Tag: Paul Manafort

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.

He’s back! Trump’s former campaign manager resurfaces — at the heart of Ukraine

AlterNet logoHas anyone else noticed that we already had a presidential election during which all you heard was “Russia! Russia! Russia!” and now here we are three years later in the middle of another one, and all you hear is “Ukraine! Ukraine! Ukraine!”? It’s easy to forget the good old days when you would read long take-outs by political whizzes like Jack Germond about the genius of some Republican state committeeman in deep Indiana who was going to turn out the south 32 counties for Nixon in a tightly contested primary. Who even knows what a Republican committeeman is these days, when you’re more likely to read that some hack Ukrainian prosecutor holds the keys to Trump’s re-election.

It’s 2016 all over again, folks. The only thing that’s changed is the name of the corrupt foreign country that Trump is tapping to influence his re-election to the presidency. Even some of the players are the same. Remember Paul Manafort, the late, lamented former Trump campaign chairman who fancied ostrich skin jackets and $12,000 suits? Well, old Paul is currently sporting prison polyester, waist chains and handcuffs, and he’s ba-a-a-a-a-a-ack!

Manafort’s name surfaced last month in reports that Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has been talking to the jailed former Trump campaign manager through his attorneys, seeking confirmation of a free-floating right-wing conspiracy theory that it wasn’t the Russians who meddled on behalf of Trump in the 2016 election, but the Ukrainians who butted in on behalf of Hillary Clinton. Yep, you read that right. From his cell in prison, no less, Manafort has been pushing a narrative about the 2016 election that discredits the rationale behind the entire investigation by Robert Mueller into Russian election meddling.

View the complete November 9 article by Lucian K. Truscott IV from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Internal Mueller documents show Trump campaign chief pushed unproven theory Ukraine hacked Democrats

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, suggested as early as the summer of 2016 that Ukrainians might have been responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee during the presidential campaign rather than Russians, a key witness told federal investigators last year.

Newly released documents show that Manafort’s protege, deputy campaign manager Rick Gates, told the FBI of Manafort’s theory during interviews conducted as part of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Gates told the FBI that Manafort had shared his theory of Ukrainian culpability with him and other campaign aides before the election.

The new information shows how early people in Trump’s orbit were pushing the unsubstantiated theory about Ukraine’s role. And it illustrates a link between Mueller’s investigation, which concluded in March, and the current House impeachment investigation of Trump. The president had pushed Ukrainians to open a probe into whether their country interfered in the election — an assertion his allies have made in an effort to discredit Mueller’s findings about Russia’s role.

View the complete November 2 article by Rosalind S. Helderman and Spencer S. Hsu on The Washington Post website here.

Giuliani consulted on Ukraine with imprisoned Paul Manafort via a lawyer

Washington Post logoIn his quest to rewrite the history of the 2016 election, President Trump’s personal attorney has turned to an unusual source of information: Trump’s imprisoned former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Rudolph W. Giuliani in recent months has consulted several times with Manafort through the federal prisoner’s lawyer in pursuit of information about a disputed ledger that would bolster his theory that the real story of 2016 is not Russian interference to elect Trump, but Ukrainian efforts to support Hillary Clinton.

The relationship, which Giuliani acknowledged in an interview this week with The Washington Post, stems from a shared interest in a narrative that undermines the rationale for the special counsel investigation. That inquiry led to Manafort’s imprisonment on tax and financial fraud allegations related to his work in Kiev for the political party of former president Viktor Yanukovych.

View the complete October 2 article by Josh Dawsey, Tom Hamburger, Paul Sonne and Rosalind S. Helderman on The Washington Post website here.

Paul Manafort’s legal problems keep going from bad to worse

AlterNet logoThe legal problems of Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, have been going from bad to worse. The 70-year-old Manafort is already serving seven and one-half years in federal prison, but when he appeared in a courtroom in New York City on Thursday, June 27, he was fighting separate accusations and entered a “not guilty” plea to mortgage fraud charges. And if he is ultimately convicted, there is a possibility that Manafort could end up with even more prison time.

The mortgage fraud charges Manafort pled “not guilty” to were not federal charges, but rather, charges in New York State and were part of an indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. And the fact that Vance is prosecuting Manafort at the state level is important.

In 2018, Manafort’s federal prosecution and trial in Alexandria, Virginia were a result of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Manafort was never accused of criminally conspiracy with Russian government officials, and when Mueller wrapped up his investigation earlier this year, he concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians — although questionable — never reached the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy. But Mueller’s team found a mountain of evidence of tax and bank crimes on Manafort’s part, and he was convicted on multiple counts last year.

View the complete June 28 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Paul Manafort Seemed Headed to Rikers. Then the Justice Department Intervened.

The decision came after Attorney General William Barr’s top deputy sent a letter to state prosecutors. Mr. Manafort will now be held in a federal lockup while he faces state charges.

Paul J. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman who is serving a federal prison sentence, had been expected to be transferred to the notorious Rikers Island jail complex this month to await trial on a separate state case.

But last week, Manhattan prosecutors were surprised to receive a letter from the second-highest law enforcement official in the country inquiring about Mr. Manafort’s case. The letter, from Jeffrey A. Rosen, Attorney General William P. Barr’s new top deputy, indicated that he was monitoring where Mr. Manafort would be held in New York.

And then, on Monday, federal prison officials weighed in, telling the Manhattan district attorney’s office that Mr. Manafort, 70, would not be going to Rikers.

View the complete June 17 article by William K. Rashbaum and Katie Benner on The New York Times website here.

Investigating The Investigators? Don’t Forget That Manafort Meeting

Riddle me this: exactly how did the Deep State, anti-Trump conspirators in the FBI and CIA persuade Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to hand over sensitive internal polling data to a Russian spy? Not to mention, what did Konstantin Kilimnik do with it?

More to the point, how is Attorney General William Barr going to explain it away? Particularly in view of the fact that Manafort remains locked up in a federal slammer, having violated a plea agreement with special counsel Robert Mueller for lying to investigators about that very thing.

Because if Barr can’t explain, then all of his weasel-worded insinuations about FBI “spying” on the Trump campaign stand revealed for what they are: the desperate rationalizations of a cunning political operative willing to play along with an absurd conspiracy theory concocted to appease Donald J. Trump and distract his fervid supporters.

View the complete June 11 article by Gene Lyon on the National Memo website here.

Giuliani meets with former diplomat as he continues to press Ukraine inquiries

Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani had a lengthy meeting last week with a former Ukrainian diplomat as part of aggressive efforts aimed at gathering information to undermine Democrats in the United States.

The Ukrainian, Andrii Telizhenko, has made unproven claims that the Democratic National Committee worked with the Kiev government in 2016 to dig up incriminating information about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was sentenced in March to more than seven years in prison on conspiracy and fraud charges. The DNC has denied Telizhenko’s claims.

“He was in Washington and he came up to New York, and we spent most of the afternoon together,” Giuliani said in an interview, referring to his meeting with Telizhenko.

View the complete May 24 article by Josh Dawsey and David L. Stern on The Washington Post website here. 

A Manafort Pardon Would Prove Trump’s Guilt

No longer can there be any doubt that Paul Manafort expects Donald Trump to pardon him — and that Trump has encouraged that expectation in a broad strategy to obstruct the Russia investigation over the past two years.

The signals emanating from Manafort’s legal team over the past few days could scarcely have been clearer. Moments after Judge Amy Berman Jackson extended Manafort’s federal prison time to seven and a half years, his lawyer, Kevin Downing, assured the assembled press outside the Washington courthouse that the judge’s sentence indicated there had been “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia. Downing uttered that false statement just minutes after Judge Jackson had scolded him in court for making exactly the same irrelevant remark following Manafort’s sentencing last week in Virginia.

As the judge said, those statements were intended not for the court but for the White House, echoing the president’s own favorite alibi. Coming from Manafort, through his legal mouthpiece, “no collusion” means “I didn’t tell Robert Mueller about any collusion.”

View the complete March 14 article by Joe Conason with the Creators Syndicate on the National Memo website here.

Mueller focus shifts to Rick Gates

The focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is about to shift to Richard Gates.

Gates, Paul Manafort’s ex-business partner and President Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman, has been quietly cooperating with federal prosecutors for over a year on Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

He’s also a cooperating witness to other undisclosed federal probes.

View the complete March 14 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.