WWTBAM Bored

silverscreenselect wrote:My hunch is that this won't affect the pool very much unless someone is really up on the category of sleazy Russian businessmen and hackers.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/16/politics ... index.html

I'm eagerly awaiting to see how Flock, Pat Buchanan (I'm giving Flock a break but not mentioning his usual fellow traveler here), and the other Trump water carriers will turn this into part of the Mueller/Hillary Deep State conspiracy against Trump.

It's been you and the Bobbies that have been accusing Trump and the Republicans for colluding with the Russians. Mueller's indictments pretty much exonerate all Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike.

BackInTex wrote: Mueller's indictments pretty much exonerate all Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike.

The indictment doesn't exonerate anyone. In fact, it says that the 13 Russians conspired with others, known and unknown to the Grand Jury. This just means that Mueller didn't want to tip his hand at this particular time. I'm not sure how many, if any, of these Russians can actually be brought to trial in the U.S., but my feeling is that any of them who are arrested won't have much compunction about flipping on Kushner, Trump Jr., or anyone else. The easiest way to prove that an "unwitting" member of the Trump campaign was in fact quite witting will be for one of them to flip.

This was just Mueller's first move (and, again, it's one that no one was predicting).

silverscreenselect wrote:

BackInTex wrote: Mueller's indictments pretty much exonerate all Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike.

The indictment doesn't exonerate anyone. In fact, it says that the 13 Russians conspired with others, known and unknown to the Grand Jury. This just means that Mueller didn't want to tip his hand at this particular time. I'm not sure how many, if any, of these Russians can actually be brought to trial in the U.S., but my feeling is that any of them who are arrested won't have much compunction about flipping on Kushner, Trump Jr., or anyone else. The easiest way to prove that an "unwitting" member of the Trump campaign was in fact quite witting will be for one of them to flip.

This was just Mueller's first move (and, again, it's one that no one was predicting).

They won't flip because there is no one to flip on.

BackInTex wrote:

silverscreenselect wrote:

BackInTex wrote: Mueller's indictments pretty much exonerate all Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike.

The indictment doesn't exonerate anyone. In fact, it says that the 13 Russians conspired with others, known and unknown to the Grand Jury. This just means that Mueller didn't want to tip his hand at this particular time. I'm not sure how many, if any, of these Russians can actually be brought to trial in the U.S., but my feeling is that any of them who are arrested won't have much compunction about flipping on Kushner, Trump Jr., or anyone else. The easiest way to prove that an "unwitting" member of the Trump campaign was in fact quite witting will be for one of them to flip.

This was just Mueller's first move (and, again, it's one that no one was predicting).

They won't flip because there is no one to flip on.

This is one post I'm definitely going to bookmark for future reference.

BackInTex wrote:

silverscreenselect wrote:My hunch is that this won't affect the pool very much unless someone is really up on the category of sleazy Russian businessmen and hackers.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/16/politics ... index.html

I'm eagerly awaiting to see how Flock, Pat Buchanan (I'm giving Flock a break but not mentioning his usual fellow traveler here), and the other Trump water carriers will turn this into part of the Mueller/Hillary Deep State conspiracy against Trump.

It's been you and the Bobbies that have been accusing Trump and the Republicans for colluding with the Russians. Mueller's indictments pretty much exonerate all Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike.

I knew one of you would say that.

silverscreenselect wrote:

BackInTex wrote: Mueller's indictments pretty much exonerate all Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike.

This was just Mueller's first move (and, again, it's one that no one was predicting).

One big thing Mueller accomplished with this was to give himself a giant "Get Out of Jail Free" card with even the Republicans in Congress. They will be very hard pressed to support any talk about shutting down the investigation at this stage.

Should Chris Steel be indicted?

If the Russians were indicted for being foreigners trying to influence an election and for not registering as such...

then so should Steel.

This is like "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" but eventually ends with the Clinton Campaign being indicted. Not Trump's.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted foreign citizens for trying to influence the American public about an election because those citizens did not register as a foreign agent nor record their financial expenditures to the Federal Elections Commission. By that theory, when will Mueller indict Christopher Steele, FusionGPS, PerkinsCoie, the DNC and the Clinton Campaign

BackInTex wrote:Should Chris Steel be indicted?

If the Russians were indicted for being foreigners trying to influence an election and for not registering as such...

then so should Steel.

This is like "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" but eventually ends with the Clinton Campaign being indicted. Not Trump's.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted foreign citizens for trying to influence the American public about an election because those citizens did not register as a foreign agent nor record their financial expenditures to the Federal Elections Commission. By that theory, when will Mueller indict Christopher Steele, FusionGPS, PerkinsCoie, the DNC and the Clinton Campaign

Of course, Steele gave his information to the FBI, much of which it already had from other sources, and he never posed as an American organization, and neither he nor Hilary released the dirt he had on Trump to the public. Other than that, there's not much difference between Steele and the Russians.

Well, I doubt this one is going to change things either in the pool unless someone is really up on slimy attorneys, an especially broad category. This would also appear to be a case of someone flipping, but if Mueller is charging people with lying to his investigators, then there's a whole lot of Trumpies who are in big trouble.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ssia-probe

Well, you can't cover any new squares on your bingo card, but you should get some sort of bonus points if you had Manafort and/or Gates in the pool, as Mueller has now leveled some new charges against them bringing the indictments up from 12 counts to 32 counts. The new charges involve bank fraud and money laundering while the two were associated with the Trump campaign.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 364943002/

Gates has fired his attorney and it now looks as if he won't be co-operating with Mueller.

silverscreenselect wrote:Well, you can't cover any new squares on your bingo card, but you should get some sort of bonus points if you had Manafort and/or Gates in the pool, as Mueller has now leveled some new charges against them bringing the indictments up from 12 counts to 32 counts. The new charges involve bank fraud and money laundering while the two were associated with the Trump campaign.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 364943002/

Gates has fired his attorney and it now looks as if he won't be co-operating with Mueller.

Were these crimes related to the "stated purpose" of the investigation or collateral winnings? Real question.

BackInTex wrote:
Were these crimes related to the "stated purpose" of the investigation or collateral winnings? Real question.

Laundering millions while he was Trump's campaign manager. Nope, nothing to see here.

BackInTex wrote:

silverscreenselect wrote:Well, you can't cover any new squares on your bingo card, but you should get some sort of bonus points if you had Manafort and/or Gates in the pool, as Mueller has now leveled some new charges against them bringing the indictments up from 12 counts to 32 counts. The new charges involve bank fraud and money laundering while the two were associated with the Trump campaign.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 364943002/

Gates has fired his attorney and it now looks as if he won't be co-operating with Mueller.

Were these crimes related to the "stated purpose" of the investigation or collateral winnings? Real question.

Serious answer, to the best of my ability, since SSS just fed you another line of snark.

I didn't know the evolution of the what-is-now special counsel law until pretty recently. In Nixon's time, it was a special prosecutor, and that was Archibald Cox, until Nixon got him fired and replaced with Leon Jaworski. After the debacle of Watergate, the law expanded, because people were so disgusted by Nixon's actions. The office reached a peak with Kenneth Starr, who by this time was called an "independent counsel," which meant Clinton couldn't really do much of anything to him, and he poked through everything after originally being charged to investigate Whitewater, then meandering through Vince Foster, FBI files, Paula Jones, the White House travel office, and many other sideshows until landing on the Monica Lewinsky perjury investigation. After that, the people who make decisions about these kinds of things decided that Starr had had too much power, so they modified the independent counsel law, making the title "Special counsel."

Mueller has far less power and latitude than Starr had. Once he begins an investigation, though, he can pursue anything else that comes up, if it is directly linked to that investigation. I don't claim to know enough law to be able to follow much of what is going on, but based on what I have seen and known of Mueller, Rosenstein, and Wray, I have to believe they are doing the jobs they were hired to do to the best of their ability. And I also have to believe that if Mueller were overstepping his bounds, SOMEONE would call him out on it -- whether it's Trump's lawyers, or Republican lawmakers, or whatever.

I do believe it is pretty easy to connect the dots between Manafort and Gates's shady financial dealings to the Russian government through Ukraine, however. So even if you mistrust Mueller and the rest of the FBI, he at least appears to have sufficient cover to continue to investigate and prosecute them, even if his ultimate goal is to try to flip Manafort.

mrkelley23 wrote: Serious answer, to the best of my ability, since SSS just fed you another line of snark.

Thanks for that.

It was a serious question. I realize the charges could be related to the investigation into Russian connections, or it could be something else.

I just wanted know if these fish were perch or bass caught while competing in a bass tournament. Perch are pretty good eating, too, but won't win you the prize.

BackInTex wrote:

mrkelley23 wrote: Serious answer, to the best of my ability, since SSS just fed you another line of snark.

Thanks for that.

It was a serious question. I realize the charges could be related to the investigation into Russian connections, or it could be something else.

I just wanted know if these fish were perch or bass caught while competing in a bass tournament. Perch are pretty good eating, too, but won't win you the prize.

Definitely perch at best, IMHO. Sleazy, but more suited to a New York DA than a federal prosecutor.

mrkelley23 wrote:

BackInTex wrote: I just wanted know if these fish were perch or bass caught while competing in a bass tournament. Perch are pretty good eating, too, but won't win you the prize.

Definitely perch at best, IMHO. Sleazy, but more suited to a New York DA than a federal prosecutor.

Well, Mueller is getting that much closer to the prize. Gates cops a plea today and agrees to cooperate.

I don't think it's just Manafort he's going to testify against either; you don't hit someone with a 32-count indictment in the hopes that a co-defendant will turn on him.

The big fish is the great orange whale.

CNN wrote:Special counsel Robert Mueller told a federal court Tuesday that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn has given "substantial assistance" to the Russia investigation and should not get jail time.

Flynn has sat for 19 interviews with the special counsel and other Justice Department offices, and his early cooperation gave prosecutors a road map for their Russia investigation and may have helped to encourage others to cooperate, the filing states.

So they won't be "locking him up." Trump will probably tweet that Flynn shouldn't be rewarded for his lies, and defendants with guts like Stone and Corsi are being railroaded.

jarnon wrote:

CNN wrote:Special counsel Robert Mueller told a federal court Tuesday that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn has given "substantial assistance" to the Russia investigation and should not get jail time.

Flynn has sat for 19 interviews with the special counsel and other Justice Department offices, and his early cooperation gave prosecutors a road map for their Russia investigation and may have helped to encourage others to cooperate, the filing states.

So they won't be "locking him up." Trump will probably tweet that Flynn shouldn't be rewarded for his lies, and defendants with guts like Stone and Corsi are being railroaded.

They won't be locking him up, but they'll be locking a whole bunch of others up. That bingo card is going to get a lot of action soon.

And thanks jarnon for bringing this thread forward. It's going to save me a lot of trouble finding it.

silverscreenselect wrote:And thanks jarnon for bringing this thread forward. It's going to save me a lot of trouble finding it.

Why didn't you just bookmark it?

Estonut wrote:

silverscreenselect wrote:And thanks jarnon for bringing this thread forward. It's going to save me a lot of trouble finding it.

Why didn't you just bookmark it?

I would but the bookmarks keep falling off the monitor screen.

silverscreenselect wrote:

Estonut wrote:

silverscreenselect wrote:And thanks jarnon for bringing this thread forward. It's going to save me a lot of trouble finding it.

Why didn't you just bookmark it?

I would but the bookmarks keep falling off the monitor screen.

You could buy some better ones if you got money from an ATM machine.

Here's two more names I doubt anyone had in their pool. And, no this one I doubt has anything to do with Trump other than further confirmation that he hired some very sleazy people. (And Mueller handed the case off to Virginia prosecutors):

Two former business associates of Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser, have been indicted as part of a federal investigation into Turkey’s secret 2016 lobbying campaign to pressure the United States to expel a rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Charges against the two former associates, Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin, were unsealed on Monday in an Alexandria, Va., courtroom. The two men were indicted last week as part of a conspiracy to violate federal lobbying rules, and Mr. Alptekin also was charged with making false statements to F.B.I. investigators.

The indictment is further evidence of a broad crackdown on unregistered foreign lobbying growing from the inquiry by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who has investigated foreign flows of money from Ukraine, Turkey and other countries designed to manipulate decision-making in Washington. Mr. Mueller referred the Turkey case back to prosecutors in Northern Virginia. The indictment said that the two men sought to conceal that Turkey was directing the work, and that cabinet-level Turkish officials approved the budget for the project and were given regular updates by Mr. Alptekin about the campaign’s progress. Mr. Flynn’s firm — Flynn Intel Group — received a total of $530,000 for its work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/p ... -kian.html

Speaking of Flynn, here’s a document we rarely see: the summary of his original FBI interview. Flynn and one if his interviewers, Strzok, are now notorious. But Flynn admitted to lying at that meeting, and I’m not familiar enough with the investigation to know which of his statements are false, so the document is just a curiosity.

Flynn 302

One we knew was coming, Roger Stone:

Roger Stone arrested following Mueller indictment

Here’s the indictment. A juicy tidbit: Stone told a senior Trump campaign official about Wikileaks. Also, unlike previous documents, Mueller uses the name “Trump” freely and signed this one himself.

Much of the news from the Mueller investigation has been released on a Friday. I wonder if, as it nears its conclusion, there will be developments throughout the week, like at the end of a Supreme Court session.