Tag: 2016 Trump campaign

How Paul Manafort promoted Russian disinformation that has been embraced by Trump

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The effort began only days after Paul Manafort resigned as chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in August 2016.

Manafort faced scrutiny for accepting millions in off-book payments from pro-Russian Ukrainian officials — an uncomfortable situation for the longtime lobbyist, since accusations were then emerging that Russia was interfering in the White House race to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.

According to a new bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee released Tuesday, Manafort began quickly working with a Russian employee based in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on a counternarrative — that it was the Ukrainians who were actually interfering in the U.S. election, not Russia, and that they were framing Manafort to help the Democrats. Continue reading.

Roger Stone joins the remarkable universe of criminality surrounding President Trump

Washington Post logoOn Friday, President Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone was found guilty on seven criminal charges related to testimony he gave to Congress as part of investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Those charges included five counts of offering false statements, one of obstruction and one of witness tampering. Stone is scheduled to be sentenced early next year.

Stone was with Trump at the very beginning of the president’s time in politics. In fact, Stone long pushed Trump to enter into the political world, encouraging him repeatedly to announce presidential bids in previous cycles. He was sidelined during Trump’s 2016 run after either quitting or being fired; as with many things related to Stone, details are murky.

Friday’s convictions seem to bring to an end the high-profile criminal probes stemming from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The convictions also contribute to a truly remarkable universe of admitted, proved or alleged criminal behavior involving people linked to Trump.

View the complete November 15 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

Roger Stone’s defense: MAGA, God and Donald Trump

As a legal strategy, it caught many by surprise. As a political play, it might be perfectly tailored for another audience — MAGA-ites and the president himself.

For once, Roger Stone is letting others do the talking.

The political provocateur has spent decades verbally sparring with almost anyone who is willing to engage. But as his trial over lying to Congress and tampering with a witness nears its end, Stone has left his defense in the hands of external factors: lawyers, God, the race card, a coterie of MAGA-world figures and, if all else fails, President Donald Trump.

Given the chance to tell his side of the story, Stone chose not to take the witness stand. Given the opportunity to call witnesses, his attorneys opted instead to simply play portions of the congressional testimony in question.

View the complete November 13 article by Darren Samuelsohn and Josh Gerstein on the Politico website here.

Roger Stone Trial Testimony Ends With Talk of Outreach to Jared Kushner

WASHINGTON — Testimony in the colorful trial of Roger Stone — featuring talk of dognapping and Godfather references — wrapped up Tuesday with a top Trump campaign official telling jurors that Stone tried to contact Jared Kushner to “debrief” him about hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

While Stone’s trial in Washington didn’t produce the bombshells about President Donald Trump that some expected, the testimony over the last week reinforced that those at the highest ranks of the Trump campaign were eager to gather information about WikiLeaks’ plan to release the damaging emails and saw Stone — who had repeatedly inferred he had inside information about those plans — as the best person to gather that intelligence.

Stone, a longtime Trump friend and ally, is charged with witness tampering and lying to Congress about his attempts to contact WikiLeaks about the damaging material during the 2016 presidential campaign.

View the complete November 12 article on the Time website here.

Roger Stone trial: Former top Trump official details campaign’s dealings on WikiLeaks, and suggests Trump was in the know

Washington Post logoRoger Stone was the linchpin of a months-long effort by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to discover damaging information on Hillary Clinton to be released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, an effort that began before the hack of Democratic emails was publicly known, Stone’s trial has shown.

Testimony over four days ending Tuesday also revealed engagement by Trump and top aides in making use of Stone’s claims that he knew emails detrimental to Clinton’s campaign would be released.

The trial in federal court in Washington turns on accusations that Stone lied to Congress about his attempts to learn more about what WikiLeaks would publish and when it would do so. But some testimony also raises questions about the president’s written assertions under oath that he did not recall being aware of communications between Stone and WikiLeaks or recall any conversations about WikiLeaks between Stone and members of his campaign.

View the complete November 12 article by Spencer S. Hsu, Rachel Weiner and Matt Zapotosky on The Washington Post website here.

Ex-Trump campaign official testifies Stone gave updates on WikiLeaks email dumps

The Hill logoPresident Trump‘s former deputy campaign manager told a jury on Tuesday that Roger Stone was giving the campaign updates on WikiLeaks’s plans to release damaging emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s campaign chairman.

Richard Gates, who is facing up to ten years in prison under a plea agreement for various fraud charges, testified in Stone’s criminal trial on Tuesday, saying that the longtime Trump associate was telling the campaign about WikiLeaks’s plans as early as April 2016, months before the DNC had announced it was hacked.

It had not been previously known that Stone was updating the campaign about WikiLeaks that early.

View the complete November 12 article by Harper Neidig on The Hill website here.

Stone Trial Links Trump More Closely to 2016 Effort to Obtain Stolen Emails

New York Times logoNewly revealed calls between President Trump and Roger Stone dovetailed with key developments in the theft of Democratic emails, prosecutors said.

WASHINGTON — President Trump was more personally involved in his campaign’s effort to obtain Democratic emails stolen by Russian operatives in 2016 than was previously known, phone records introduced in federal court on Wednesday suggested.

Federal prosecutors disclosed the calls at the start of the criminal trial of Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime friend, who faces charges of lying to federal investigators about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. Russian intelligence officers had funneled tens of thousands of emails they stole from Democratic computers to WikiLeaks, which released them at critical points during the presidential race.

The records suggest that Mr. Trump spoke to Mr. Stone repeatedly during the summer of 2016, at a time when Mr. Stone was aggressively seeking to obtain the stolen emails from Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. The prosecutors noted that they did not know what Mr. Stone and Mr. Trump had discussed. But they stressed that the timing of their calls dovetailed with other key developments related to the theft and release of the Democratic emails.

View the complete November 6 article by Sharon LaFraniere on The New York Times website here.

Prosecutor says Roger Stone lied ‘because the truth looked bad for Donald Trump’

Washington Post logoProsecutors fired their opening salvo Wednesday in the trial of Roger Stone, tying the combative political consultant directly to President Trump by revealing a series of 2016 phone calls that they said showed Stone later lied to Congress “because the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.”

Stone’s lawyer, in turn, argued that his client never meant to lie to lawmakers about his efforts to gain insights about Democrats’ hacked emails ahead of the presidential election. In an unusual gambit, Stone’s lawyer Bruce S. Rogow argued that Stone’s public claims about connections to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks were false, and therefore he did not make false statements later to Congress.

Stone’s trial is the last case filed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, and prosecutors wasted little time drawing a straight line from Stone’s alleged crimes to Trump’s political interests.

View the complete November 6 article by Spencer S. Hsu, Rachel Weiner and Devlin Barrett on The Washington Post website here.

Redacted Mueller Report

If you have an interest in reading the full redacted Mueller report, we have a link to a copy below.  (Where it’s a large PDF file, it takes a bit of time to load into preview mode.)  You’ll be able to read it in your browser window or download a copy to read offline:

https://app.luminpdf.com/viewer/CNFEcohiARvepzMtk

If you’d prefer to immediately download the file, here’s another link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C-id3YJBYAvSC5IoyIk6Du_S6Y6F3ZAU/view?usp=sharing

Following Assange Bust, Trump Claims ‘I Know Nothing About Wikileaks”

File this one on the list of Trump’s biggest, most absurd lies.

“I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing,” Trump said Thursday after the group’s founder, Julian Assange, was arrested in London. “I know there is something having to do with Julian Assange.”

However, during the 2016 campaign, Trump praised WikiLeaks more than 140 times in the final month of the campaign alone, after the group published emails that were stolen from top aides working on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

View the complete April 11 article by Emily Singer with The American Independent on the National Memo website here.