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Robert Mueller Tag

Paul Manafort made a tragic life decision when he agreed to serve as Trump's campaign manager during the primaries, mostly because of his expertise in working delegates in floor fights. He just didn't know it at the time. Because Manafort was associated with the Trump campaign, he has come under the watch of Robert Mueller.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has charged lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan for making "materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements and representations" to his office and the FBI. Van Der Zwaan will appear in a federal court in Washington this afternoon. He is expected to enter in a guilty plea since he was charged with a criminal information. Mueller claims Van Der Zwaan lied about his communications with former Trump campaign adviser Rick Gates and with someone else only identified as Person A and deleted emails that his office requested concerning a report from 2012 with Ukraine's Ministry of Justice.

President Donald Trump's former national security advisor Michael Flynn has come back into the news after The Washington Examiner's Byron York reported that former FBI Director James Comey told Congress the department doesn't think Flynn lied to them. Remember the fiasco is over him allegedly speaking to to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition period in December 2016:
On Jan. 24, 2017, two of Comey's FBI agents went to the White House to question Flynn, and there was a lot of speculation later that Flynn lied in that interview, which would be a serious crime.

On January 24, 2018, as Robert Mueller appeared near the end of his plowing through interviews with White House staffers past and present, and other Trump associates, it appeared that Trump himself would be next on Mueller's list. At an impromptu press session, Trump said he looked forward to meeting with Mueller, and might do so under oath, "subject to my lawyers."

A memo compiled by the House Intelligence Committee has several Republican Congressmen rattled. Thursday afternoon, lawmakers began demanding declassification of key points of a FISA Memo which they say "raise serious questions about the upper echelon of the Obama DOJ and Comey FBI" in the Russia/collusion investigation.

Back in December, the media published texts between FBI Agent Peter Strzok, who was involved in the Russia investigation, and FBI attorney Lisa Page demeaning then-candidate Donald Trump and hoping that failed Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton would win. Special Counsel Robert Mueller quietly removed Strzok from the investigation after he discovered the texts. However, some of the texts also mentioned "specific reporters, news organizations and articles." These texts have spawned a congressional probe into whether those involved "had contacts with the news media that resulted in improper leaks."

After Trump fired him, James Comey leaked four (4) of seven (7) internal FBI memos he created regarding his interactions with Trump to a Columbia Law School professor, for the purpose of passing on the contents to a reporter. The professor did just that, and it created the basis for NY Times reporting that Trump had demanded a "loyalty" pledge and also raised the issue of shutting down the investigation into Michael Flynn. Comey would testify to the same effect before Congress, which is when the fact of his leak came out under questioning by Susan Collins, almost by accident, and without any meaningful follow up to the bombshell testimony.

One of the concerns about the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel is that from the get go his investigation has appeared to go far afield of the "Russia collusion" that was the basis for his appointment. I made this point in an earlier post with regard to the guilty plea of Michael Flynn for lying with regard to post-election transition matters, Why is Robert Mueller even investigating the presidential transition?

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe has decided to retire by March as he has come under fire from Republicans in Congress due to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible collusion between then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russia. McCabe took over the FBI after Trump fired James Comey in May, but he has surfaced in the news recently after he supposedly appeared in anti-Trump texts between two FBI employees. He spent seven hours in front of the House Intelligence Committee earlier this week, frustrating Republicans with his non-answers.