Robert Mueller's Next Indictment Targets

With the midterm elections behind us, media attention has turned again to the Mueller Russiagate probe and Der Trumpenführer's obsession with killing the probe - something that should count as obstruction of justice in and of itself.   The near hysteria of Trump continues to run counter to the behavior of someone who is innocent.  Laughably, Rudi Giuliani - who has discredited himself in the eyes of anyone sane - whined that Mueller's questions to Trump were "perjury traps" ignoring the fact that if one doesn't lie (a difficult task for Trump) there is no risk of perjury.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at the growing fear and paranoia among Trump and his sycophants who I suspect known damn well that they conspired with Russian agents and are thoroughly guilty.  Innocent people simply do not act they way these folks are behaving.  Here are article highlights:

After stepping out of the headlines and into the courtroom as part of a pre-midterms cease-fire, Robert Mueller appears poised to make his dramatic return to national politics with a new set of indictments centered around WikiLeaks and Roger Stone. According to multiple reports, the special counsel has been zeroing in on whether Stone or other Donald Trump associates had advance knowledge of Russia’s hacking of Clinton e-mails, which WikiLeaks later published.

If Mueller were to make his next move against Stone, he might also be expected to take action against Assange. So it is perhaps unsurprising that Assange’s name also surfaced this week, thanks to a slipup by the Department of Justice.

Exactly what charges Assange is facing remains unclear. In the past, prosecutors have considered conspiracy, violating the Espionage Act, and theft of government property. During the Obama administration, the Justice Department held back on going after Assange amid concerns that doing so was similar to prosecuting a news outlet. (Charging someone for publishing accurate information, Assange’s lawyer Barry Pollack told The Guardian on Thursday, is “a dangerous path for a democracy to take.”) The recently ousted Jeff Sessions, however, took a more Draconian stance on government leaks, and prosecutors were reportedly told over the summer that they could start compiling a complaint. So far, the D.O.J. has not offered further details.

Whether Assange will be charged as part of the Russia probe is also unknown, though it seems likely. Presumably, the mention of Assange’s name in legal documents has spooked Trumpworld, which is already on edge in anticipation of the next Mueller bombshell. According to Politico, the White House suspects more indictments are imminent, potentially targeting a cabal of Trump family members and associates for their connections to WikiLeaks.

On Wednesday, the special counsel delivered a one-page motion to a Washington judge stating that former Trump campaign deputy chairman Rick Gates, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the U.S. and making a false statement in a federal investigation, “continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations.” Then, on Thursday, Mueller’s office and Paul Manafort’s lawyers jointly requested a 10-day extension to file a report pertaining to the former campaign chairman’s sentencing.

Trump allies are feeling the pressure. Conspiracy theorist and commentator Jerome Corsi, a Stone ally, has said he expects to be indicted for perjury, and told The Guardian that Mueller’s team grilled him on Assange and Brexiteer Nigel Farage, the latter of whom has links to both WikiLeaks and Trump. Donald Trump Jr., too, is said to be bracing for a legal showdown . . . .

As paranoia, media scrutiny, and the hashtag #indictmentpalooza pick up, [Trump] the president, who has been working with lawyers on written answers to a series of Mueller’s questions, also appears to be on tenterhooks.

Nothing is more wonderful than seeing these despicable individuals sweating over getting indicted for things they knowingly did while viewing themselves above the law.  I hope the indictments come very soon.  

Eighth Person in Trump, Jr., Meeting Linked to Money Laundering

For years Donald Trump, Sr., has skirted the edge of the law and cut deals with both domestic and Russian mobsters, often in connection with his real estate projects.  The latter have for years provided a means for dirty Russian money to be used to acquire real estate in America - the USA, unlike many other nations has few restrictions on foreigners buying property - which when sold effective launders the money and makes it "clean."  Hence it should be no surprise that the now identified 8th person in the June, 2016, meeting with Trump, Jr., at Trump Tower had ties to money laundering. Literally, with every passing day some new sleazy and/or questionable detail of the meeting unfolds which further underscores the lies that were first used to explain the meeting which sought to collude with Russian operatives.  Here are details from Politico on this new information (Note Senator Mark Warner's pointed comment): 

The eighth attendee at a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between top Trump associates and a politically connected Russian lawyer is a business associate of a top Moscow oligarch and was once the focus of a congressional money-laundering probe.

Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze, until now the mysterious eighth person in the room, attended the meeting on behalf of Aras Agalarov, a billionaire real estate magnate with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and a Trump family friend. A lawyer for Agalarov has confirmed Kaveladze’s attendance to other news outlets, though he did not respond to requests for comment from POLITICO.

Business filings list Kaveladze as founder of a company called IBC Group, which shares a New Jersey address — 333 Sylvan Ave. in Englewood Cliffs — with several shell companies connected to Aras Agalarov.

One of those firms is Saffron Property Management, which Agalarov reportedly used to purchase an $11 million condo in Florida last year.

A POLITICO reporter visiting the nondescript office building where all of these companies are based found that the suite linked to Agalarov and Kaveladze was empty, with unopened mail by the door. A sign in the lobby indicated that the suite belonged to IBC and Russian Art Mall, which was founded in 2000 and registered to Emin Agalarov, who is a partner in his father's business.

"They're current on the rent. They're on our rent roll, they're just quiet," said George Sayrafe, who said he has managed the building for 20 years. "I hadn't heard anything. Some tenants bother you, you know what I mean? These people, I haven't seen them in a long time."

Kaveladze’s identity is among many facts about the 2016 meeting that Donald Trump Jr. has failed to disclose in multiple public statements. And his background may add to the questions members of Congress and investigators have about the meeting, which Trump officials say was brief and inconsequential but which Democrats call evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“I doubt if this individual who had a history of setting up thousands of fake accounts in Delaware was really there to talk about Russian adoptions,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, told reporters on Tuesday.

Kaveladze was named in a round of news stories in November 2000, after the General Accounting Office issued a report on Russian money laundering through U.S. financial institutions.

At the time, Kaveladze was identified in contemporaneous news reports as the originator of thousands of Delaware-based shell corporations.

Through his company, which was at the time called International Business Creations, Kaveladze formed 2,000 corporations for Russian brokers, which helped steer more than $1.4 billion in wire transactions through U.S. banks, according to the congressional inquiry.

The Agalarovs and Kaveladze are represented by Scott Balber, a New York white-collar defense attorney and former legal partner with Abbe Lowell, an attorney handling Russia matters for Kushner. Balber told The Washington Post on Tuesday he got a call this weekend from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office seeking an interview with Kaveladze — an ask that marks the first public signal the special counsel is investigating the Russia meeting.

Trump, Jr. Hands Over the Trump-Russia Smoking Gun

As numerous legitimate news outlets, such as Politico, New York Magazine, New York Times, and the Washington Post and others, are reporting - which excludes Fox News, a/k/a Faux News - Donald Trump, Jr., an arrogant cretin it would seem, released copies of e-mails today that many see as providing special prosecutor Robert Mueller, the "smoking gun" proving collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. While Donny, Jr., claims he released the e-mails for the sake of "transparency,"the reality is that the New York Times was about to disclose the e-mails' contents.   To paraphrase the Times, the emails make it crystal clear that one of Donald Trump's former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton which "would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”  The email, also noted that “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”  Vanity Fair looks at what Trump, Jr. has handed to Robert Mueller.  Here are excerpts:

For more than a year, Donald Trump and his associates have pushed back against allegations that his campaign colluded with the Russian government, which the president has called a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” orchestrated by Clintonworld. But a series of e-mails exchanged between the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid journalist linked to the Trump family through the Miss Universe pageant, suggests that the eldest Trump son not only sought compromising information on Hillary Clinton from a Kremlin-backed lawyer but was aware since at least June 2016 that the Russian government was working to help elect his father.

Trump Jr. received an e-mail from Goldstone informing him that one of his family’s former Russian business partners had received “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” The e-mail chain, which began June 3, was also addressed to the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Trump Jr. responded, “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” In a series of follow-up e-mails, he agreed to meet with the “Russian government attorney”—presumably Natalia Veselnitskaya, who later met with Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort at Trump Tower on June 9.

The e-mails between Trump Jr. and Goldstone are the first concrete evidence that the Trump campaign was aware of Russian government effort to help elect Donald Trump—months before the Obama administration made the Russian campaign known, and long before Trump himself acknowledged Russian interference. “The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me,” Trump tweeted on July 25. The day before, Donald Trump Jr. had gone on CNN to decry the Clinton campaign’s claims that the Russians were helping Trump as “disgusting” and “phony.”

The president’s son released the e-mail exchange Tuesday after learning that The New York Times was about to publish a story containing parts of his conversation with Goldstone, which the paper published minutes later. The acknowledgement that he was aware of Kremlin efforts to help his father become president, and his eagerness to meet with a Russian intermediary to solicit the promised information, follows a series of incremental reports from the Times, to which Trump Jr. has responded with ever-shifting explanations [lies].

On Monday, Trump Jr. hired New York-based lawyer Alan Futerfas, who has defended members of several major mob families. Collusion between Russia and members of the Trump campaign is one of several allegations being investigated by the F.B.I., under special counsel Robert Mueller, as well as by parallel inquiries by the intelligence committees in the House and Senate. Trump Jr. has said he would be “happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know,” in reference to the Senate panel.

In light of all of Trump, Jr.'s series of lies, ,  Trump, Jr., and Der  Trumpenführer himself now want us to believe that Trump senior knew nothing of the meeting that took place in Trump Tower that just happened to include his oldest son and his son-in-law.  As in Watergate, the questions become: what did the president know and when did he know it.  I suspect that he knew about all of it.