Robert Mueller to provide Paul Manafort with free room and board until September
In prison. Judge revokes Manafort’s bail for alleged witness tampering until September 2018 trial.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally has sent someone to jail. Paul Manafort.
For nothing having to do with Russia or the Trump campaign.
For alleged witness tampering in a criminal case based on Manafort’s long ago dealings unrelated to Trump or the campaign.
NBC News reports:
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office convinced a federal judge on Friday to revoke the bail of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chief after he was accused of witness tampering.
“I cannot turn a blind eye to this,” Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in a Washington courtroom, explaining that she could not just release Manafort with more restrictions.
“This isn’t middle school, I can’t take your phone,” Jackson said.
Manafort, 69, did not appear to react to the ruling beyond a nod to his attorney. He was immediately taken into custody and walked into a hallway behind the courtroom. He gave a quick wave to his wife as he disappeared from sight.
He will remain in pretrial detention until a trial in September on charges that include conspiracy and money laundering; he also faces a separate trial in Virginia.
The details of the alleged witness tampering were set forth Mueller’s motion to revoke Manafort’s release pending trial (pdf.)(full embed at bottom of post).
Manafort denied the witness tampering in an opposition to the motion (pdf.)(full embed at bottom of post):
The Special Counsel creates an argument based on the thinnest of evidence; to wit, Mr. Manafort violated the Release Order’s standard admonition that a defendant not commit an offense while on release by allegedly attempting to tamper with trial witnesses. However, the scant proof of this claim is an 84-second telephone call and a few text messages between Mr. Manafort (or an associate referred to as “Person A”) and two former business associates(Doc. 315-2, Ex. N). These brief text messages followed the filing of the Superseding Indictment on February 23, which was the first time the Special Counsel raised any allegations about the mission and work of the Hapsburg Group. (Doc. 202, ¶¶30, 31.) Closer scrutiny of this “evidence” reveals that the Special Counsel’s allegations are without merit because Mr. Manafort’s limited communications cannot be fairly read, either factually or legally, to reflect an intent to corruptly influence a trial witness.
The witness tampering was included in a Superseding Indictment filed on June 8, 2018 (pdf.)(full embed at bottom of post).
COUNT SIX
(Obstruction Of Justice)48. Paragraphs 1 through 36 are incorporated here.
49. From in or about and between February 23, 2018, and April 2018, both dates being
approximate and inclusive, within the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the defendants PAUL
J. MANAFORT, JR., and KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK knowingly and intentionally attempted to
corruptly persuade another person, to wit: Persons D1 and D2, with intent to influence, delay, and
prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding.(18 U.S.C. §§ 2, 1512(b)(1), and 3551 et seq.)
COUNT SEVEN
(Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice)50. Paragraphs 1 through 36 are incorporated here.
51. From in or about and between February 23, 2018, and April 2018, both dates being
approximate and inclusive, within the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the defendants PAUL
J. MANAFORT, JR., and KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK knowingly and intentionally conspired to
corruptly persuade another person, to wit: Persons D1 and D2, with intent to influence, delay, and prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §
1512(b)(1).(18 U.S.C. §§ 2, 1512(b)(1), and 3551 et seq.)
Manafort’s conduct in contacting potential witnesses was incredibly stupid, particularly for someone on bail and who has the full weight of the Special Counsel team focused on putting him in jail.
All of this is taking place because Manafort made the life-error of associating with the Trump campaign at a time when the FBI and DOJ, aided by opposition research paid for by Hillary and the DNC, was seeking to portray Trump as colluding with the Russians.
Mueller has yet to put anyone in jail, or even charge anyone, for alleged campaign collusion. So Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn and a handful of others will face the choice of capitulating and taking a plea, or suffering a complete financial collapse of their lives and those of their families due to the cost of litigating against a Special Counsel team that has all the time and money in the world.
———————
USA v. Manafort – Motion to Revoke Bail June 4, 2018 by Legal Insurrection on Scribd
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USA v. Manafort – Opposition to Motion to Revoke Bail June 8, 2018 by Legal Insurrection on Scribd
———————
USA v. Manafort – Superseding Indictment (DC) June 8, 2018 by Legal Insurrection on Scribd
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Comments
Comes now the test: Will Trump pardon Manafort?
You are assuming that he will be convicted. I would not go so fast.
I can guarantee with absolute certainty that if Manafort is tried in DC he will be convicted, not because he is guilty, but because of his association with Trump. He will become the whipping boy.
For witness tampering? No.
Mueller can delay the trial over and over and over again almost as long as he likes. And for what? The case against Manafort is over ten years old and was kicked to the curb by the FBI/DOJ years ago.
Mueller has not been able to get Manafort to ‘sing’ let alone ‘compose’ testimony against Trump, so now he increases the pressure. Remember, Mueller put four men he knew to be innocent of the crime charged in prison where the survivors stayed for decades; two of the four dies in prison.
This ‘witness tampering’ was known back in February, it is NOT a new charge, it is extortion.
Because I am the Special Prosecutor and I can do the Special Prosecutors Superior Dance.
Hit it Pearl.
If Manafort did what he’s accused of doing, then let him rot in prison – with hillary clinton beside him.
This farce has gone far enough. This is war.
To think, all of this became an issue after the coup in Kiev, which was staged in response to Russia’s confrontation of ISIS in Syria.
Or was it a coup backed by the Obama Administration with interested parties supporting the coup because of potential control of pipelines through Ukraine to Europe?
The Afghanistan pipeline may be more consequential for those involved.
Let Mueller spin. He’s done more to delegitimize his impeachment project than anything said or done by Trump.
Mueller Peter Principled out on the Hatfield-Anthrax investigation. Ruthlessness, too much zeal and insufficient scrupulousness in that investigation cost Uncle Sam a $5.8 million settlement.
Same Mueller. Bigger stage. More eyeballs now.
Mueller isn’t actually prosecuting Manafort. He tagged his filthy, lying deputy Weissman to do that. Considering Weissman’s track record I’d say he might convict Manafort and then he’d be acquitted on appeal.
That’s how so many of his convictions in the Enron case turned out. Weissman isn’t stupid. He resigned as the director of the Enron task force just before the judge began dressing down the prosecutors in the Enron Broadband case as both the judge and the press caught on to Weissman’s modus operandi of gaining convictions through prosecutorial misconduct and abuse.
This is why Judge Sullivan, who was assigned the case after the judge who accepted the guilty plea had to/was recused, still hasn’t sentenced Michael Flynn. Without Flynn’s defense team to take such action he ordered, on his own authority, that Mueller’s team turn over all exculpatory evidence to Flynn’s defense team back in January. And Mueller still hasn’t done it! Mueller immediately requested and received a 90 day delay, then a second one in May. He’s been burned once before by DoJ lawyers who play keep away with the evidence they’re required to turn over in the Ted Stevens case (so much for Comey’s assertion that he didn’t want to interfere in an election; he has in the past). No doubt he’s also aware that Andrew Weissman is the proverbial “dirty cop” who does the prosecutorial equivalent of planting evidence to gain convictions.
I expected the judge to rubberstamp this attempt by Mueller to jail Manafort. This is a typical Mueller/Weissman (his deputy) tactic.
Andrew Weissman was the deputy and then director of the Enron task force. During the course of the farce he was able to convince a judge to jail four Merrill Lynch executives and one junior Enron executive in what became known as the Enron Barge case, all in an attempt to twist the screws and get them to roll on higher ups. I know that at least three of the four Merrill Lynch and the Enron executive were entirely exonerated on appeal. The Fifth Circuit Court took the prosecutors to task for “creatively criminalize” a perfectly legal business transaction. As the court said, their actions “did not constitute criminal conduct.”
This is one of the prosecutorial abuses that Weissman became famous for here in Texas. Manufacturing crimes where none exists, then convincing a judge to go along with it. Then threatening to indict the accused close family members if the accused didn’t accept a plea deal to the non-crime.
I have no idea why idiot judges go along with this crap. Weissman destroyed Arthur Anderson because he convinced a judge to issue jury instructions that left out the part of the statute that said they had to find the accounting firm had criminal intent when it destroyed documents. So the jury found the company guilty since they didn’t know they were required to determine criminal intent. The case was unanimously overturned by the SCOTUS due to this prosecutorial misconduct but he put 85000 people out of work because again he destroyed a company over a non-crime.
Mueller is no better. First of all, he knows Weissman’s track record. Weissman should have been disbarred. Some attorneys from Texas, including a law professor, filed charges against Weissman with the New York bar association. Acting improperly and without notifying the complainants the committee that was supposed to decide the merits of the charges quietly slipped the whole case to the DoJ for the Office of Professional Responsibility to decide the issue. As if the OPR has the authority to take Weissman’s law license. Naturally, the DoJ which had been defending Weissman against the charges found him as innocent as a newborn infant.
But then Mueller has his own track record of perfidy.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/05/21/when_comey_and_mueller_bungled_the_anthrax_case_133953.html
“Kristof never mentioned why he had as much reason to recuse himself from this subject as Attorney General Jeff Sessions did. I’ll explain later. First, I’ll say that when I heard Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had appointed Bob Mueller as a special prosecutor, I didn’t experience the same rhapsody as my capital compatriots. Why? Three reasons.
…The third and most important factor tempering my enthusiasm for the new special prosecutor is that Comey and Mueller badly bungled the biggest case they ever handled. They botched the investigation of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that took five lives and infected 17 other people, shut down the U.S. Capitol and Washington’s mail system, solidified the Bush administration’s antipathy for Iraq, and eventually, when the facts finally came out, made the FBI look feckless, incompetent, and easily manipulated by outside political pressure.
This, too, was an enormously complex case. But here are some facts: Despite the jihadist slogans accompanying the mailed anthrax, it had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or any foreign element; the FBI ignored a 2002 tip from a scientific colleague of the actual anthrax killer, who turned out to be a Fort Detrick scientist named Bruce Edwards Ivins; the reason is that they had quickly obsessed on an innocent man named Steven Hatfill; the bureau was bullied into focusing on the government scientist by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy (whose office, along with that of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, was targeted by an anthrax-laced letter) and was duped into focusing on Hatfill by two sources – a conspiracy-minded college professor with a political agenda who’d never met Hatfill and by Nicholas Kristof, who put his conspiracy theories in the paper while mocking the FBI for not arresting Hatfill.
In truth, Hatfill was an implausible suspect from the outset. He was a virologist who never handled anthrax, which is a bacterium. (Ivins, by contrast, shared ownership of anthrax patents, was diagnosed as having paranoid personality disorder, and had a habit of stalking and threatening people with anonymous letters – including the woman who provided the long-ignored tip to the FBI). So what evidence did the FBI have against Hatfill? There was none, so the agency did a Hail Mary, importing two bloodhounds from California whose handlers claimed could sniff the scent of the killer on the anthrax-tainted letters. These dogs were shown to Hatfill, who promptly petted them. When the dogs responded favorably, their handlers told the FBI that they’d ‘alerted’ on Hatfill and that he must be the killer.
You’d think that any good FBI agent would have kicked these quacks in the fanny and found their dogs a good home. Or at least checked news accounts of criminal cases in California where these same dogs had been used against defendants who’d been convicted — and later exonerated. As Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times investigative reporter David Willman detailed in his authoritative book on the case, a California judge who’d tossed out a murder conviction based on these sketchy canines called the prosecution’s dog handler ‘as biased as any witness that this court has ever seen.’
Instead, Mueller, who micromanaged the anthrax case and fell in love with the dubious dog evidence, personally assured Ashcroft and presumably George W. Bush that in Steven Hatfill the bureau had its man. Comey, in turn, was asked by a skeptical Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz if Hatfill was another Richard Jewell – the security guard wrongly accused of the Atlanta Olympics bombing. Comey replied that he was ‘absolutely certain’ they weren’t making a mistake.
Such certitude seems to be Comey’s default position in his professional life. Mueller didn’t exactly distinguish himself with contrition, either. In 2008, after Ivins committed suicide as he was about to be apprehended for his crimes, and the Justice Department had formally exonerated Hatfill – and paid him $5.82 million in a legal settlement – Mueller could not be bothered to walk across the street to attend the press conference announcing the case’s resolution. When reporters did ask him about it, Mueller was graceless. ‘I do not apologize for any aspect of the investigation,’ he said, adding that it would be erroneous ‘to say there were mistakes’…”
Gee, I’d say it’s a mistake to persecute the wrong guy by manufacturing evidence against him merely because some high-powered pols told you to get him. But then I’m not a swamp dweller, and Mueller, Comey and Weissman are.
I don’t know if Manafort committed any of the crimes he’s accused of. I do know it doesn’t take a special prosecutor to try to make the case against him. The DoJ had private citizen Manafort under investigation for years concerning these decade old charges. I do know that I’d never take Mueller, Comey, or Weissman’s word for it. I fully expect that they’re pressuring Manafort to take a plea deal on the witness tampering charge and they’ll drop the other charges if he’ll give up Trump. Imagine that; witness tampering with no underlying case and no witnesses. That’s exactly the kind of stunt Weissman and Mueller would pull.
If these shysters told me the sky was blue I’d have to go look to verify it hadn’t turned green or purple since the last time I checked.
In light of the amount of wrong doing by these characters, what can be done to bring their reign of terror to an end?
The key is not what can be done, but what can be done without bringing the insane attacks of the entire MSM down on the person doing it. And the answer is nothing will stop that result, so nothing will be done to end this travesty.
I need to clarify something about my earlier comment. When Weissman had four ML executives and one junior Enron executive locked up, that was pretrial. He made sure they didn’t get bail either.
So this move in the Manafort case is a typical Weissman tactic.
Three of the four ML executives and the Enron executive were convicted. The Fifth Circuit overturned all those convictions on appeal.
What a fucking joke. All of the ‘evidence’ was already released and the judge was rightly going to laugh at Mueller for trying to throw him in jail for ‘witness tampering’.
So then he indicted his 10th ham sandwich and actually indicted Manafort for it so the judge was forced to revoke the bail because Manafort had been indicted for another crime.
This is just a fucking joke on every level.
Trump. wake up and be a man! Time to start throwing some desrving FBI and DOJ asses in jail. Quit Tweeting and start beating.
Trump. wake up and be a man! Time to start throwing some deserving FBI and DOJ asses in jail. Quit Tweeting and start beating.
why can’t judicial watch or some similar org file an amicus brief against the DOJ overreach ?
It’s now sideways.
When the guardians of law become lawless, there is only one option.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
I think the thing for Manafort to do is investigate the judges previous cases and see if she “turned a blind eye” to similar or more grievous transactions of defendants out on bail. From what I’ve seen most judges are lenient toward minor bail violations.
If he does find a pattern, he should then go to the appeals courrt and seek a writ to overturn the judges ruling.
President Trump needs to ORDER the DOJ and FBI to release ALL documents, unredacted, requested by Congress!!!!!!!!! If Jeff Sessions can’t cope with that, he can go home to Birmingham.
I must say, though — Mueller and Manafort are some weird-looking people. They look corrupt, and smug. Manafort especially looks like someone who thinks he’s some kind of major player in a James Bond movie. Not to imply that I think Manafirt is necessarily guilty in any if this, or that he even approaches Mueller in corruption.
Zero respect for Mueller or anyone on his SC team. Zero. He has a thoroughly corrupted soul and has corrupted all those around him (who weren’t corrupted already). Has ‘not a smidgen’ of conscience.
Zero respect for Rosenstein for not recognizing his glaring conflicts of interest.
Zero respect for Sessions for not just putting an end to all this extraordinarily expensive, not to mention pointless, nonsense.
The time is fast approaching, if it hasn’t already arrived, for Trump to simply can them all, pardon Flynn & Manafort and start over. The howling volume of the howling media would rise to 11, but it’s already at 10.5 & most of us are sick and tired of this kabuki bullshit. My guess is Trump is holding off until after the mid-terms to pull any such trigger, for obvious political reasons, but come December…
Chilling. Not just for Manafort but anyone associated with the President or anyone he might try to recruit.
There is one standard of justice being applied to those on the left, and a completely different, far more vindictive, standard being applied to those on the right.
This incident is just the latest in a long line of manifistations/confirmations of this phenomena.
At some point, those on the right are going to conclude that they have no further obligation, moral or ethical, to continue to respect a system that is plainly politicized, rather than blind.
And when that happens, all hell will break lose.
Equality before the law has been a joke for a long time. The joke is no longer funny.
At some point, those on the right are going to conclude that they have no further obligation, moral or ethical, to continue to respect a system that is plainly politicized, rather than blind.
If you have been following the Drug War the system has been that way since Nixon. At least.
“Look, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue…that we couldn’t resist it.” – John Ehrlichman, White House counsel to President Nixon on the rationale of the War on Drugs.
Funny that as long as the target was lefty dopers hardly anyone on the right noticed.
Our problem is not corrupt justice. It is a corrupt people.
Can the President commute a pre-trial detention, without pardoning the underlying crime?
One the one hand, it would be strange if he could order a guilty man freed, but not a presumed-innocent one.
On the other hand… commutation is usually the end of the process, not the beginning.
If it’s not a sentence, how can he commute it?
It seems some loose cannons have been knocked loose from their moorings:
A suspected gunman blocked the road over the Hoover Dam in an armoured vehicle and has a message for President Donald Trump, according to reports.
The suspect hhad notes taped to the window of the vehicle he’s barricaded in with one saying “Mr President release the reports”, according to a passerby, reports 8NewsNow.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/breaking-hoover-dam-gunman-blocks-12718497
This is such bullshit. Prosecutorial (sic) powers gone wild. This crap case is what, over a decade old, was dropped once already? I swear if anybody organizes a march on DC with pitchforks, I’ll roll (wheelchair) from SC if I have to. I. am. not. joking.
I’ll help you push that chair north.
Robert Barnes has stated that these tactics are more aggressive than is used against a mob boss , not for a run of the Mill Swamp creature’s shenanigans
Sessions.
But for Sessions, hillary clinton would be in prison right now.