Hmm.
What if… It’s proven that Butina did assist in helping Russia funnel money through the NRA to Trumps campaign. NRA goes down hard. Gun laws become easier to pass without the NRA. Gun owners revolt. Turmoil is at a fever pitch. Trump is a laughing stock even more than he is now. Trump’s in even more trouble.
Putin laughs at the strings that he pulls.
Butina is deported to Russia, and is a new National hero.
No matter what, Putin won. His goal right now is to get enough tendrils into enough places - Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Georgia, etc. - that he can step down just before the next American president is elected and tell his successor, “I got it for you. Now it’s on you to keep it.”
All we can do on our end is try to get someone useful into the Presidency as fast as possible.
Ehh… We do kind of have an epidemic of (not necessarily accurate) plea deals. People very often plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit just to avoid spending a ton of time in jail because they can’t afford bail during the trial.
Note that this typically applies to poor people who often don’t have a great grasp on the law and whose plea deal allows them to take “time served”, not rich lawyers willing to just take 3 years rather than fight for their own innocence.
You forgot one.
US Congress.
I have not been following this closely, so maybe I am misinterpreting something here but…
John Edwards was found not guilty of campaign finance violations with respect to his payments to a mistress.
Edwards was not guilty on 1 count and a hung jury on the other 5 counts. They elected not to retry him. One thing in his favor was he kept paying his mistress after the campaign was over so it was not just to keep the story quiet while he was running.
Here is Individual-1 talking about his great knowledge of the Kerry case back in 2012.
Buckle up for the next few weeks my friends.
But you know, if I’d been correct then that would have been a hell of an argument. 
Christmas is coming earl-- well, right on time, but dang it’s gonna be noice!
Interesting article about Manafort:
I think we can trust that Mueller doesn’t have a wiretap on the President’s phone. It also seems unlikely that Mueller had a wiretap on the phone of Manafort’s lawyers. So, we can assume that the information about what Manafort’s lawyers were shopping around would probably come from a leak.
I also note that the article makes explicit mention of Sean Hannity and his involvement in the effort.
Michael Cohen, we know, consulted with Hannity on “some matters”. Michael Cohen is now laying seeds before he goes to jail. I think we can assume that this is one of them. Probably he acted as an intermediary for Manafort’s lawyers to Trump and others. And, of course, the SDNY did have a wiretap on Cohen.
I doubt that Hannity will go down for Obstruction of Justice. He can simply say that Cohen/Manafort were sources, and he’s a journalist. They told him Clinton was in bed with Ukraine, why shouldn’t he believe them?
But it doesn’t seem impossible that Hannity may have done more badness with Hannity, so we’ll have to see.
Manafort’s lawyers are almost certainly in trouble though.
I suspect that team Mueller is figuring that it makes sense from here to let the Trump family enjoy their last Christmas, and wait for the new House to be seated.
I’m still curious about the mystery subpoena that Mueller was fighting with someone - that could pop up - but I expect that we’re going to be in a lull for about a month and a half, except for some little surprises that Cohen felt like he could safely drop off on people outside of the President, without getting into trouble with Mueller.
Granted, that should be fun, but it will all be things that probably don’t get a lot of coverage because they’ll be single source.
I also expect that we’ll learn quite a bit when Schiff comes in. I don’t think he’s had a deconfliction meeting with Mueller yet, but he probably will before getting seated on the 20th. So when he announces what he’ll be investigating, if it seems like something hardcore like “President Trump purposefully and actively working with Vladimir Putin” then probably Mueller has cleared the President. If Schiff, instead, decides to investigate Kushner’s ties to MBS, than probably almost everything to do with Russia is still on the table and looking likely.
I don’t think that Schiff will create a scandal - ala Benghazi - to investigate. The Trump Adminstration has enough real questionable activities that there’s probably something credible to investigate that the FBI has languishing somewhere. So I would be relatively doubtful that Schiff would investigate “Trump-Russia” even if Trump has been cleared, but I still think that we’ll be able to get some sense of how big the investigation is by assuming that the House Intelligence Committee will be picking up something on the border of it all.
Just a nitpick…the new Congressional session begins on 1/3, not 1/20.
Word.
ETA: I have a private bet with myself that Russia makes another Ukrainian land grab before the end of the year.
I suspect that they will be enjoying Christmas about as much as Damocles enjoyed being king.
Dana Rohrabacher lost his reelection bid.
I thought about starting a new thread for this, but finally decided that it wasn’t necessary.
Lawfare goes over the dossier and pinpoints where information that is now in the public domain confirms Steele’s information. They caution that not everything in the dossier has been confirmed, but nothing in it has been disproven.
It’s a well-researched and constructed article and I urge everyone in this thread to give it a thorough reading. I certainly feel more up-to-date on what we know and why we know it than I was, and I thought I was on top of things already.
Looks like Schiff has announced his focus, investigating Deutsche Bank:
Presuming that he has chosen this with the blessing of Mueller, I guess that would imply that Mueller hasn’t been looking at the possible money laundering accusations against Trump. So, I suppose it’s a mystery whether that’s because he has better human leads at this point, if there’s too much politics around trying to get foreign banking records, he’s looking for the extra grunt labor to go through financial records, or Trump has been cleared on that pathway and Schiff don’t care.
That article made me consider whether we should start a Lawfare commentary thread. I’m just not sure which forum it should go to… GD? Cafe Society?