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Sen. Marco Rubio warned President Trump on Sunday that it would be a bad idea to pardon Paul Manafort. During an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Rubio, R-Fla., said it would be a mistake for Trump to issue a pardon for his former campaign chairman after Special Counsel Robert Mueller accused Manafort of lying about his contacts with administration officials in 2018 and at least four other details related to the investigation into Russian election meddling during the 2016 campaign. “I haven’t heard that the White House is thinking about doing it,” Rubio said. “I advise strongly against it. It...

President Donald Trump said Saturday that court filings in the Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen cases showed no collusion between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. "We're very happy with what we're reading because there was no collusion whatsoever," Trump told reporters Saturday at the White House before boarding Marine One for the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia. Trump told reporters he has not read the court filings, which detail alleged lies Cohen and Manafort told publicly and to investigators.

Special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday is expected to file a bombshell report that describes how former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort eviscerated his plea agreement with federal prosecutors. The highly anticipated memo, slated for release as a court filing, will likely shed more light on Mueller’s investigation into whether President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. But just how much new information will be made public remains to be seen. Still, whatever information is disclosed is expected to be revelatory in terms of the content and nature of Manafort’s remarks to the special counsel’s...

Federal prosecutors have recently resumed interviewing witnesses in an investigation of two lobbying firms that worked with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, including one operated by the brother of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. According to The Associated Press, prosecutors in New York have in recent weeks started contacting witnesses and attorneys as part of an investigation into the Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs. The two firms worked with Manafort through 2014 on a consulting project aimed at fluffing the public image of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Prosecutors have also focused on Greg Craig, the former White...

Paul Manafort, the embattled former campaign chief of President Donald Trump, attempted to broker a deal between Washington and the government of Ecuador over Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the New York Times reported. During meetings with incoming Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno in May 2017, Manafort suggested he could help negotiate an agreement for the South American country to hand over Assange to the U.S., the Times said, citing people familiar with the talks.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors have told defense lawyers in recent weeks that they are “tying up loose ends” in their investigation, providing the clearest clues yet that the long-running probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election may be coming to its climax, potentially in the next few weeks, according to multiple sources close to the matter. The new information about the state of Mueller’s investigation comes during a pivotal week when the special counsel’s prosecutors are planning to file memos about three of their most high profile defendants — former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump...

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team is poised to make public a sentencing memo about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort by Friday, special counsel spokesman Peter Carr told Yahoo News on Monday. Mueller is also set to release memos about former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen this week, which are all likely to provide greater insight into the inner workings of the special counsel's probe into possible ties between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign. Prosecutors on Mueller's team have been telling defense lawyers that they are "tying up loose ends" in the...

There has been a lot of hand-wringing over the recent revelation that Paul Manafort’s lawyers have been speaking to Donald Trump’s lawyers. Pundits have said breathlessly that such conduct is obstructive and that only mob lawyers engage in such behavior. Nothing could be further from the truth — by itself, there is nothing obstructive about the lawyers speaking with each other and sharing information. Witnesses do not belong to one side or the other. Paul Manafort has pleaded guilty and as part of his plea agreement has promised to answer Mueller’s questions truthfully. Mueller did not ask Manafort to keep...

Paul Manafort's allegedly lied about his personal business dealings and contacts with former associates in Ukraine to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators, the Wall Street Journal reports. People familiar with the matter reportedly told the Journal that such statements are among the reasons that Mueller this week ended Manafort's plea agreement over two months after it was reached. Manafort allegedly misrepresented information about payments he received related to his lobbying work, the people familiar with the matter said. Manafort, President Trump's former campaign manager, was accused Monday by the government of breaching his plea deal. According to court filings, they...

Many media figures have swallowed whole, without evidence, a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump became president by treasonously colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election from its rightful owner, Hillary Clinton. The information operation that pushed this story turned out to have been secretly developed and funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, a fact uncovered only through the tenacious digging of Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the face of major opposition from the media and Democrats on the committee. The information operation has been fed to an increasingly compliant and credulous...

Embattled former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort says that he has never met privately with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and is threatening to sue the Guardian for reporting that he has. Citing a “well-placed source,” the Guardian reported Tuesday that Manafort met with Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2013, 2015, and again in the spring of 2016, soon after he became a senior member of the Trump campaign. The report further suggested that the alleged meeting will be of interest to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether any members of the Trump campaign helped to coordinate the...

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's attorney repeatedly spoke with the president's lawyers about discussions with federal investigators after Manafort agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller, The New York Times reported Tuesday. Rudy Giuliani, who represents Trump in the special counsel's investigation, confirmed the arrangement to the newspaper and argued that the conversations provided valuable insight. Giuliani said Manafort's lawyer, Kevin Downing, relayed that investigators pressed Manafort on what Trump knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign associates and a Russian lawyer who had promised dirt on then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “He wants...

RUSH: Well, well, well, if anybody doubts the political nature of the Mueller investigation, all you have to do is take a look at the news today. For crying out loud, they really want us to believe that Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange three times before WikiLeaks published the Podesta emails? Where’s this story been? If this were true, they would have known this all the way back when Obama and his buddies were spying on the Trump campaign. And we would have heard about this long before today. So what the heck is going on? Greetings, my friends,...

The breaking down of Paul Manafort’s plea deal has dealt a blow to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. A witness to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and a Russian lawyer predicated on damaging information about then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Manafort was seen as a valuable potential witness in Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. The decision to call him out as a liar effectively takes his testimony off the table, removing a valuable asset for the government. It comes after a lengthy trial where prosecutors won guilty...

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told. Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House. It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating...

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort lied to the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office "on a variety of subject matters" since his plea deal thereby violating the agreement, Mueller said in a court filing submitted Monday night, while adding that Manafort claims he's been truthful.

Paul Manafort, back in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia. Manafort was wheeled in to court in a wheelchair clothed in the court mandated, “guilty prisoner (stripless but colorful) costume” emblazoned "Alexandria Inmate, courtesy of Alexandria Detention Center. Paul told the judge that they were eager to expedite the sentencing process, citing confinement and "significant issues" with his health. Judge T.S. Ellis (sorta master of the rocket docket) figured a more better next year, (yuppy torture) sentencing date. A mistrial declared on the ten (of the eighteen) charges brought by “special counsel” who, won’t retry Manafort on those...

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team has been asking former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort about his former business partner Roger Stone, according to ABC News. Mueller in recent months has interviewed multiple people linked to Stone, a former Trump campaign adviser. Some of those people have also testified before the grand jury. "I am highly confident Mr. Manafort is aware of no wrong doing on my part during the 2016 campaign, or at any other time, and therefore there is no wrongdoing to know about,” Stone told ABC News. “Narratives to the contrary by some in the media are false...

You might remember back in May 2018 when sketchy porn lawyer Michael Avenetti was releasing U.S. Treasury notifications on Michael Cohen received from an unknown source within the Treasury Department. You might also remember when New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow wrote a sympathetic article after talking to the leaking treasury official. As a result the Treasury Inspector General began an investigation. Today, a U.S. Treasury employee named Natalie Mayflower Sours-Edwards was arrested and charged with leaking to numerous reporters multiple financial reports about suspicious financial transactions related to: Paul Manafort, Richard Gates, Maria Butina, and others.

A Treasury Department employee has been charged with leaking confidential banking reports of suspects charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Federal prosecutors say Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards is set to appear in court Wednesday in Virginia. The 40-year-old Edwards is a senior official at the department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. She’s accused of leaking the material to a journalist — who’s not named in court papers. Prosecutors say reports on Paul Manafort, Richard Gates and Maria Butina were among those leaked. …