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Trump hires “Only the Best” ...
Only the “best” law-breakers, that is.
Let us count the cons ...
www.axios.com
Sentenced:
en.wikipedia.org
On February 22, 2018, Mueller revealed new charges in the [Paul] Manafort and [Rick] Gates case,[24][25] filed on February 21.[26] Unlike previous indictments, the superseding indictment was issued by a federal grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, and contains 32 counts: 16 counts related to false individual income tax returns, seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts, five counts of bank fraud conspiracy, and four counts of bank fraud.[27]
On February 23, 2018, Gates pleaded guilty to one count of false statements and one count of conspiracy against the United States.[4] The plea bargain included an agreement to cooperate with the Mueller investigation.[28] Federal guidelines suggested that Gates would face a sentence of 57 to 71 months.[29] His sentencing date was repeatedly postponed, with a March 2019 court filing requesting another sixty day extension, stating Gates "continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations," suggesting that his cooperation extended beyond matters involving Manafort, who had already been convicted in two courts by that time.[30] On May 13, 2019, prosecutors asked for another extension until August 30, stating that Gates continues to cooperate and referencing the pending trials of Roger Stone and Gregory Craig.[31][32]
www.nytimes.com
Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr. on seven felony crimes on Friday, using the power of his office to spare a former campaign adviser days before Mr. Stone was to report to a federal prison to serve a 40-month term.
[...]
Mr. Stone, 67, a longtime Republican operative, was convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and possible ties to Russia. Prosecutors convinced jurors that he lied under oath, withheld a trove of documents and threatened an associate with harm if he cooperated with congressional investigators.
time.com
If there are direct connections between the Russian efforts and the Trump campaign, one potential contact might have been campaign chairman Paul Manafort. A longtime Republican consultant, Manafort worked overseas in recent years, including for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine. Mueller charged Manafort with hiding tens of millions of dollars he earned for that work and lying to banks to get loans. In August, a jury in Virginia found Manafort guilty on eight counts.
www.dailykos.com
Lev Parnas, the Rudy Giuliani associate caught in the middle of President Donald Trump’s impeachment, said on Wednesday that the president was fully aware of his actions in Ukraine, and leveled a string of potentially damaging accusations against the president’s closest allies, including Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr and the House Intelligence Committee’s top Republican, Rep. Devin Nunes.
“President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” Parnas, who was indicted over an alleged campaign finance scheme in October, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow when asked to correct the biggest inaccuracy about his dealings with the president. “He was aware of all of my movements. I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president.”
[...]
Just a few more of the President’s Chumps ...
Exclusive: Trump lawyer Giuliani was paid $500,000 to consult on indicted associate's firm
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was paid $500,000 for work he did for a company co-founded by the Ukrainian-American businessman arrested last week on campaign finance charges, Giuliani told Reuters on Monday.
[...]
Giuliani said Parnas’ company, Boca Raton-based Fraud Guarantee, whose website says it aims to help clients “reduce and mitigate fraud”, engaged Giuliani Partners, a management and security consulting firm, around August 2018. Giuliani said he was hired to consult on Fraud Guarantee’s technologies and provide legal advice on regulatory issues.
[...]
According to an indictment unsealed by U.S. prosecutors, an unidentified Russian businessman arranged for two $500,000 wires to be sent from foreign bank accounts to a U.S. account controlled by Fruman in September and October 2018. The money was used, in part, by Fruman, Parnas and two other men charged in the indictment to gain influence with U.S. politicians and candidates, the indictment said.
[...]
That
unidentified Russian businessman was subsequently identified as
Dmitry Firtash, a Putin oligarch, previously wanted by the US Dept of Justice for:
Dmitry Firtash, a wealthy industrialist with assets across Europe, who has spent the last five years in Vienna fighting extradition to the U.S. on bribery and racketeering charges. The U.S. Department of Justice said in 2017 he was among the “upper echelon associates of Russian organized crime” [...]
That Firtash warrant of course was before Don Donnie Leone, got “his guy” installed in Justice:
www.law.com
For his part, Barr has openly abandoned any pretense of acting in the nation’s best interest and has instead acted as Trump’s “Roy Cohn” or his new Michael Cohen — take your pick. The litany of his abuses of power on behalf of the president is worth rehearsing here.
Upon taking office in February 2019, Barr refused to recuse himself from Russia/Mueller Investigation, notwithstanding that in June of 2018 he had sent a 20 page unsolicited legal memorandum to the Department of Justice — which he separately sent to and discussed with the president’s legal team — in which he perversely claimed that Mueller had no authority to investigate the Trump for obstruction of justice. When Mueller filed the report of his investigative findings with Barr, the latter summarized them in a letter to Congress that can only be characterized — charitably — as a whitewashing of much of the wrongdoing that the former had uncovered. In fact, when a redacted version of the report was released in April of 2018, fact-checkers and news outlets reported that Barr had deliberately mischaracterized the Mueller report and its conclusions.
[...]
The only plausible reason for Berman’s sacking [by Bill Barr] would appear to be his record as U.S. Attorney [for the Southern District of New York] including: his prosecution of Michael Cohen, Trump’s prior attorney/fixer; his prosecution of two associates of the president’s private lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who were said by prosecutors to have been involved in the effort to recall the United States ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch; his investigation of Giuliani himself, in connection with allegations stemming from his lobbying practice; and his indictment, against Trump’s personal wishes, of Halkbank, a Turkish state-owned bank, on charges that it conspired to undermine the United States Iran sanctions regime.
“It’s not illegal, when the President does it.” — Richard Nixon.
www.forbes.com
A group of 1,264 former Justice Department officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations have signed a letter requesting the agency's Inspector General Michael Horowitz to open an investigation into U.S. Attorney General William Barr over his involvement in the June 1 action by police to aggressively disperse peaceful protesters near Lafayette Square in Washington DC, as well as the deployment of federal law enforcement officers to quell protests across the country.
www.nbcnews.com
Nearly 2,000 former Justice Department and FBI officials on Monday signed an open letter strongly critical of Attorney General William Barr's decision to abandon the prosecution of Michael Flynn, calling the action "extraordinarily rare, if not unprecedented."
If anyone else who is not a friend of the president "were to lie to federal investigators in the course of a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation, and admit we did so under oath, we could be prosecuted," the letter said.
And this only scratches the surface, when you take into account the Trump Inauguration slush-fund — being investigated by SDNY, by the way — and the kid-glove catering of Putin’s ongoing attacks on America’s troops overseas.
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Like I said at the top, Trump hires “Only the Best” ...
Only the “best” law-breakers, that is.
It takes a career Con, to know one …
From the discussion on that tape, it is clear as day that:
Trump knew what the Payment was for, and wanted to know how much this one would cost.
Trump was involved in the arrangements for channeling Trump funds to cover the payments.
www.dailykos.com
"FOLLOW THE MONEY."
Weisselberg is the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization — but he's so much more than that. Hired first by Trump's father, Weisselberg has been the money man in Trump's orbit for decades. And, he didn't just handle finances for the Trump Organization but also for Trump's personal accounts.
Which brings us to why he was granted immunity by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York in their pursuit of Cohen who pleaded guilty to eight felonies earlier this week. Two of those eight counts dealt with campaign finance violations tied to payments made to two women — Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal — who alleged that they had affairs with Trump. Cohen engineered payments to those women totaling almost $300,000 and, in the plea agreement, he said that he did so at the "direction" of Trump.
[...]
Couldn’t happen to a move deserving “Boss” … <em>If only,</em> there were any Justice left in the world.