Posted on 10/30/2017 5:27:08 AM PDT by smileyface
Paul Manafort, the onetime chairman of President Donald Trump's campaign, has been indicted along with his former colleague, Rick Gates. The indictments mark the beginning of a new phase in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The timing of the indictment suggests that Mueller is pursuing a legal strategy typically reserved for cases involving drug cartels and mafia families.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
Ok Special Counsel Robert Mueller you got your pelt now close up shop and go away.
Does the wiggle-room window have sufficient width to allow Hillary and Loretta to squeeze through?
...or tall enough for Comey to duck out?
Forgot about the dossier which will implicate a lot more Dems.
Does Trump look worried to you?
“Conspiring against the Unites States” and Manafort ran Trump’s campaign. That’s all the Deep State/Media Complex need.
Good luck, Mr. Trump.
“Little birdies” purportedly with insider perspective don’t have the best track record here. Anybody remember Pukin Dog?
Indictment:
https://www.justice.gov/file/1007271/download
Tucker: Source Says Podesta Brothers & Manafort, Not Trump, ‘Central Figures’ in Russia Probe
FLASHBACK
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2080292/posts
The McCain-Follieri Love Boat - The Maverick and the Celebrity Con Man
The Nation ^ | September 11, 2008
John McCain has been hammering rival Barack Obama for being little more than a vapid “celebrity” and “elitist.” But The Nation has obtained a photo revealing just how star-struck a straight-talking maverick can become when offered the chance to celebrate his birthday aboard a yacht filled with celebrities—even if one of those celebrity types turns out to be an A-list con man.
The photograph substantiates reports that in late August, 2006, McCain celebrated his 70th birthday aboard a yacht, the Celine Ashley, rented by A-list con man Raffaello Follieri and his then-movie star girlfriend Anne Hathaway. In the current edition of Vanity Fair, Michael Schnayerson reported that Follieri rented the Celine Ashley for the month of August 2006. Montenegro’s leading daily newspaper, Vijesti, earlier reported that during McCain’s visit in 2006 he celebrated with birthday cocktails and sweets aboard the Celine Ashley yacht. In the photograph, taken in Montenegro at the end of August, McCain is shown boarding the yacht ramp towards the smiling Follieri and Hathaway. Just ahead of McCain and shaking hands with Follieri appears to be Rick Davis—McCain’s top aide and now co-manager of his campaign, who accompanied him on the trip and advised the government of Montenegro. A few months after McCain’s yacht party, Follieri strengthened his ties to McCain’s orbit by retaining Rick Davis’s well-connected Washington lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, and offering Davis both an investment deal and help in securing the Catholic vote for McCain’s presidential bid.
Follieri, who posed as Vatican chief financial officer in order to win friends and investments, pleaded guilty Wednesday in a Manhattan district court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, eight counts of wire fraud and five counts of money laundering. As part of the plea, Follieri admitted to misappropriating at least $2.4 million of investor money and redirecting it to foreign personal bank accounts that were disguised as business accounts.
At the time he met McCain, Follieri was adept at collecting friends in powerful places and using those connections to attract investments in projects which later turned out to be bogus. His ties to Bill Clinton and his entourage have been well-documented; the charismatic Follieri, whom Vanity Fair has likened to an ambitious nineteenth-century protagonist from a Balzac novel, ingratiated himself to President Clinton and aides by posing as a mega-donor to the Clinton Global Initiative. He also formed an investment partnership with California business mogul and Clinton donor Ron Burkle to develop surplus real estate properties owned by the Catholic Church, which Follieri claimed to represent. Burkle later sued Follieri for $1.3 million in misappropriated funds.
Yet Follieri’s ties to McCain’s orbit have been largely overlooked by the media. Follieri first met McCain when the Arizona Senator visited Montenegro from August 29-31 as part of a Congressional delegation that included Republican senators Lindsay Graham, Richard Burr, Saxby Chambliss, Mel Martinez and John Sununu. [We’ll have more on what else McCain was doing in Montenegro in a forthcoming article in the print edition of The Nation.]
What, exactly, was McCain doing aboard Follieri’s yacht? Or put another way, was this McCain’s 70th birthday wish—to spend an evening floating on the Adriatic with one of Hollywood’s top actresses and her smooth-talking Italian beau?
An even bigger mystery is how Follieri’s boat came to be docked in Montenegro on McCain’s birthday. According to a journalist in Montenegro, the yacht had been anchored there for several days before McCain’s arrival, and only sailed away after McCain boarded. According to Vijesti, locals were told that McCain was meeting “friends from Florida” on the yacht.
McCain aides later confirmed the encounter with Follieri, but said it was “entirely social and nothing came of it.” Follieri, they told the New York Daily News, was just a “passing acquaintance.” (Though the McCain campaign promise to comment on the encounter, it did not respond to The Nation’s request by the time this article was published.)
It must not have seemed that way to Follieri. According to the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, in January 2007 Follieri sent Rick Davis a packet of information on his companies Follieri Capital and Follieri Media, apparently hoping to get financing from Pegasus Capital Advisors, a hedge fund in Connecticut that Davis represented. “Follieri’s proposal to Davis had two dimensions to it—first, as an investment opportunity for Davis’s fund; but secondly, there was the political dimension, in which Follieri offered to help deliver Catholic votes to McCain,” said Claudio Gatti, a reporter for Il Sole 24 Ore, who investigated Follieri for eighteen months.
In February 2007, according to a recent article in the New York Daily News, Follieri retained Davis’s lobbying firm, Davis Manafort. According to the paper, “on Feb. 27, 2007, Davis Manafort partner Rick Gates signed a confidentiality agreement drafted by the Follieri Group. In the contract...Gates agreed not to disclose any information about Follieri’s deal to get Clinton pal Ron Burkle to buy Catholic Church properties.” (Gates did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Two months later, Burkle sued Follieri, who later repaid the $1.3 million owed to Burkle’s Yucaipa Funds. That fall, the Wall Street Journal exposed Follieri’s life as a high-society con man. In June of this year, Follieri was finally arrested and charged. Following his guilty plea this week, Follieri now faces up to five years and three months in jail.
The thing is, Mueller and his team did not uncover what Manafort is charged with while investigating Russian meddling. They went after Manafort in a totally separate initiative. D.C. is a target rich environment for uncovering chicanery. Mueller himself could not withstand such scrutiny.
Mobster: quite possibly former KGB/FSB, current comrade/associate of Putin.
Manafort did in fact have some disturbing ties to Russia, having worked for Putin's puppet in the Ukraine (Viktor Yanukovych).
Viktor Yanukovych's opponent was pro-US Viktor Yushchenko.
_______________________________
From 2014
Many Ukrainians believe you need look no further than the face of Viktor Yushchenko to understand Russia's aggression against Ukraine.
Once smooth and ruggedly handsome, it still bears the scars from an assassination attempt when someone slipped dioxin into Yushchenko's food. ..."
Read more here:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24765781.html#storylink=cpy
______________________________________________
A woman has sex for her first time with a man who climaxes in 60 seconds while the woman doesn’t. She asks, “Is this all there is to it?” This is an appropriate response to Mueller’s indictments today.
While it might have been excusable for Jr. to agree to this meeting Manafort should have known right away that these kinds of offers must be declined because of the sentence “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump”.
You can lay this one at the feet of Jeff Sessions.
Manafort was low hanging fruit in that target rich environment.
The indictments mark the beginning of a new phase in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Wow! What spin indeed.
Manafort was a lobbyist for the pro Russia President of the Ukraine. The indictments likely relate to Manefort’s work as a lobbyist/consultant to Ukraine’s Party of Regions and its Pro Russian Ukrainian standardbearer, Viktor Yanukovych..
That work by Manefort predates any involvement he had with the Trump campaign.
What Mueller is doing is conducting a Liberal Left shakedown of Gates and Manefort, getting them to give out information which would damage the trump Administration of lead to President Trumps impeachment.
The person who needs to be fired is Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has allowed this fiasco to happen.
Anything extorted out of Manefort or Gates by Mueller would have to be patently untrue at this point.
I do believe that President Trump would pardon them both.
This is not a new phase of the investigation, it is proof that yet again, this is a political show designed to impede the Trump administrations progress to Make America Great Again.
In short, the Meueller investigation is abuse of legal process for “resistance” purposes, to foil the collective will of the American people. As such it is liberal fascist in nature.
Jeff Sessions needs to appoint a special prosecutor to look into the “dossier, Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing e-mails, and the Uranium one deal.
Actually there’s a lot of emails floating around that Trump didn’t want to meet with Putin during the campaign.
Now there are problematic emails with Manafort, the Trump campaign team, and a Russian Billionaire.
The way I am seeing it the campaign kept saying no to a Russia meeting. Manafort though in one email promised ‘insider campaign information’ to the Russian billionare with ties to Putin. Manafort with all his dealings etc. may either have been being blackmailed by the billionare or is actually a spy and traitor to our country?
Trump may have been briefed on this issue and fired him a few days later. If Manafort was feeding information to both sides, unbeknownst to the Trump Campaign collusion isn’t the right word for what happened.
Manafort’s money laundering led to being able to be blackmailed into providing insider campaign information to Russia.
Washington (CNN)Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump campaign official Rick Gates surrendered Monday to Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller.
Gates, 45, is a longtime business associate of Manafort, 68, having worked together since the mid-2000s, and served as his deputy on the campaign. The two were indicted under seal on Friday, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said.
The indictment against the two men contains 12 counts: conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.
Manafort arrived at the FBI’s Washington field office Monday morning. The two are being processed separately, according to a law enforcement official. They will later be transported to federal district court in Washington later Monday morning.
The two are scheduled to make their initial court appearances before US District Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson at 1:30 p.m. ET Monday.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/30/politics/paul-manafort-russia-investigation-surrender/index.html
May have quickly discovered what Manafort was about. Leaker of the first order?
Haven’t heard that Sessions is working furiously behind the scenes and we will all eat our words?
Some here are saying just that...
Not seeing it, but time will tell :(
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