Mueller’s Real Target in the Roger Stone Arrest

Having worked with the FBI on a couple of cases - I even gave some tutorials of real estate transactions to a couple of special agents and assistant U.S. Attorneys in one case - I know one thing.  The FBI's investigations are incredibly thorough and the goal is to assemble a series of four inch thick evidence note books that back up every aspect of indictments in sequence from start to finish.  To say that copies of email. wire transfer orders and documents that dispel lies and witness untruths are their stock in trade is an understatement. Given this reality, a column in the New York Times looks at what may have been the real target of Robert Mueller's indictment of Roger Stone beyond merely pushing Stone towards cooperating: Stone's cell phone(s), computers and encrypted email messages that may document Trump campaign coordination with Russian intelligence officials,  If Stone's message document such coordination and conspiring, Der Trumpenführer's life may be about to get very interesting and unsettling.  Ditto for perhaps Jared Kushner and others in the Trump inner circle.  Here are column highlights:

For many, Friday’s arrest of Roger Stone, the veteran political trickster and longtime adviser to Donald Trump, was a sign that the special counsel investigation into Russian electoral interference is entering its final phase. Yet there were also several indications that the probe may not be as near its conclusion as many observers assume — and that the true target of Friday’s F.B.I. actions was not Mr. Stone himself, but his electronic devices. 

[F]ederal agents were “seen carting hard drives and other evidence from Mr. Stone’s apartment in Harlem, and his recording studio in South Florida was also raided.” The F.B.I., in other words, was executing search warrants, not just arrest warrants. Even the timing and manner of Mr. Stone’s arrest — at the absolute earliest moment allowed under federal rules of criminal procedure without persuading a judge to authorize an exceptional nighttime raid — suggests a concern with preventing destruction of evidence: Otherwise it would make little sense to send a dozen agents to arrest a man in his 60s before sunrise. Of course, as the indictment also makes clear, the special counsel has already managed to get its hands on plenty of Mr. Stone’s communications by other means — but one seeming exception jumps out. . . . the special counsel is taking pains to establish that Mr. Stone made a habit of moving sensitive conversations to encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp — meaning that, unlike ordinary emails, the messages could not be obtained directly from the service provider. The clear implication is that any truly incriminating communications would have been conducted in encrypted form — and thus could be obtained only directly from Mr. Stone’s own phones and laptops. And while Mr. Stone likely has limited value as a cooperating witness — it’s hard to put someone on the stand after charging them with lying to obstruct justice — the charges against him provide leverage in the event his cooperation is needed to unlock those devices by supplying a cryptographic passphrase.

Of course, Mr. Mueller is likely interested in his communications with Trump campaign officials, but the detailed charges filed against the Russian hackers alleged to have broken into the Democratic National Committee’s servers also show the special counsel’s keen interest in Mr. Stone’s communications with the hacker “Guccifer 2.0,” an identity said to have been used as a front for the Russian intruders.

And if this really is the first time Mr. Mueller’s office is seeing the most sensitive communications from a key figure like Mr. Stone, it’s likely they’ll come away with new leads to follow and new questions to pose to other witnesses.

We may ultimately look back on Mr. Stone’s arrest not as the beginning of the special counsel’s endgame, but the point when the investigation began to really heat up.

Michael Cohen's - and Trump's? - Serious Legal Jeopardy

We can expect more lies and posturing from the White House today in the wake of an FBI raid of Trump consigliere Michael Cohen's home, law office and hotel room (where he was staying during home renovations) that included seizing Cohen's computer, records and emails.  This is NOT something that happens with regularity and the fact that a warrant was issued by a federal judge is telling because the U.S. Attorney's office would have had to convince a judge that (i) there is a likelihood that a crime occurred, and (ii) there was a strong likelihood that evidence would be destroyed or go missing if the normal course of issuing a subpoena had been followed.  Having been a witness for federal prosecutors on two occasions and worked as a consultant on another case, these folks do NOT fool around.  Cohen - and possibly Trump - is in serious legal jeopardy as a column in the Washington Post lays out.  Here are highlights:

When your lawyers need lawyers, it’s usually a bad sign. When your lawyers have their offices and homes raided, it’s a really bad sign. News that federal investigators on Monday took the extraordinary step of executing a search warrant at the legal office of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal attorney, indicates that Cohen is suddenly in serious legal jeopardy of his own. And although the investigation is not directly related to the Mueller probe, it’s yet another example of the legal walls closing in on one of the people closest to Trump — someone who may have a wealth of information about the president’s own conduct. The first thing to note about this striking development is that the warrant was not obtained by Mueller himself. Whatever the subject matter of this particular investigation, it apparently falls outside of Mueller’s jurisdiction and thus resulted in his referral to the New York prosecutors. So we know the potential crimes that led to the search today do not directly relate to Mueller’s inquiry into any conspiracy with Russians to influence the election or related crimes such as obstruction of the special counsel’s investigation. We also know that a search warrant, unlike a grand jury subpoena, requires prosecutors to go before a federal judge to demonstrate probable cause that a crime has been committed and evidence of that crime can be found in the premises to be searched. Before approving a search of a lawyer’s office, a judge would want to be satisfied that there was some substance behind the prosecutors’ allegations. This is not just some prosecutorial fishing expedition; it bears the imprimatur of a federal judge. This was not just any search warrant; that the raid took place at a lawyer’s office further highlights the seriousness of the investigation. Searches of an attorney’s office are extremely rare and are not favored, due to their potential to impinge on the attorney-client relationship. Prosecutors must jump through multiple hoops to get such a warrant approved, both within their own office and at the criminal division of Main Justice. (Notably, this would likely have included approval by Trump’s own guy, the new interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Geoffrey S. Berman, who was just appointed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions this past January.) Approval of a search warrant suggests prosecutors were able to demonstrate not only the gravity of the potential case but also the risk that evidence might be destroyed or otherwise go missing if they pursued a less aggressive option. Cohen, and perhaps the president, will likely argue that this raid violates the attorney-client privilege. . . . . There is an exception to the attorney-client privilege if communications to an attorney are used in furtherance of a crime or fraud; that could come into play here as well. And documents related to anything Cohen did on his own — after all, Trump has deniedknowing about the payment to Daniels — are likely not privileged if they do not contain attorney-client communications. Documents are not automatically privileged simply because they passed through an attorney’s hands. There may well be litigation concerning whether particular records seized during this search are protected by privilege. But seizing the records now allows prosecutors to ensure that the integrity of the evidence is maintained while those legal issues are sorted out.

Cohen, someone extremely close to Trump and who has been known as the president’s “fixer,” appears to have serious legal problems. If federal prosecutors feel they have enough on you to execute a search warrant, it’s never a good sign — just ask Paul Manafort. . . . . we can’t rule out the possibility that his own legal troubles could induce him [Cohen] to cooperate in the Russia investigation.

Another Shoe Just Dropped in the Mueller Probe

With Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, with no legal counsel in the Russiagate investigation other than Jay Sekulow, a Christofascist lawyer who some believe skimmed millions from supposed charities operated by he and his family members, Robert Mueller has "dropped another shoe" via information contained in a new federal court filing.  Sekulow has a long history of working with Christofascist extremists such as Pat Robertson.  As for his questionable business practices, Think Progress has this:

Sekulow’s business model bears more resemblance to Trump University than it does to an ordinary legal non-profit. Between 1998 and 2011, according to an investigation by The Tennessean’s Bob Smietana, two Sekulow-run charities “paid out more than $33 million to members of Sekulow’s family and businesses they own or co-own, according to the charities’ federal tax returns.” That includes “$2.74 million in private jet lease payments to companies owned by Jay Sekulow and his sister-in-law, Kim Sekulow,” and $15.4 million to a law firm co-owned by Jay.

True, Sekulow would seem to be cut out of the same cloth as Trump given his history self-aggrandizement and and self-enrichment.  But that will likely have no bearing on Sekulow's ability to defend Trump in what appears to be a tightening noose around Trump and his closet sycophants.  Worse yet for Der Trumpenführer is the reality that reputable and competent attorneys are declining his invatations to join his legal team.  As for the latest Mueller development, a piece in the Washington Post looks at where the Russiagate investigation could be heading and the increasingly high stakes game Trump may be recklessly playing.  Here are highlights:

Another shoe just dropped in the Russia investigation. And it may leave a large footprint.“Manafort associate had Russian intelligence ties during 2016 campaign, prosecutors say,” reads The Post’s headline this morning. The story reports:

The FBI has found that a business associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had ongoing ties to Russian intelligence, including during the 2016 campaign when Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, were in touch with the associate, according to new court filings.

The documents, filed late Tuesday by prosecutors for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, also allege that Gates had said he knew the associate was a former officer with the Russian military intelligence service.

Gates, of course, was Donald Trump’s deputy campaign manager, and he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is now cooperating with the Mueller probe. The associate is unnamed in the filing, but The Post notes the description matches Konstantin Kilimnik, the Russian manager of Manafort’s lobbying office in Kiev.

As the filing puts it, Gates was “directly communicating in September and October 2016” with that associate, who had “ties to a Russian intelligence service … in 2016.” And Gates knew of those ties, the filing also says, noting that another figure involved in those conversations has already testified to the special counsel’s office that “Gates told him” the person was a “former Russian intelligence officer.” That means Mueller is now alleging that Trump’s deputy campaign manager knew in the fall of 2016 that his and Manafort’s business associate had ties to Russian intelligence.  [Paul] Rosenzweig [who was special counsel during Ken Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton] also said that these new revelations do raise some important possibilities. First, they suggest that Manafort — who was Trump’s campaign chair deep into August 2016 — likely knew his associate had connections to Russian intelligence, since if Gates knew, Manafort also probably knew. “At a minimum that says something about his willingness to work with people who have ties to Russian intelligence agencies,” Rosenzweig said. “That raises the question of whether Manafort was a conduit of Russian influence on the campaign,” though he may have been an “unwitting dupe” in this regard.

Second, and perhaps more important, Mueller may have put this information in the filing in part to increase the pressure on Manafort. Mueller’s investigators are “showing Manafort some of their cards as a way to increase the pressure on him to cooperate,” Rosenzweig says.

Indeed, Politico recently reported that people around Trump are deeply worried about what Gates can tell Mueller, because that might end up inducing Manafort to conclude that his legal jeopardy is so severe that he should flip. Gates can perhaps tell Mueller what Manafort knew at the time about the associate’s ties to Russian intelligence.

Finally, putting this information in the filing might end up protecting the Mueller probe itself. “Mueller’s biggest strategic risk is being fired,” Rosenzweig said. “The more they put Russia into the equation, the harder it is for Trump to fire him.”

The new Mueller filing, . . . . , could make it that much harder politically for Trump to try to shut down or hamstring the probe. And if that’s what this latest shoe dropping accomplishes, that itself will leave a pretty big footprint.