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Tag: rick gates
Report: Mueller Overlooked Evidence Of ‘Coordination’ Between Trump And Russia

Report: Mueller Overlooked Evidence Of ‘Coordination’ Between Trump And Russia

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Some Democrats and critics of President Donald Trump have been railing against Republicans for admitting that they haven’t read former special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report for the Russia investigation and for saying that they don’t plan to. But journalist and Trump critic Jed Shugerman takes a different approach in an in-depth piece published in the Daily Beast this week. Rather than attacking Republicans and Trump supporters for not bothering to read the report, Shugerman argues that Mueller’s report isn’t as damning of the president and his allies as it should have been — and that Mueller is downplaying the importance of some key events.

“The bottom line is that the Mueller Report is a failure not because of Congress or because of public apathy, but because it failed to get the law, the facts or even the basics of writing right,” Shugerman asserts. “When Mueller testifies before Congress on July 17, he should be pressed on all of this.”

In his report, Mueller concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians, although questionable, didn’t rise to the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy. But Shugerman views Mueller’s analysis as flawed.

“It seems Mueller did not hire any legal experts with experience in campaign finance regulation,” Shugerman complains. “Given that this investigation was about campaign crimes, this appears to be a revealing oversight with serious consequences.”

Shugerman goes on to say that Mueller’s “errors meant that, first, he failed to conclude that the Trump campaign criminally coordinated with Russia.” And the Daily Beast writer adds that Mueller “failed to indict campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, for felony campaign coordination.”

In 2018, Manafort was vigorously prosecuted in federal court for a long list of financial crimes thanks to Mueller’s investigation — and Gates became the prosecution’s star witness. But neither of them was accused of “felony campaign coordination,” Shugerman writes.

Shugerman, in his article, goes on to list and describe, in detail, interactions between  Trump’s campaign and Russians in 2016 — and those interactions, he believes, are more damning than Mueller concludes in his report.

For example, Shugerman asserts, “Mueller should have concluded that both Manafort and Gates engaged in felony campaign coordination, and he should have indicted Manafort for it. Manafort is a lawyer with decades of experience working for presidential campaigns: it would be less difficult to establish knowing and willful violations. And Manafort’s extraordinary record of lying to prosecutors — and coordinating his lies with Trump’s lawyers — would help prove the case as an inference of consciousness of guilt.”

Shugerman concludes his piece by stressing that when Mueller publicly testifies before two committees in the House of Representatives on July 17, he hopes members of Congress will address some of the ways in which his report falls short — and why the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians three years ago were more damning than the report indicates.

 

 

Court Filing Reveals Key Mueller Probe Witness Is ‘Still Cooperating’

Court Filing Reveals Key Mueller Probe Witness Is ‘Still Cooperating’

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Rick Gates, President Donald Trump’s former deputy campaign chair, is still cooperating with federal investigators after playing a key role in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Mueller managed to flip Gates, who pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI and conspiracy against the United States. He, in turn, testified against his longtime associate Paul Manafort, who was the chair of Trump’s campaign. Manafort eventually found guilty and then pleaded guilty for a slew of charges, including false statements, failing to register as a foreign agent, and various financial and tax crimes.

Gates also told Mueller about his and Manafort’s interactions with Russian political operative Konstantin Kilimnik, who Gates thought was a spy, during the 2016 campaign, but the special counsel was unable to get to the bottom of this bizarre connection.

But even after Manafort has been sentenced and the Mueller Report has been released, the government said Monday in a court filing that it would like to delay Gates’ sentencing further as his cooperation continues.

There are at least two ongoing Mueller-related cases in which Gates’s testimony might be relevant: the charges against Trump ally Roger Stone and the case against Greg Craig, the former White House counsel for President Barack Obama. Mueller also indicated in his report that there were a dozen additional cases on various matters that have been spun off from the Russia investigation to other offices in the Justice Department, and Gates’ testimony might be relevant in any number of them.

One particularly intriguing possibility is the ongoing investigation in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere of Trump’s inauguration, in particular the massive fundraising to support the gala. Gates was the deputy chairman of the inaugural committee, so if there was any criminal wrongdoing surrounding the event, he may have information about it.

 

 

Did Trump’s Obstruction Prevent Manafort Exposing Russia Conspiracy?

Did Trump’s Obstruction Prevent Manafort Exposing Russia Conspiracy?

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

In the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s expansive case for President Donald Trump’s obstruction of justice, as revealed in the newly public report, a common theme is emerging among much of the commentariat that Trump’s obstruction of the Russia investigation was largely futile.

It was exemplified by Philip Klein’s take in the Washington Examiner, who wrote that “those surrounding President Trump managed to protect him from his own worst instincts by refusing to carry out actions that would have significantly strengthened the obstruction of justice case against him.”

But this is wrong. Attempting to obstruct justice, such as giving orders to quash the special counsel probe as Trump did, is just as much a crime as actually obstructing justice. Your aids refusing to carry out your corrupt orders doesn’t make you less corrupt.

Perhaps even more importantly, though, we have no idea how successful Trump was at obstructing justice.

Consider an extremely important caveat in the summary of the first volume of the report, which focuses on the Russian election interference, the Trump campaign’s links to Russia, and potential conspiracy. Mueller could not establish that a conspiracy occurred; however, he noted that

Even when individuals testified or agreed to be interviewed, they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete, leading to some of the false-statements charges described above.

…some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated—including some associated with the Trump Campaign—deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records.

And he explained that

while this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible, given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.

In other words, while Mueller didn’t demonstrate that a conspiracy occurred, he leaves open the possibility that it did. And he a cover-up may be the reason he didn’t find it.

If a conspiracy existed, the most plausible nexus for such a crime would be Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort, who used Deputy Campaign Chair Rick Gates to send internal polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik periodically throughout the campaign. Gates, according to Mueller, used WhatsApp and deleted the messages after they were sent. Gates believed Kilimnik was a Russian “spy”; the FBI has assessed that he has ties to Russian intelligence. The report also says that Manafort believed the polling data would make its way back to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch to whom Manafort was indebted.

And when Manafort was supposedly cooperating with the special counsel, he lied when he was asked about his interactions with Kilimnik, rendering him entirely unreliable.

At one meeting, Gates said that the three men discussed key battleground states in the 2016 election: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Manafort did not offer that fact — which may mean it didn’t indeed happen, or that Manafort thought it was worth hiding.

Ultimately, the report noted: “The Office [of Special Counsel] could not reliably determine Manafort’s purpose in sharing internal polling data with Kilimnik during the campaign period.”

During a hearing with Judge Amy Berman Jackson, one of Mueller’s prosecutors said the meetings with Kilimnik went to the “heart” of the probe.

So all this is clearly important. What does it have to do with Trump?

In Volume II of the report, Mueller revealed that he considered Trump’s behavior toward Manafort potentially obstructive conduct:

the President has taken other actions directed at possible witnesses in the Special Counsel’s investigation, including Flynn, Manafort, [REDACTED] and as described in the next section, Cohen. … During Manafort’s prosecution and while the jury was deliberating, the President repeatedly stated that Manafoft was being treated unfairly and made it known that Manafort could receive a pardon.

The jury in Manafort’s case deadlocked on 10 out of 18 counts, and juror has since revealed that this was because of a single holdout juror who did not agree with the rest on the undecided charges. The mistrial didn’t end up affecting the totality of the case against Manafort, but if that holdout juror resisted finding Manafort guilty because of Trump’s comments, he would have successfully obstructed justice.

More important, though, is the fact that Trump made it clear Manafort could be pardoned. The report explained:

With respect to Manafort, there is evidence that the President’s actions had the potential to influence Manafort’s decision whether to cooperate with the government. The President and his personal counsel made repeated statements suggesting that a pardon was a possibility for Manafort, while also making it clear that the President did not want Manafort to “flip” and cooperate with the government.

…

In light of the President’s counsel’s previous statements that the investigations “might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons” and that a pardon would be possible if the President “come[s ] to the conclusion that you have been treated unfairly,” the evidence supports the inference that the President intended Manafort to believe that he could receive a pardon, which would make cooperation with the government as a means of obtaining a lesser sentence unnecessary.

This is particularly relevant because, in the same hearing mentioned above, one of Mueller’s prosecutors argued that the special counsel believes part of Manafort’s reasons for lying to the special counsel about the Kilimnik meetings was to increase his chances of getting a pardon.

So what does this all tell us?

Mueller isn’t confident that new evidence wouldn’t “shed additional light” on the question of a conspiracy with Russia. Mueller was never able to determine why Manafort was sending polling data to someone believed to be a Russian spy, though he thought this matter was central to his probe. He also believes Trump’s dangling of a pardon for Manafort may have been an instance of obstructing justice, and he believes that Manafort may have lied about a matter of central importance of the probe — one that could have implicated a criminal election-related conspiracy — in an effort to get that dangled pardon. By dangling a pardon, Trump could have kept quiet the best source of information about a conspiracy with Russia.

We don’t know if Trump’s obstruction worked. But Mueller leaves that possibility open, and if it’s true, it could be obstruction of a historical scale.

Under Investigation: Kushner’s Radioactive Mideast ‘Piece’ Plan

Under Investigation: Kushner’s Radioactive Mideast ‘Piece’ Plan

Originally published on Creators.

Often enough, the ambitious phrase “Middle East peace plan” emanates from the Trump White House, often associated with presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner. Only last week, the Polish government joined with the U.S. State Department to host a major international conference on Middle East issues in Warsaw.

But now the House Oversight Committee has released a stunning 24-page report about the pursuit of certain potentially dangerous commercial opportunities in the Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia, by Kushner and an assortment of other Trump cronies. Suddenly, the “peace plan” looks far more like a “piece” plan — as in cronies grabbing a piece of the Saudi financial action.

Based on information from alarmed informants within the government, the Oversight committee is investigating the Trump administration’s secret, reckless, and apparently illegal rush to promote the sale of nuclear power plants to the Saudi regime. On Thursday, the committee chair, Rep. Elijah Cummings III (D-MD), released an interim report titled “Whistleblowers Raise Grave Concerns With Trump Administration’s Effort to Transfer Sensitive Nuclear Technology to the Saudis.”

One such concern is the administration’s rejection of advice from lawyers, who warned that its plans to sell nuclear technology violated the Atomic Energy Act, designed to safeguard against the unchecked proliferation of atomic weapons and materials. Another is the brazen and unethical self-dealing by figures close to Trump, who sought to profit from the Saudi deals — including disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Tom Barrack, the real estate executive and Trump pal who ran the inaugural committee (now also under investigation by federal prosecutors).

According to the interim report, Flynn signed on as “advisor” to a firm known as IP3, which the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman accurately described as an “all-star team” of retired generals and diplomats pushing to build nukes in Saudi. This IP3 outfit recruited Flynn while he was serving as a campaign adviser to Trump, and he continued that role, despite the obvious conflict of interest, after he entered the White House. Others on Trump’s national security staff joined with Flynn to promote the Saudi nuclear sales, sparking conflict with officials who objected both on policy and legal grounds.

As soon as Trump was inaugurated, the IP3 group started pushing him to appoint Barrack as a “special representative” of the U.S. government, tasked with “implementing the plan.” At the same time, Barrack was considering an investment in Westinghouse Electric, one of the world’s largest builders of nuclear plants. Assisting him was Rick Gates — the same felon who had worked for Paul Manafort and ended up with a guilty plea and a cooperation agreement with the Office of Special Counsel.

Let’s pause here to think hard about the wisdom of constructing dozens of nuclear plants, with their potential for terrorist exploitation, in the same country that sent forth the 9/11 hijackers — never mind its recent misadventures in Yemen and its brutal murder of an American resident, Jamal Khashoggi.  It is incomprehensible that any American president would consider turning over the most lethal technology to the Saudis, with their aggressive brand of radicalized Wahhabi Islam.

But leaving aside the peril to world peace, there are billions to be made here. And that may be what matters most to the inhabitants of the Trump White House.

In that connection, the interim report notes a fascinating timeline, which begins with a holding company called Brookfield Asset Management acquiring Westinghouse Electric for $4.6 billion in January 2018. (Of course, Westinghouse Electric would have benefited hugely from the IP3 plan to build those Saudi nukes). And then just seven months, Brookfield Asset Management purchased a 99-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue — the famous Manhattan tower whose $1.8 billion in debt had nearly ruined the Kushner family company, which owned it.

Brookfield’s decision to bail out the Kushner company by paying for that overpriced lease up front puzzled knowledgeable observers when the company first announced its purchase. After so many other potential investors had rejected that bad deal, what made Brookfield bite?

Perhaps now we will find out.