Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

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[Michael Scally MD]

The first big takeaway from this morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III, and George Papadopoulos is this: The President of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.

The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team now admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some them.

Before we dive any deeper into the Manafort-Gates indictment—charges to which both pled not guilty to today—or the Papadopoulos plea and stipulation, let’s pause a moment over these two remarkable claims, one of which we must still consider as allegation and the other of which we can now consider as admitted fact. President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had "nothing to do with Russia."

The release of these documents should, though it probably won’t, put to rest the suggestion that there are no serious questions of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the latter’s interference on the former’s behalf during the 2016 election. It also raises a profound set of questions of its own about the truthfulness of a larger set of representations Trump campaign officials and operatives have made both in public, and presumably, under oath and to investigators.

And here’s the rub: This is only Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s opening salvo.

As opening salvos go, it’s a doozy.

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We will say this: Mueller’s opening bid is a remarkable show of strength. He has a cooperating witness from inside the campaign’s interactions with the Russians. And he is alleging not mere technical infractions of law but astonishing criminality on the part of Trump’s campaign manager, a man who also attended the Trump Tower meeting.

Any hope the White House may have had that the Mueller investigation might be fading away vanished this morning. Things are only going to get worse from here.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

While the biggest news of the day is the indictments Robert S. Mueller III has handed down against former Trump aides Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, today he also released a plea bargain with a heretofore minor figure in the Russia scandal by the name of George Papadopoulos. And that could actually be the day’s biggest news.

That’s because while Manafort and Gates sure look like they’re going to jail, as of yet they aren’t cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. Papadopoulos is, which means that he likely has information that will lead Mueller closer to the heart of the case.

Papadopoulos was a junior foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. In August we learned that he had tried to set up meetings between Trump officials — and even Trump himself — with representatives of the Russian government. At the time, his suggestion was characterized as having been rejected by other Trump officials as inappropriate while Trump was still a candidate and not yet president.

But now that we’ve seen the details of Papadopoulos’ plea, it sure looks like that wasn’t the whole story.

Papadopoulos has agreed to plead guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians. Specifically, he falsely claimed that they had occurred before he joined the campaign in March 2016. He had communication with a professor who had contacts in the Russian government; this professor told him that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” The professor introduced him to a Russian national who was supposedly Vladimir Putin’s niece (it turned out she wasn’t), and to someone who supposedly had connections in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). Based on those conversations, Papadopoulos pressed the campaign to set up meetings with the Russians, a suggestion that never came to fruition.

So what does this have to do with the larger case? I spoke this morning with Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan law school who is a former U.S. Attorney and who has worked extensively in criminal and national security cases. I asked: If Papadopoulos was just some low-level nobody tossing around ideas that were rejected by the campaign’s higher-ups, why would Mueller offer him a plea deal that is contingent on his cooperation? Doesn’t that suggest that he has information that can be used to build a case against someone more important than him?

“I think it’s a fair conclusion to think that he has information that is valuable in the prosecution of others,” McQuade says. “You would only offer that cooperation if you’ve sat down with him and learned that he has information that is of value.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Swiper]

the manaford charges have absolutely nothing to do with president Trump or the Trump campaign. only thing is Trump probably should have vetted manaford more carefully before he hired him for 3 months.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Now begins the crisis stage of the Trump presidency
Opinion | Now begins the crisis stage of the Trump presidency

We knew it was coming, and now it is here. The Trump presidency had crisis written all over it from the beginning, and all the symptoms were apparent from the first day of his campaign. Americans who voted for Donald Trump hoping for some disruption didn’t know the half of what they were bargaining for. We’re about to experience that. Trump is a bad bargain.

We should all be grateful for the speed and apparent rigorous professionalism that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has brought to his investigation of Russia’s subversive involvement in our election. It will make it a good deal harder and a good deal less credible when Trump turns on him personally, which seems almost inevitable. The charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his longtime business partner Rick Gates have now set in motion the first, if not the final, crisis in Donald Trump’s presidency.

The medical meaning of the word “crisis” is useful here, as an inflection point in a process of a disease. It is the threshold where things turn better, or worse. What it is not is government as usual. The Trump presidency has been an impeachment waiting to happen. Trump knows it, and is ready to start a scorched-earth protection of himself whenever needed. How do we know this? Have you been paying attention to who he is and how he behaves?

My personal opinion is that the best of a bad set of choices is to remove Trump from office as quickly as possible. If a crisis is a turning point in a disease, yes, I consider the Trump presidency a disease of the American political system. Trump has shown over and over and over again that he has no regard for the democratic norms of honesty in governing or any respect for legitimate opposition centers of power. And now one of those independent centers of power is getting ominously close to Trump.

This process will lead either to the orderly removal of Donald Trump from office, or a newly empowered and vengeful Donald Trump.

Neither scenario will be pretty. The second scenario is nothing but terrifying.

 

[GigaloRob]

the manaford charges have absolutely nothing to do with president Trump or the Trump campaign. only thing is Trump probably should have vetted manaford more carefully before he hired him for 3 months.

Please do not attempt to interject facts inside of this bubble as they have no place here.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

THE BIGGEST NEWS of Mueller Monday — the roll out of a money laundering indictment against Trump’s former campaign adviser, Paul Manafort and campaign aide Rick Gates, and the unsealing of a false statements plea deal by another campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos — may involve someone not named explicitly in either indictment: Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

That’s because Sessions has repeatedly testified to the Senate that he knows nothing about any collusion with the Russians (though in his most recent appearance, he categorized that narrowly by saying he did not “conspire with Russia or an agent of the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election”).

But the Papadopoulos plea shows that Sessions — then acting as Trump’s top foreign policy adviser — was in a March 31, 2016, meeting with Trump at which Papadopoulos explained “he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.” It also shows that Papadopoulos kept a number of campaign officials in the loop on his efforts to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin, though they secretly determined that the meeting “should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal,” itself a sign the campaign was trying to hide its efforts to make nice with the Russians.

Papadopoulos also learned, on April 26, that the Russians “have dirt” on Clinton; “they have thousands of emails.” A key part of Papadopoulos’s cooperation must pertain to what he told the Trump campaign about these emails. According to his complaint, he originally claimed he hadn’t told anyone on the campaign about the dirt on Clinton because he didn’t know if it was real. But as his plea makes clear, after being arrested, he “met with the Government on numerous occasions to provide information and answer questions.” There would be no reason for Papadopoulos to lie about the significance of the emails in January unless he did so to hide his discussions of them with the rest of the campaign.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

See: http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/sites/dcd/files/17-mc-2336_MEM_OP_REDACTED FOR UNSEALING_20171030.pdf [Sections Blacked Out!!!]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Swiper]

Please do not attempt to interject facts inside of this bubble as they have no place here.

it’s too bad some people just don’t know what the facts are or don’t care

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]