Ok now that Manafort has pleaded guilty to this and conspiracy to obstruct justice does he deserve a pardon?
Charter Member
Ok now that Manafort has pleaded guilty to this and conspiracy to obstruct justice does he deserve a pardon?
Fred
"Everyday I beat my own previous record for number of consecutive days I've
stayed alive."
'Take care of yourself, and each other.'
Washington (CNN)Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department, including in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Manafort pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy against the US and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice due to attempts to tamper with witnesses, according to a court filing Friday.
Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told the judge Manafort's plea agreement is a "cooperation agreement," and other charges will be dropped at sentencing at "or at the agreement of successful cooperation."
Manafort had proffered information to the government already, Weissmann said in a federal court in a Washington, DC.
The scope of the cooperation was not immediately clear. While President Donald Trump is not mentioned in Friday's filing, nor is Manafort's role in his campaign, the news of the cooperation comes as the President continued to lambast the Mueller investigation on Twitter this week.
READ: Paul Manafort's plea
READ: Paul Manafort's plea
In a statement to CNN after the news of Manafort's cooperation, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said, "This had absolutely nothing to do with the President or his victorious 2016 Presidential campaign. It is totally unrelated."
Wearing a purple tie beneath his dark suit, Manafort looked glum as the hearing unfolded, standing next to his attorney, Richard Westling, with a court security officer standing immediately behind him. Manafort answered the judge's questions about himself, his plea and rights he will waive, including his right to a trial.
"I do," he said repeatedly, waiving each right.
Westling agreed in court that the mistried counts in Virginia will be dropped with Manafort's admission of guilt to all his allegations. In DC, his seven criminal counts are rewritten as two.
Prosecutors will drop the five remaining charges in DC federal court against Manafort, including money laundering, tax fraud, failing to disclose foreign bank accounts, violating federal foreign lobbying law and lying to the Department of Justice. But the court filing says Manafort admits to the actions.
Manafort had faced seven charges in Washington and faces another 10 possible charges in Virginia which had been declared in mistrial. It's still not clear what will happen to those charges in Virginia federal court. He's already been convicted on eight counts of bank and tax fraud crimes in the Virginia trial.
In recent days, as the Manafort plea talks were ongoing, the President's legal team expressed confidence that if Manafort signed a cooperation agreement it wouldn't have anything to do with the President, according to a source briefed on their thinking.
In a statement Friday, the President's attorney Rudy Giuliani reiterated that confidence.
"Once again an investigation has concluded with a plea having nothing to do with President Trump or the Trump campaign. The reason: the President did nothing wrong," said Giuliani.
It was the second version of the statement. The initial version, which was quickly revised, included "Paul Manafort will tell the truth" as part of the quote. The amended version removed the phrase.
A legal source, supportive of the President and familiar with the Manafort case, said the Trump team does not believe Manafort has anything significant on the President to share with the special counsel.
The White House had previously distanced itself from Manafort and downplayed his time leading the Trump campaign. But last month, Trump expressed sympathy for him.
"I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family," the President tweeted the week of Manafort's conviction in his Virginia trial. "'Justice' took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to 'break' - make up stories in order to get a 'deal.' Such respect for a brave man!"
In their filing, prosecutors describe Manafort's scheme to take in more than $60 million from pro-Russian Ukrainians and launder that money to avoid paying taxes. He appears to admit to the allegations he faced in both Virginia federal court and DC district court, describing his use of offshore bank accounts to move the money, deceive his accountants and bookkeeper and then spend the money on lavish purchases and real estate.
He also will admit to lying to banks about his assets to gain new loans as a way to supplement his income, according to the filing.
"Manafort cheated the United States out of over $15 million in taxes," the filing states, adding that in order to commit the crimes, he relied on help from both his longtime deputy Rick Gates and the Russian Konstantin Kilimnik.
Jury selection was set to begin next week
Friday's plea deal comes just three days ahead of when jury selection for his second trial was set to begin.
As part of the run-up to the second trial, Manafort's lawyers filed hundreds of pages in court to fight prosecutors' allegations -- having brought two appeals unsuccessfully -- and his legal fees mounted to more than $1 million, according to two people familiar with his case.
Manafort, Trump's top political operative from May to August 2016, has long been considered one of the bigger fish for Muller's office. In addition to the financial and lobbying charges against Manafort, the special counsel's team has said it's investigating allegations he colluded with Russia while working for Trump.
CNN Poll: More approve of Mueller than of Trump
CNN Poll: More approve of Mueller than of Trump
Over the past several months, Manafort's legal options slimmed as the special counsel notched several wins against him, including sending him to jail, securing several cooperators and gaining convictions.
Manafort's case marked the first indictment in Mueller's investigation. The allegations revealed last October reiterated a year of news reports that Manafort had secretly funneled income from Ukrainian lobbying contacts for years.
After his arrest in October, he was detained by the court in his Alexandria, Virginia, home for more than eight months.
Then in February, prosecutors filed new mortgage and tax fraud charges against him weeks after they discovered he was offering to secure his bail with homes tied up in his alleged mortgage fraud.
Prosecutors also gained the cooperation of his longtime associate Rick Gates, who had been indicted alongside him. Gates pleaded guilty in February to helping Manafort use bank accounts in Cyprus and Grenadines to hide millions they had made while lobbying for Ukrainian politicians. Gates testified against Manafort in the Virginia trial, saying his former boss had directed him to commit the fraud.
The special counsel's office added a second potential cooperator against Manafort in late August when another lobbyist for the Ukrainians, Sam Patten, pleaded guilty to a foreign lobbying charge. Patten worked with Manafort's Russian associate Kilimnik through 2017 and admitted in court to illegally using a straw purchaser to buy Trump inaugural tickets for an oligarch.
Kilimnik is charged as a co-defendant in Manafort's DC criminal case, for the witness tampering accusation. In previous court filings, prosecutors allege he had ties to the Russian GRU, a military intelligence agency. Kilimnik has not appeared in court, though Manafort's plea Friday admits that he committed his crimes in conspiracy with both Gates and Kilimnik.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
CNN's Sophie Tatum, Evan Perez, Gloria Borger and Allie Malloy contributed to this report.
"The only thing that we learn from torture is the depths of our own moral depravity"
Fox New report
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018...l-counsel.html
"The only thing that we learn from torture is the depths of our own moral depravity"
to answer Fred's question. If any of them are found to have conspired with a foreign government, Hell no
"The only thing that we learn from torture is the depths of our own moral depravity"
Registered Member
I'm here, but got some medical problems, so will be scarce pretty much. This bull roar will never stop.
Old redneck hillbilly borned and raised on a redwood stump.
Charter Member
Very odd when you understand there is no such law proscribing “Conspiracy Against The United States.” I have little doubt that Manafort is dirty on several levels, yet I wonder what machinations has led him to agree to plead guilty to a charge that does not exist.
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“You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.” — Too fundamental to have an attribution
Guest
I would give him a pardon just to see the liberals heads explode. I am also wondering how you come up with conspiracy against the US? Wouldnt that be more along the lines of treason? Could that Conspiracy charge also be used against Obama and Kerry for aiding the Iranians, who are sworn enemies of the US, and those two handed them billions in cash. How much of that cash went to fund terrorists and their organizations, because according to the Iranian citizens, they damn sure did not receive any of it.
Guest
And CNN, really, they couldnt tell the truth to save their lives.
that why the Fox link..I'm am presenting both points of slanted viewsOriginally Posted by TxMusky
"The only thing that we learn from torture is the depths of our own moral depravity"
Guest
Well it seems like Manafort also took the same folks to a meeting with Obama and Biden, what are we to gather about that?
Paul Manafort’s pro-Ukraine campaign reached the top of the White House, with one of the members of his lobbying effort meeting President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in 2013, according to new court documents released Friday.
A member of the so-called Hapsburg Group, which comprised former European politicians Manafort convened as part of his lobbying effort in support of Ukraine’s then-President Viktor Yanukovych, came with a foreign prime minister on May 16, 2013, to meet with Obama and Biden, “as well as senior United States officials in the executive and legislative branches,” according to the court documents.
Alan Friedman, a former journalist based in Europe who helped Manafort launch the group, told Manafort after the meeting that the member of the Hapsburg Group “delivered the message of not letting ‘Russians steal Ukraine from the West,’” prosecutors say.
Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chief, pleaded guilty Friday to two criminal charges from special counsel Robert Mueller to head off a potentially dramatic trial over allegations he violated laws on foreign lobbying. The court documents released Friday say Manafort failed to register as a foreign lobbyist, as required under U.S. law, or disclose a host of meetings, including the one involving Obama and Biden. The lobbying effort that caught prosecutors’ attention tried to persuade the U.S. government to support Yanukovych, who was at the time under international fire for jailing a rival, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. U.S. lawmakers had condemned Yanukovych’s actions, and he would later flee Ukraine for Russia after his government’s security forces beat protesters in 2013.
Court documents and filings with the Justice Department previously revealed some of the members of Manafort’s Hapsburg Group and showed that they met with dozens of members of Congress, congressional staffers and Obama administration officials. But Friday brought the first indication that the campaign stretched to the top of the U.S. government.
The court documents don’t name the member of the Hapsburg Group or the prime minister, but Obama met on May 16, 2013, with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The Turkish leader was accompanied by foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and Hakan Fidan, head of Turkish intelligence.
The court documents also indicate that Manafort “orchestrated a scheme to have … ‘[O]bama jews’ put pressure on the administration” to persuade it to support Yanukovych.
As part of his effort, Manafort disseminated stories that said “a senior Cabinet official” who had previously criticized Yanukovych “was supporting anti-Semitism because the official backed Tymoshenko, who in turn had formed a political alliance with a Ukraine party that espoused anti-Semitic views,” the court documents state.
Manafort worked with a senior Israeli government official to provide a statement on the issue, prosecutors say, with the hope that the story would force the administration to “understand that ‘the Jewish community will take this out on Obama on election day if he does nothing.’”
Although the senior Cabinet official is not named in the documents, prior to the 2012 elections, conservative media reported accusations of anti-Semitism against then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because of a New York Times op-ed she co-wrote with Catherine Ashton, then high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy. The op-ed voiced concern about Ukraine’s political situation.
“We regret that the convictions of opposition leaders during trials that did not meet international standards are preventing them from standing in parliamentary elections,” Clinton and Ashton wrote. “The Ukrainian government needs to address these selective prosecutions, including the case of former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko and other former senior officials.”
Breitbart reported in October 2012 that “a Jewish leader, who asked to remain unnamed, says that Clinton’s New York Times op-ed ripping the current Ukrainian administration has ‘created a neo-Nazi Frankenstein by issuing a de facto endorsement of Mrs. Tymoshenko and her choices.’”
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/...a-biden-824747
How deep does the garbage pile go or are we really just interested in f**king Trump?
Charter Member
Wasn’t the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and his lobbying firm partners with Manafort in all these efforts, also unreported to the government, yet gets a big, fat pass? Seems like I read that buried somewhere on Page 13. I must be mistaken. Surely a connection such as that would garner a mention in this reporting about undeclared lobbying.
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“You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.” — Too fundamental to have an attribution
Charter Member
Damn shame, once you can split up all the butt buddies and actually get a conviction it just turns into an inconvenience for the treasonous f@#king felons! And they get to keep all of their ill gotten gains from all of the other felonies they have committed!
This is your mind on drugs!
Registered Member
I sure hope you get to feeling better buddy
OPINION....a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.
Registered Member
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/371
If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
If, however, the offense, the commission of which is the object of the conspiracy, is a misdemeanor only, the punishment for such conspiracy shall not exceed the maximum punishment provided for such misdemeanor.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 701; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147.)
Registered Member
....Federal prosecutors in New York are weighing criminal charges against former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig as part of an investigation into whether he failed to register as a foreign agent in a probe that is linked to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, according to sources familiar with the matter.
In addition, these sources said, prosecutors in the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York are considering taking action against powerhouse law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, where Craig was a partner during the activity under examination.
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