Free Republic

December 2015 was a pivotal month in many respects. During the first week of December 2015, Donald Trump began to establish a substantial lead over his Republican primary opponents. Vice President Joseph Biden traveled to Ukraine to announce, on December 7th, a $190 million program to “fight corruption in law enforcement and reform the justice sector,” but behind the scenes explicitly linked a $1 billion loan guarantee to the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating the energy company Burisma, which employed Biden’s son Hunter. On December 9, 2015, the reported whistleblower Eric Ciaramella held a meeting...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team have been aggressively pursuing former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, even tacking on new charges of obstruction of justice due to alleged attempted witness tampering. Although Mueller has been tight-lipped about evidence and witness identification up to this point, his team appears to have screwed up by outing journalists who “produced messages to the FBI” about Manafort’s alleged “coaching up” on lobbying practices. Manafort was indicted in D.C. back in October 2017 for alleged financial fraud and violating lobbying disclosure laws. There’s also a case against him in the Eastern District of Virginia...

In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence. But hundreds of pages of government documents — which Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters. Why special counsel Robert Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from their report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny. The incomplete portrayal...

The mainstream media seemed to suffer a collective shock Friday evening after the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller handed its final report of its Russia investigation to the Department of Justice. MSNBC host Chris Matthews seemed livid that neither President Trump, his children, nor his “henchmen” would face any criminal charges from the special counsel. “Maybe he missed the boat here,” Matthews said of Mueller. “Because we know about the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, we know about the meeting at the cigar bar with Kilimnik [Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian political consultant]. My God, we know about all...

Attorneys for Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, submitted a poorly redacted filing on Tuesday revealing that Manafort shared polling data with a Russian operative during the campaign. Special counsel Robert Mueller submitted a filing in November accusing Manafort of breaching his plea agreement with the special counsel's office by lying to federal investigators. The special counsel said in a memo describing Manafort's alleged wrongdoing in December that Manafort's lies to federal investigators were not simply "memory lapses." According to that memo, Manafort lied about several things in breach of his plea deal, including his contact with Konstantin Kilimnik, who...

Special counsel Robert Mueller filed a superseding indictment Friday against former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, and added Russian citizen Konstantin Kilimnik as a defendant. The superseding indictment lodged by a grand jury sitting in federal court in Washington, DC, came days after Mueller asked the judge in Manafort's case to revoke his bail and jail him because of an alleged effort to tamper with witnesses. This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has abruptly reversed course on a bail agreement his office struck with Paul Manafort's legal team last week that would have allowed him to be released from GPS monitoring. Manafort evidently failed to tell the government that he was ghost-writing a draft op-ed about his work in Ukraine as late as November 30. He was working on it with "a longtime Russian colleague" who is "assessed to have ties to Russian intelligence," according to the special counsel's court filing. That colleague was likely Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian-Ukrainian citizen and longtime protege of Manafort who he had...