RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two former senior Trump campaign staffers pled not guilty yesterday to evading taxes on millions of dollars over a period of years and a litany of other charges sought by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III that appear wholly unrelated to the alleged Russian intervention in last year’s election that he was commissioned to investigate.

It was a busy day in the nation’s capital yesterday.

Paul J. Manafort Jr. and Richard W. Gates III were arraigned in federal court in Washington, D.C., and released on a $10 million bond and a $5 million bond, respectively. The defendants are not allowed to leave their homes except under narrowly defined circumstances.

Trump defenders have long said Mueller has too many serious conflicts of interest to be leading the probe of the electoral collusion fairy tale and that the president should fire him.

At 10:25 a.m. Monday, President Trump tweeted his disgust at the indictments, which in his view are aimed at the wrong people. “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????” Minutes later he tweeted, “there is NO COLLUSION!”

Recent news reports indicate at least one Democrat, “power lobbyist” Tony Podesta, has been under Mueller’s microscope. Podesta, brother of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, abruptly resigned yesterday from the Podesta Group.

“Podesta announced his decision during a firm-wide meeting Monday morning and is alerting clients of his impending departure,” according to Politico. The Podesta Group partnered with Manafort on a public relations campaign to promote Ukraine in the U.S.

Mueller has been investigating Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group, NBC News reported last week. The probe has “morphed into a criminal inquiry into whether the firm violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

As Breitbart News reports,

The Podesta Group has also lobbied for Uranium One, the Canadian-based energy company that has come under scrutiny as well. In 2010, the Obama administration allowed Uranium One to be sold to Russian energy company Rosatom, giving the company control over one-fifth of American uranium-mining capacity to Russia, despite an ongoing FBI investigation into a Rosatom subsidiary involved in a racketeering scheme. The Podesta Group received $180,000 from Uranium One over several years between 2012 and 2015, according to records at opensecrets.org.

Hillary Clinton infamously approved the Uranium One transaction when she was secretary of state and her husband received the suspiciously large sum of $500,000 for a single speech from Russian sources.

Commentator Sean Davis, co-founder of the Federalist website, reminded us on Twitter last week who the real villains are. “The Mueller probe is based entirely on two things: a dossier created by Dem[ocrat] collusion [with] Russia, and illegal leaks by [former FBI Director] James Comey.”

“Democrats and Comey didn’t just allow Russia to interfere with our elections. They let shady Russian operatives pervert our justice system,” he added.

Returning to Manafort, he managed the Trump campaign from June to August 2016, until his foreign business dealings, hyped relentlessly by the mainstream media, led to his firing. He was replaced by Kellyanne Conway and Bannon. Gates is a protégé of Manafort who served as his deputy in the campaign and partner in various business enterprises.

Mueller is already the textbook definition of an out-of-control independent prosecutor and these charges may be part of a legal stratagem to strong-arm the two men into cooperating as witnesses. In other words, the charges could be bogus or blown out of proportion, calculated to give the prosecutor leverage over the two defendants.

The best way to think of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Monday-morning indictments is as a compliment—backhanded as it may be—to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes.

Like the special prosecutor, Mr. Nunes and his committee have been investigating the 2016 presidential campaign. Unlike the special prosecutor, Mr. Nunes has unearthed hard evidence about both Russian influence on the election and domestic spying on Trump campaign officials. And if the committee gets the documents it has been demanding for months about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s handling of the salacious Christopher Steele dossier, this week may end even more explosively than it’s begun.

Right now that’s hard to imagine, given how Washington has been overwhelmed by Monday’s indictments of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his former business associate Rick Gates, as well as news that another former campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts. Though a court will determine whether Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates are guilty of the crimes they are accused of, surely it is worth noting that those charges, serious as they may be, have little to do with what Mr. Mueller was supposed to be investigating when he was named special prosecutor, to wit: “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.”

Meanwhile Mr. Nunes and the Republicans on his intel committee plod on. They do so in the face of mockery and contempt from the Beltway press corps, and sabotage and obstruction by Democrats, especially those on the committee. The obstruction includes a manufactured ethics charge against Mr. Nunes that has deliberately been kept unresolved in the House Ethics Committee as part of an effort to keep a cloud hanging over Mr. Nunes so long as he continues to ask real questions about not only the Russians but our own government.

So what has Mr. Nunes’s committee found? Turns out that in the Obama years, especially in 2016, officials made many requests to unmask the identities of Americans, including Trump campaign officials, who were caught up in foreign surveillance.

When asked about it by PBS’s Judy Woodruff back in March, Obama national security adviser Susan Rice claimed she was “surprised” and told Ms. Woodruff “I know nothing about this.” Under oath before Mr. Nunes’s committee, Ms. Rice’s memory returned, and she admitted of unmasking senior figures in the Trump campaign.

Meanwhile the committee learned that Ms. Rice’s colleague at the United Nations, Ambassador Samantha Power, had made hundreds of unmasking requests. During Ms. Power’s appearance before the committee, she oddly claimed others were doing much of the asking—even though her name was on these requests. Did anyone outside the House committee think to ask why a Democratic White House was so free with such sensitive info in an election year?

Then there’s the Russian question. The Steele dossier is at the heart of the narrative that Mr. Trump had colluded with Moscow to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Now the same people who pushed this narrative have lost all interest in the document that helped fuel it. When two of Fusion’s three partners invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination rather than reveal who paid for the dossier, it looked as though we might never find out. CONTINUE AT SITE

“Americans deserve to know how Russia interfered in the 2016 campaign, but one problem with special prosecutors is that they exist to prosecute—someone, somewhere for something—more than they shed light. The latter should be Congress’s job, and the Members should keep pressing to tell the complete story.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for tax fraud on Monday, and the main charge against Donald Trump is poor judgment for hiring the notorious Beltway operator.

The indictment accuses Mr. Manafort (and business partner Richard Gates ) of funneling money from a pro-Russia party in Ukraine into offshore shell companies and bank accounts. They then allegedly used these accounts to fund their spending habits, neglecting to declare the money to the IRS.

The indictment also accuses Mr. Manafort of failing to register as an agent for a foreign government as required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). This is news mainly because violations of that law haven’t been successfully prosecuted since 1966. The Russia probe has exposed the degree to which lobbyists ignore this statute that the Justice Department has failed to enforce. (Democrat Anthony Podesta announced Monday that he is leaving his lobbying firm amid the Mueller probe. He is the brother of John Podesta, who ran Hillary Clinton’s campaign.)

The most striking news is that none of this involves the 2016 election campaign. The indictment makes clear that Mr. Manafort’s work for Ukraine and his money transfers ended in 2014. The 2016 charges are related to false statements Mr. Manafort made to the Justice Department.

In other words, Mr. Manafort stands accused of a financial and lobbying scam, which is exactly what Mr. Trump risked in hiring a swamp denizen. Mr. Manafort has lobbied for a rogues gallery of dictators, with the occasional domestic scandal (HUD contracts).

Separately, Mr. Mueller released a guilty plea by Trump campaign policy adviser George Papadopoulos for lying to the FBI in early 2017 about his interaction with “foreign nationals whom he understood to have close connections with senior Russian government officials.” The plea suggests Russians might have been attempting to supply the Trump campaign with opposition research on Hillary Clinton. But Mr. Mueller provides no evidence this happened.

One popular theory is that Mr. Mueller is throwing the book at Mr. Manafort so he will cop a plea and tell what he knows about Russian-Trump campaign chicanery. But that assumes he knows something that to date no Congressional investigation has found. Prosecutors typically try to turn witnesses before they indict, and Messrs. Manafort and Gates pleaded not guilty on Monday.

Meanwhile, we’ve learned in recent days that Fusion GPS, the oppo research firm hired by Democrats to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump, was hired initially by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website largely funded by GOP donor Paul Singer. This is embarrassing for the Free Beacon, which has been caught jumping in bed with sleazy operators like Fusion.

But none of this absolves Democrats from their role in financing Fusion to hire Christopher Steele, the former British spook, to collect information about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia. The Free Beacon says it had nothing to do with Mr. Steele or his dossier.

The admission is in; the sentence awaits us. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl admitted deserting his Afghan post and endangering fellow troops. By all accounts this is the most serious betrayal of presidential authority in my life time.

In 2014 President Obama attempted to cover Bergdahl with the achievement of a war hero, even inviting his Idaho based parents to the Rose Garden to celebrate news of his release. President Obama pointed out at the time that five Taliban leaders were freed from Guantanamo so that Bergdahl could be released from captivity. To gild the lily, National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, said Bergdahl served “the United States with honor and distinction.”

Yet everyone in the White House and the Pentagon knew this was a lie with monumental implications. In fact, Army officials refused to list Bergdahl as a POW. An internal 2009 Army report found that he walked off his post on more than one occasion and even said he wanted to join the ranks of the enemy. This report also noted he shipped his laptop back to Idaho with a note expressing his disillusionment with the American position in the war.

President Obama had all of this information at his disposal before he made a deal releasing Bergdahl. Why then did he mislead the American people? The answer can be found in the president’s desire to satisfy antiwar liberals keen on emptying Gitmo. At the Rose Garden event the president admitted as much when he said, “We’re committed to winding down the war in Afghanistan and closing Gitmo.” It is instructive that the CIA has evidence at least three of the released Taliban leaders have returned to the battlefield.

With this exchange and the elevation of Bergdahl’s rank, the president compromised national security knowingly and willfully. Although Bergdahl will not receive capital punishment when his sentence is determined, he probably should be tried as a traitor whose actions led directly to three soldiers seriously injured during search and rescue missions to find him. But if this fiasco is linked to American injuries and, perhaps deaths, one might well ask if the commander in chief should be held accountable as well.

The president’s dissimulation clearly violated the military code and has had a profound effect on morale. Those I know in the military invariably ask how a president could honor a deserter when he was fully aware of his prior actions. This, of course, wasn’t the first time President Obama allowed politics to determine a course of ethical behavior, but it may be among the most egregious examples. One intelligence official argued: “It’s probably a tie as to who is the bigger traitor” – Bergdahl or Obama. With a political ecology in which standards have been debased, many have attempted to rationalize President Obama’s decision. In my judgment, however, his actions that jeopardized national security should be fully investigated and, where blame exists, the full weight of public opinion should be employed to condemn the president and his assistants.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/453244/print

The Paul Manafort indictment is much ado about nothing . . . except as a vehicle to squeeze Manafort, which is special counsel Robert Mueller’s objective — as we have been arguing for three months (see here, here, and here).

Do not be fooled by the “Conspiracy against the United States” heading on Count One (page 23 of the indictment). This case has nothing to do with what Democrats and the media call “the attack on our democracy” (i.e., the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 election, supposedly in “collusion” with the Trump campaign). Essentially, Manafort and his associate, Richard W. Gates, are charged with (a) conspiring to conceal from the U.S. government about $75 million they made as unregistered foreign agents for Ukraine, years before the 2016 election (mainly, from 2006 through 2014), and (b) a money-laundering conspiracy.

There are twelve counts in all, but those are the two major allegations.

The so-called conspiracy against the United States mainly involves Manafort’s and Gates’s alleged failure to file Treasury Department forms required by the Bank Secrecy Act. Specifically, Americans who hold a stake in foreign bank accounts must file what’s known as an “FBAR” (foreign bank account report) in any year in which, at any point, the balance in the account exceeds $10,000. Federal law also requires disclosure of foreign accounts on annual income-tax returns. Manafort and Gates are said to have controlled foreign accounts through which their Ukrainian political-consulting income sluiced, and to have failed to file accurate FBARs and tax returns. In addition, they allegedly failed to register as foreign agents from 2008 through 2014 and made false statements when they belatedly registered.

In the money-laundering conspiracy, they are alleged to have moved money in and out of the United States with the intent to promote “specified unlawful activity.” That activity is said to have been their acting as unregistered foreign agents.

On first glance, Mueller’s case, at least in part, seems shaky and overcharged.

Even though the Ukrainian money goes back to 2006, the counts involving failure to file FBARs (Counts Three through Nine) go back only to 2012. This is likely because the five-year statute of limitations bars prosecution for anything before then. Obviously, one purpose of the conspiracy count (Count One) is to enable prosecutors, under the guise of establishing the full scope of the scheme, to prove law violations that would otherwise be time-barred.

The offense of failing to register as a foreign agent (Count Ten) may be a slam-dunk, but it is a violation that the Justice Department rarely prosecutes criminally. There is often ambiguity about whether the person’s actions trigger the registration requirement, so the Justice Department’s practice is to encourage people to register, not indict them for failing to do so.

It may well be that Manafort and Gates made false statements when they belatedly registered as foreign agents, but it appears that Mueller’s office has turned one offense into two, an abusive prosecutorial tactic that flouts congressional intent.

Specifically, Congress considers false statements in the specific context of foreign-agent registration to be a misdemeanor calling for zero to six months’ imprisonment. (See Section 622(a)(2) of Title 22, U.S. Code.) That is the offense Mueller charges in Count Eleven. But then, for good measure, Mueller adds a second false-statement count (Count Twelve) for the same conduct — charged under the penal-code section (Section 1001 of Title 18, U.S. Code) that makes any falsity or material omission in a statement to government officials a felony punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment.

Obviously, one cannot make a false statement on the foreign-agent registration form without also making a false statement to the government. Consequently, expect Manafort to argue that Mueller has violated double-jeopardy principles by charging the same exact offense in two separate counts, and that the special counsel is undermining Congress’s intent that the offense of providing false information on a foreign-agent registration form be considered merely a misdemeanor.

Finally, the money-laundering conspiracy allegation (Count Two) seems far from slam-dunk. For someone to be guilty of laundering, the money involved has to be the proceeds of criminal activity before the accused starts concealing it by (a) moving it through accounts or changing its form by buying assets, etc., or (b) dodging a reporting requirement under federal law.

Now, it is surely a terrible thing to take money, under the guise of “political consulting,” from an unsavory Ukranian political faction that is doing the Kremlin’s bidding. But it is not a violation of American law to do so. The violations occur when, as outlined above, there is a lack of compliance with various disclosure requirements. Mueller seems to acknowledge this: The money-laundering count does not allege that it was illegal for Manafort and Gates to be paid by the Ukrainian faction. It is alleged, rather, that they moved the money around to promote a scheme to function as unregistered foreign agents, and specifically to avoid the registration requirement.

That seems like a stretch. To be sure, the relevant money-laundering statute includes in its definition of “specified unlawful activity” “any violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938.” (See Section 1956(c)(2)(7)(D) of Title 18, U.S. Code.) But the prosecution still has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the money was the proceeds of unlawful activity in the first place. Moreover, the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that

Manafort and Gates (a) knew the money was the proceeds of illegal activity and (b) transported the money the way they did with the specific intent of avoiding having to register as foreign agents. This count will thus fail if there is any doubt that the Ukrainian money was illegal under American law, that Manafort and Gates knew it was illegal, that they knew the work they were doing required them to register as foreign agents, or that it was their intention to promote a failure-to-register violation.

Even from Paul Manafort’s perspective, there may be less to this indictment than meets the eye — it’s not so much a serious allegation of “conspiracy against the United States” as a dubious case of disclosure violations and money movement that would never have been brought had he not drawn attention to himself by temporarily joining the Trump campaign.

From President Trump’s perspective, the indictment is a boon from which he can claim that the special counsel has no actionable collusion case. It appears to reaffirm former FBI director James Comey’s multiple assurances that Trump is not a suspect. And, to the extent it looks like an attempt to play prosecutorial hardball with Manafort, the president can continue to portray himself as the victim of a witch hunt.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.