At least six people close to Trump almost certainly knew about offers from Russians of dirt on Clinton

Roger Stone, means that at least six members of Trump’s broader team knew about offers of dirt from Russians during that campaign — and, depending on how that information was shared, as many as 10 may have, including Trump.

.. Papadopoulos sent an email to Trump adviser Stephen Miller the day after Mifsud reached out to him, telling Miller he had some “interesting messages” coming in from Moscow.

.. Trump’s argument has long been that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russian government. That claim increasingly depends on how one defines “collusion.”

The Real Origination Story of the Trump-Russia Investigation

.. It turns out that, in “late spring” 2016, the FBI’s then-director James Comey briefed the principals of the National Security Council on “the Page information.” As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York observes in a perceptive column today, NSC principals are an administration’s highest-ranking national-security officials.

.. we know that Page, an Annapolis alumnus and former naval intelligence officer, is . . . well, he’s a knucklehead. He is a Russia apologist whose “discursive online blog postings about foreign policy,” Politico noted, “invoke the likes of Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, and Rhonda Byrne’s self-help bestseller, ‘The Secret.’” More to the point, Page blames American provocations for bad relations with the Kremlin and advocates, instead, a policy of appeasing the Putin regime.

..  on March 21, 2016 — i.e., early spring — the Trump campaign announced the candidate’s foreign-policy advisory team. Trump had been spurned by the Republican foreign-policy clerisy and was under pressure to show that he had some advisers. So the campaign hastily put out a list of five little-known figures, including Page.

.. Another source of consternation: On March 29, just a few days after Page was announced as a foreign-policy adviser, Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign. Manafort and his partner, Richard Gates (who also joined the Trump campaign), had been on the FBI’s radar

..  the FBI had interviewed Carter Page in March 2016.

.. There are many different ways the Obama administration could have reacted to the news that Page and Manafort had joined the Trump campaign. It could have given the campaign a defensive briefing. It could have continued interviewing Page, with whom the FBI had longstanding lines of communication. It could have interviewed Manafort. It could have conducted a formal interview with George Papadopoulos rather than approaching him with a spy who asked him loaded questions about Russia’s possession of Democratic-party emails.

Instead of doing some or all of those things, the Obama administration chose to look at the Trump campaign as a likely co-conspirator of Russia — either because Obama officials inflated the flimsy evidence, or because they thought it could be an effective political attack on the opposition party’s likely candidate.

.. From the “late spring” on, every report of Trump-Russia ties, no matter how unlikely and uncorroborated, was presumed to be proof of a traitorous arrangement. And every detail that could be spun into Trump-campaign awareness of Russian hacking, no matter how tenuous, was viewed in the worst possible light

there are two basic flaws in version 2.0. First, Papadopoulos’s story is actually exculpatory of the Trump campaign: If Russia already had the emails and was alerting the Trump campaign to that fact, the campaign could not have been involved in the hacking. Second, there is confusion about exactly what Mifsud was referring to when he told Papadopoulos that the Russians had emails that could damage Clinton. Democrats suggest that Mifsud was referring to the Democratic National Committee emails. They need this to be true because (a) these are the emails that were hacked by Russian operatives, and (b) it was WikiLeaks’ publication of these hacked DNC emails in July 2016 that spurred the Aussies to report to their American counterparts about the encounter, two months earlier, between Papadopoulos and Downer

.. Papadopoulos maintains that he understood Mifsud to be talking about the 30,000-plus emails that Hillary Clinton had deleted from her homebrew server. That makes more sense — it was those emails that Donald Trump harped on throughout the campaign and that were in the news when Mifsud spoke with Papadopoulos in April 2016. While there are grounds for concern that Clinton’s emails were hacked, there is no proof that it happened; Clinton’s 30,000 emails are not the hacked DNC emails on which the “collusion” narrative is based.

.. longtime CIA source Stefan Halper, was run at Page by the FBI, in Britain. Because this happened just days after Page’s Moscow trip, the implication was that it was the Moscow trip itself, not the dossier claims about it, that provided momentum toward opening the investigation.

.. The real origination story begins in the early spring of 2016 — long before Page went to Russia and long before the U.S. government was notified about Papadopoulos’s boozy conversation with Downer.

F.B.I. Raids Office of Trump’s Longtime Lawyer Michael Cohen; Trump Calls It ‘Disgraceful’

The F.B.I. raided the office and hotel room of President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, on Monday, seizing business records, emails and documents related to several topics, including payments to a pornographic film actress.

.. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Mr. Cohen for possible bank fraud, and the documents identified in the warrant date back years

.. Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, who called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.”

.. The search does not appear to be directly related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation, but most likely resulted from information that he had uncovered and gave to prosecutors in New York.

.. “Today the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York executed a series of search warrants and seized the privileged communications between my client, Michael Cohen, and his clients,” said Stephen Ryan

.. Mr. Trump reacted angrily to the raid. “It’s a disgraceful situation,” he told reporters at the White House before a meeting with military leaders. He added, “I have this witch hunt constantly going on.”

.. Agents raided space Mr. Cohen uses in the Rockefeller Center office of the law firm Squire Patton Boggs, as well as a room Mr. Cohen is staying at the Loews Regency Hotel on Park Avenue 

.. In order to obtain a search warrant, prosecutors must convince a federal judge that agents are likely to discover evidence of criminal activity.

.. The searches open a new front for the Justice Department in its scrutiny of Mr. Trump and his associates: His longtime lawyer is being investigated in Manhattan; his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is facing scrutiny by prosecutors in Brooklyn; his campaign chairman is under indictment; his former national security adviser has pleaded guilty to lying; and a pair of former campaign aides are cooperating with Mr. Mueller. Mr. Mueller, meanwhile, wants to interview Mr. Trump about possible obstruction of justice.

.. The search is an aggressive move for the Justice Department, which normally relies on grand jury subpoenas to obtain records from people who are represented by lawyers and are cooperating with authorities. Search warrants are more often used in cases in which prosecutors do not trust people to preserve or turn over the records themselves.

.. The seized records include communications between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, which would likely require a special team of agents to review because conversations between lawyers and clients are protected from scrutiny in most instances.

.. He attracted attention in the Russia investigation after emails showed that a business associate of Mr. Trump, Felix Sater, pitched Mr. Cohen on a lucrative real estate deal in Russia.

.. The deal was supposed to be a Trump Tower in Moscow and Mr. Sater boasted to Mr. Cohen that the tower would get Mr. Trump elected president. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.” But the emails obtained by The New York Times show no response from Mr. Cohen, who told congressional investigators that he regarded Mr. Sater’s talk as puffery.

Comments:

 .. As a lawyer of 35 years, this is one of the most significant developments in the Mueller investigation.

It is extraordinarily hard to convince a judge, who is a former lawyer himself or herself, to pierce the attorney/client privilege and work product doctrine to issue a subpoena and seize material subject to those sacred protections.

The judge must be convinced that Cohen’s records will demonstrate substantial criminal activity.

This may be “Black Monday” for Donald Trump.

.. Remember that phrase Joe Biden got caught saying on mike that time? This is one of those.

Getting a search warrant for a lawyer’s files is a BIG, BIG deal. It requires sign-off from either the US Attorney or an Assistant AG, consultation with main justice in DC, and consideration of other, less-intrusive methods of getting the information. And that’s before the warrant goes to the judge. Judges tend to be very protective of attorney-client confidentiality and are very skeptical of such requests even in routine cases, let alone when the request is for a warrant for the client files of the personal attorney to the President of the United States.

On a scale of 1 to 10, Cohen’s legal trouble just went all the way to 11.

.. The plot thickens. Trump keeps talking about collusion. It’s the money laundering and related financial activities he should be worried about. It’s the payoffs and bribes he should be worried about. It’s the threats he should be worried about.

.. Trump said many times, do not investigate the family business! Big red line. Gosh! Why would he say that? Looks like we are about to find out.

.. Remember this, Republicans; President Clinton’s impeachment over sex-related perjury began with an investigation into a real estate deal. YOU set this standard of expansive investigations. YOU laid the groundwork for this. Any cries that this exceeds Mueller’s authority and mission should be accompanied by your profound apologies to the country for what you have done. Otherwise, reap the whirlwind.

 

.. And now, the American people get to learn about the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege.

 

.. I’ll bet they included records regarding Cohen’s negotiation of a hotel deal in Moscow for Trump during the election when Trump said he had no business in Russia. It would seem such a Moscow deal would fit right into the areas of inquiry of Mr. Mueller.

 

.. The noose tightens… Expect the obligatory military strike on Syria as another in a long list of “Look – a puppy!” diversion is perpetrated on the all-too-gullible American public.

 

.. As Richard Nixon would put it, people have the right to know if their president is a crook.

 

.. The privileged communications between an attorney and his/her clients may be seized legally as part of an investigation by a special prosecutor. Completely legal. Very sorry the whiny lawyer of the lawyer doesn’t want to admit it. The truth of everything involved with this investigation will be made known. Be patient.

 

.. Just as in the cases of Manafort et al. (and that dossier) many will scream that this is way beyond Mueller’s powers.
But, best as I read, he IS entitled to follow up on almost EVERY crime he finds when doing his work on collusion and such.
Capone didn’t go down for murders, he was convicted on tax fraud.

 

.. For all those Trumpsters hanging out here disparaging Mueller, this action is totally within the scope of the Russia investigation. Remember Mr. Cohen was already reportedly involved in brokering a Trump business project in Moscow and had been also involved with a Ukrainian lawmaker passing a pro-Russian peace proposal from a Ukrainian lawmaker to Michael Flynn, so it is very likely that Cohen has been resisting handing over documents that the Special Counsel wanted to review, and this was the most appropriate way of going about getting the information they were after. The Daniels stuff isn’t even in the same league as the types of possible crimes that Mueller may be investigating. Uncovering an unlawful international money laundering racket alone would be fair game for Mueller and his team. Think about this for a second. What would a personal attorney for Donald Trump be doing in Russia in January 2016 in the midst of a presidential campaign when Trump had not even locked up the nomination yet. Come on people! There is something very rotten in Trumpland. The Stormy Daniels case is just a small sideshow that is eating up oxygen in the media. Follow the Cohen.

 

.. There must be a multi-million dollar overseas fund with Cohen’s name on it

 

.. It isn’t just the facts of the case that determine when they will act and how; they also are studying their foe.

.. As of the past week or a little longer, Trump has no personal support, no one person in place he can trust and confide in, no one who can temper his outbursts and his tendencies to blindly and stupidly lash out. They know it and are counting on it – the case doesn’t rely solely on this, but who the opposition is and how they act/react, who their support lines are, who their attorneys are…it all has its own bit of importance. Trump is now on his own, if and how much we as a country suffer for this before the insanity ends is a guess.

 

‘You should do it’: Trump officials encouraged George Papadopoulos’s foreign outreach, documents show

As late as December 2016, as President-elect Trump was preparing to take office, Papadopoulos tried to serve as a conduit for the defense minister of Greece, transmitting what he said was a proposal for a strategic alliance from the Russian-allied Greek official that was reviewed by Bannon and Flynn, then in line to be national security adviser.

.. Papadopoulos is the only Trump associate known to have told prosecutors he had advance warning the Russians held emails that could be damaging to Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. A London-based professor told Papadopoulos in April 2016 that the Russians had dirt on Clinton in the form of thousands of emails

.. The documents also indicate that amid Papadopoulos’s advocacy of closer ties to Russia, he retained access to top officials — even after Trump’s victory.

.. In July 2015, Papadopoulos contacted then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski about his interest in joining Trump’s campaign,

.. In December 2015, Papadopoulos went to work for the campaign of neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who was then challenging Trump for the GOP nomination.

After several months, Papadopoulos reached out again to the Trump campaign to inform them he would be leaving the flagging Carson campaign.

“I wanted to let you know that I stopped working as Ben Carson’s principal foreign policy adviser. I’d be interested in getting on board with the Trump team. Is the team looking to expand?” Papadopoulos wrote to Glassner early in March 2016.

At the time, Trump was surging in the polls, and the real estate developer was under increasing pressure to name foreign policy advisers to his team.

.. Later that month, Trump himself named Papadopoulos among a list of five people advising his campaign on foreign policy during a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board. “Excellent guy,” the candidate said.

At the end of March, Papadopoulos attended a meeting of Trump’s newly named national security advisory group at the candidate’s not-yet-opened hotel in Washington. After introducing himself, the young adviser announced he could organize a meeting between Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and Trump, according to court documents.

In May, Papadopoulos forwarded to campaign officials a note he received from Timofeev informing him that Russian Foreign Ministry officials were open to a Trump visit. That idea was batted down by campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who emailed his associate Rick Gates: “We need to communicate that DT is not doing these trips.”

.. The emails show Papadopoulos was the first to alert the campaign to al-Sissi’s interest in meeting and that he then connected top campaign leadership to the Egyptian Embassy.