If Manafort pursues his self-interest, my bet is that he’ll sing. That then can become a cascade: He testifies against others, who in turn are pressured to testify against still others. And all this makes it more difficult to protect the man at the center if indeed he has violated the law.
.. The Papadopoulos revelation is particularly interesting because it goes precisely to the issue of collusion, and it’s not just an allegation—it’s a guilty plea.
.. So if Trump pardoned Manafort, my bet is that he would be prosecuted for state crimes; from Manafort’s point of view, the essential difference is that he would end up in a state prison rather than a federal prison. And the same is true of others in Trump’s circle.
Former Trump Foreign Policy Adviser Pleads Guilty to Lying to FBI
George Papadopoulos misled FBI about timing of contacts with a professor tied to Russian officials
George Papadopoulos admitted he misled the FBI in a January interview by telling agents that he had only interacted with the professor before joining the Trump campaign. That professor has “substantial connections to Russian government officials” and was offering “dirt” on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
In fact, Mr. Papadopoulos met with the professor in March 2016 after learning he was joining the campaign, court documents say. The professor only took an interest in Mr. Papadopoulos because of his status on the campaign, according to the documents.
In April 2016, the professor told Mr. Papadopoulos about “thousands of emails” related to Mrs. Clinton.
.. After that March meeting, Mr. Papadopoulos emailed Trump campaign officials to say he had just met with his “good friend” the professor, who had introduced him to an individual described in the email as the niece of Russian President Vladimir Putin
Talking Points Brought to Trump Tower Meeting Were Shared With Kremlin
But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.
.. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact — not mere “puffery,”as the president’s son later said.
.. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia repeated her charges at length last week at an annual conference of Western academics. A state-run television network recently made them the subject of two special reports, featuring interviews with Ms. Veselnitskaya and Mr. Chaika.
The matching messages point to a synchronized information campaign.
.. The memo that Ms. Veselnitskaya brought to the Trump Tower meeting alleged that Ziff Brothers Investments, an American firm, had illegally purchased shares in a Russian company and evaded tens of millions of dollars of Russian taxes. The company was the financial vehicle of three billionaire brothers, two of them major donors to Democratic candidates including Mrs. Clinton. By implication, Ms. Veselnitskaya, said, those political contributions were tainted by “stolen” money.
.. The Ziff brothers had invested in funds managed by William F. Browder, an American-born financier and fierce Kremlin foe. Mr. Browder was the driving force behind a 2012 law passed by Congress imposing sanctions on Russian officials for human rights abuses.
.. Mr. Putin said that American authorities had ignored the allegations against Mr. Browder and his investors because the Ziff brothers were major political donors. “They protect themselves in this way,” he said.
.. In April 2016, Ms. Veselnitskaya teamed with Mr. Chaika’s office to pass the accusations to an American congressional delegation visiting Moscow. An official with the Russian prosecutor general’s office gave a memo detailing the charges — stamped “confidential”— to Representative Dana Rohrabacher
.. Ms. Veselnitskaya handed a nearly identical memo to Representative French Hill, Republican of Arkansas.
.. She asked Aras Agalarov, a well-connected Russian oligarch who knows the Trump family, to help her share her allegations with the Trump campaign, according to Mr. Agalarov’s attorney, Scott Balber.
.. By all accounts, the Trump campaign officials were unimpressed — even baffled — by her 20-minute presentation. “Some D.N.C. donors may have done something in Russia and they didn’t pay taxes,” Donald Trump Jr. said later. “I was, like, ‘What does this have to do with anything?’”
.. by last weekend, she was describing herself as a kind of whistle-blower who was trying to expose American political corruption.
.. Mr. Chaika charged that Mr. Browder and the Ziffs had illegally used “Russian money” to lobby for the sanctions law.
The Coming Russia Bombshells
The confirmation this week that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid an opposition-research firm for a “dossier” on Donald Trump is bombshell news. More bombshells are to come.
.. there’s something Fusion cares about keeping secret even more than the Clinton-DNC news—and that something is in those bank records.
.. If the House wins, don’t be surprised if those records include money connected to Russians. In the past Fusion has worked with Russians, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who happened to show up last year in Donald Trump Jr.’s office.
.. We may learn the FBI knew the dossier was a bought-and-paid-for product of Candidate Clinton, but used it anyway. Or that it didn’t know, which would be equally disturbing.
.. And the more ugly info that came out (Fusion, Democratic clients, intelligence-for-hire) the more former Obama officials seemed skeptical of it. In May, former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper said his people could never “corroborate” its “sourcing.” In June, Mr. Comey derided it as “salacious and unverified.”
.. it is highly unusual for a law firm to pay bills without a client’s approval. Somewhere, Perkins Coie has documents showing who signed off on those bills, and they aren’t protected by attorney-client privilege.
.. If the Steele dossier reports (which appear to date back to June 2016) were making their way into the hands of senior DNC and Clinton political operatives, you can bet they were making their way to the Obama White House. This may explain why Obama political appointees began monitoring the Trump campaign and abusing unmasking. They were looking for a “gotcha,” something to disqualify a Trump presidency. Of course, they were doing so on the basis of “salacious and unverified” accusations made by anonymous Russians, but never mind.