the politicians.
They could probably get Trump on obstruction of justice already, but don’t think that it will stick unless they prove that the crime being covered was significant and that Trump was aware of it. They need to prove obstruction of justice in a political context rather than a law enforcement context, for impeachment.
And, I think, they wouldn’t want to go for Trump on OoJ as the sole and lonely crime if he’s probably guilty of something greater. They’d simply hold off doing anything about it until it was time to present everything in impeachment hearings, and there obstruction of justice would simply be an add-on accusation.
And unless I have missed anything, I think that leaves Rosneft/Ukrainian policy in the Republican platform, and money laundering.
The former is going to be difficult for them to prove (i.e. that Trump or Page sold Ukraine to Russia in return for a slice of the sales from Rosneft), if it is literally Carter Page that brokered the whole deal. Maybe Flynn or Keith Schiller would have the ability to confirm such an arrangement, but it’s still unclear exactly how such a deal could have been negotiated. Even Trump and his dimwits have to have understood that, that sort of an arrangement would be instant death to them, and taken at least some measures to keep it on the down low within their crew.
But so if it’s just Page, Trump, and Kushner who were in on it, the former is an unreliable witness in every sense and the latter two will keep their mouths absolutely shut.
You’re basically looking at kidnapping some Russian bankers, from Russia, if you want to prove anything. That’s unlikely to occur, even if Pompeo is all onboard.
The only other alternative is hoping that you can trace the Rosneft money, and I have to assume that that would be nigh impossible. The Russian government would have used everything they had to obscure the path.
The only thing that could pop in all of that is Keith Schiller.
Fortunately, that’s not too improbable.
He was Trump’s right hand man for decades, and so must have passed every test of loyalty that Trump ever threw at him. We should expect the man to be the world’s most loyal Trump fanboy in all of history and yet, strangely, he left the White House citing insufficient pay and went back to New York, about two months ago.
If you’re at legal risk to State level crimes (pardon-proof!) and being investigated by the Attorney General of New York, they would probably want you to come spend your days with them in New York, instead of chilling with the President in Washington.
On the money laundering angle, while there may be a path from Manafort and Gates to Trump, I think they just used Trump’s services or ancillary to his core group. I don’t think that they were part of the inner circle in the money laundering business (presuming it to exist).
But whereas we can’t know what all Schiller might have known about Rosneft; if money laundering has been Trump’s bread and butter for the last decade, there’s no reasonable chance that Schiller wouldn’t have been aware of and a participant to discussions about it.
While it would be nice to get info out of Flynn, and what he can give could be really damning on the collusion front, the really really good stuff would all need to come from Schiller.
I have no idea what crime he could have committed that he or his loved ones have committed that would make him decide to turn on Trump, but I feel like the odds ain’t bad that Schiller is working with the NY attorney general in a regular basis. And I feel like the easier and sufficient crime for them to prove, using Schiller’s testimony, would be money laundering not Russia.
I am not confident, but I would say that if Schiller is indeed in legal jeopardy, then there’s a decent chance that we’ll hear from New York next.
…or Felix Sater. I’m curious what he’s been up to.
Flipped to FoxNews for a few secs last night and got lucky and they had Judge Nap on lol, and even he said this is bad and basically the defense against whatever Flynn gives up is that he’s a convicted liar.
I was poking around right-wing websites yesterday and this seems to be the general line they’ve adopted. Flynn is a liar (Pence/FBI) and anything he said is suspect because he was just trying to save his son. In typical Republican fashion, this makes sense on the surface but falls apart once you start to logic it out.
Going back to Sage’s long but good, solid, comprehensive analysis 
, I’m also somewhat skeptical that there’s a smoking gun as a relates to the election itself involving Trump. Most of what we can assume Trump has done is probably highly unethical and antithetical to democracy, but not technically illegal. Anything illegal was probably done by his foot soldiers, and ironically it seems that much of the illegality may well turn out to be nothing more than the attempts to cover up behavior that’s mostly unethical and embarrassing but not necessarily illegal. Manafort and Flynn committed acts to enrich themselves that were blatantly illegal, but Papa and some of the others appear to be guilty of just association and knowing too much - and then lying about it to investigators.
What I suspect is that if Trump gets busted on anything illegal, it’ll relate to incidental findings related to his business dealings. But Mueller doesn’t necessarily even have to find anything illegal; he might just as well humiliate Trump by showing the world his true financial value when the forensic accountants find all of his debts. I suspect that Trump’s business empire is a giant shell game, a dressed up ponzi scheme. He’s a fake billionaire. And if Mueller starts putting out documents online that substantiate it, I think even some of his die-hards are going to feel conned. If Barney the neighborhood plumber turns out to be better at running a business and is, in fact, wealthier on paper than the Big Con-ald Trump, then that might be the end of this shit show, criminal prosecution or not. I suspect any criminal prosecution would be courtesy of Schneiderman.
Mueller might, as part of his investigation, reveal certain aspects of Trump’s financial dealings, but it’s hard to imagine him laying bare Trump’s entire financial portfolio. Possible, I supposed, but not likely. Otherwise, I agree that Trump will probably escape this relatively unscathed. Pence, too. The rest of the high level flunkies? All bets are off.
Flynn is facing a ton of jail time if he doesn’t make good on his end of the deal. He has to come through with solid information and testimony.
I expect by the time he testifies, there should be corroborating evidence.
Trump just admitted on Twitter that he knew Flynn was a felon when he asked Comey to drop the investigation. It seems to be pretty clear that he committed obstruction of justice. If he escapes then it’s because the GOP is gutless/complicit. Which wouldn’t be a shock to anyone.
Well, let’s see if Mueller implicates Trump for obstruction of justice. You say it’s “pretty clear”, but having been through this with our resident legal experts, one that is clear about obstruction of justice is that very little about it is “pretty clear”.
I imagine there’s already corroborating evidence. I don’t believe Mueller would have made the incredibly sweetheart offer to Flynn without knowing ahead of time how his testimony would bolster Mueller’s already-provable charges.
I think everything they need for obstruction is already plainly out in the public sphere – and we only know maybe a tenth of what Mueller has.
I also don’t think a team like Mueller’s works as hard as they have or gives up lauded careers to work on an investigation that isn’t yielding important results. If there was no “there” there, this investigation would already be over. Instead, it’s just getting seriously underway. I kind of hate comparisons to Watergate, because this is so much more complex – and so much more serious.
I’m sure Mueller and his team are well aware of the political ramifications of pushing an impeachment too soon. A gutless, complicit GOP-controlled Congress may or may not vote to impeach… but a Democratic one will, and 2018 mid-terms will be here in just a year. Should coincide nicely with the release of an extremely damning report that a) forces Republicans to act responsibly and impeach; b) compels voters to decisively change who controls Congress; or c) both.
It’s a horrible balancing act, because time is of the essence in terms of how much damage this administration can do to our institutions over the next year, but moving too quickly with the impeachment part of the process could yield a bad result due to the willful blindness of Republicans in Congress. Throughout the next few months, I expect to see a consistent picking off of Trump team members. Mueller will save the most important kill shot (impeachment recommendation report) for later in 2018, when Republicans can’t ignore it due to the impending mid-terms and the populace will have had enough time to absorb the depth, breadth, complexity and full weight of the Trump administration’s corruption.
I reckon.
Trump campaign knew about Flynn’s contact with Russia contrary to what they’ve said. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/us/russia-mcfarland-flynn-trump-emails.html
Given that Mueller hasn’t said much and I never heard of him when he was the head of the FBI, I only have a few news reports to go on about his personality and partisanship, but from what I have read, that all sounds very unlikely.
I don’t think that Mueller will care so long as no crime was committed. Humiliating the President is not part of the job he was given, protecting the private information of a citizen of the country is a general parameter of the work he is doing, and Trump does alright humiliating himself regularly, anyways.
This isn’t to say that, due to Mueller’s activities, Trump’s financial disfunction can’t come out. If just the right financial document that is being requested travels across the desk of someone who understands its meaning, and that person goes to the press with that information, then this outcome might still happen, but it wouldn’t be Mueller (nor his team) doing it. It would just be, “Source says, Trump’s lying about his finances.” And unless someone in Congress decides to hold a hearing on the subject, it would remain nothing more than that.
I think that Trump humiliation begins in 2019 when (and if) the House Intel and Ethics committees are taken over by the Democratic party.
With Mueller, it’s going to be “crime” or silence.
Ms. McFarland seems pretty smart. Probably unethical to be sure, but with this administration, I could wish that she was being considered for something more central than Ambassador to Singapore.
I’ve look at Trumpish Twitter and they’re trying to pin this on Obama, unsurprisingly, claiming Flynn’s Russia communications were given a blessing by the Obama administration. What’s the straight dope on that?
Wonder if he can be called as a witness.
28 CFR 600.8
(c)Closing documentation. At the conclusion of the Special Counsel’s work, he or she shall provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.
Probably financial deals. Some people might forgive Trump and his people for undermining the American government’s foreign policy. In fact, considering it was the Obama administration in charge, some people might even applaud that. And using Russian influence to defeat Clinton and win the Presidency would also be condoned.
But taking outright bribes? That’s where a lot of people are going to draw the line. That’s where you go from working with the Russians to working for the Russians.