Hmmmm…what’s that saying about sleeping with dogs and waking up with fleas?
Perhaps we need to modify to sleeping with foreign agents and waking up with bugs and kompromat…
So I guess he’s not cooperating. Indeed, looks like maybe the plea was spontaneous and Mueller has the ass for him. One suspects the guilty plea is the result of being told by…persons of his acquainance… that …things…might happen if he pushes it to trial.
Clean footnotes for such dirty work…
“Alex Van der Zwaan, the Russian-speaking son-in-law of Russian oligarch German Khan”
Is it just me, or do all roads lead to Russia?
Not just you. We’re moving out of the “no evidence of collusion” phase into the “OK some evidence of collusion oh, all right, like a frickin’ ton of evidence of collusion but no evidence Trump knew…” phase. That will be a pretty short phase IMHO.
Van der Zwaan told the special counsel’s office that Gates told him that
“Person A” was a former Russian intelligence officer, according to the
filing.
I think that this would be something of a smoking gun.
From the WaPo comments section on this story earlier this morning:
More Russian characters were involved in the trump campaign than are in your average Tolstoy novel.
(Really wish I’d thought of this.)
Wait, so “Person A” is also a lawyer at Skadden Arps?
This gets bonus points.
I don’t read this to say that the plea deal is off. This is for sentencing consistent with the plea deal.
If the deal were off, his old charges would be reinstated.
Yeah, that was my question, as well. The relevant sentence is a little ambiguous.
“Van der Zwaan then called Person A, a senior partner at the law firm,
and then followed up with Gates again, according to the guilty plea
filings.”
It sounds like Person A is the senior partner in question, though perhaps the author meant to say Van der Zwaan called two different people in succession before following up with Gates. A disambiguation on this point would be appreciated.
We would know if some particular senior partner had left Skadden Arps recently…
Couldn’t agree more. If the original poster is someone who’s also a TPM’er, they should step up and take credit. That was the exact reason my attempts to read War and Peace and Anna Karenina always ran aground at about page 30, although the same was not true of Dostoevsky’s novels, so maybe it really was the old humbug’s style…
It’s a confusing construction, but Person A (widely identified as Konstantin Kalimnik) is a Russian who worked for Manafort overseas.
FWIW, there is no such thing as an “ex-Russian Intel officer”. It’s like the Mafia - there’s only one way out.
That’s right.
And the identities of both people are known.
Yes.
[quote="clearwater, post:17, topic:70174"] FWIW, there is no such thing as an "ex-Russian Intel officer". [/quote]
Russian or any other kind.
You know… this is going to leave Manafort’s latest filing looking, ummmm… less robust.
Because even though Manafort wants to claim that the charges against him have nothing to do with “Russian Collusion” with the Trump Campaign, this filing, (and admittedly these are only “facts” from the Prosecutors point of view, Manafort could contest them), makes it clear that Manafort and Gates were associating with Russian Intelligence Operatives during the campaign.
It’s like a Nothing Burger, but with extra Russian Dressing.
Mueller is pushing on one front and the UK inquiry + Guardian/Channel 4 exposé into Cambridge Analytica are pushing on another front. Both roads are leading to the same place: Russia.
This Mueller indictment essentially removed all mystery here: that Manafort and Gates knew that a guy they had worked with for a decade was a Russian agent, Konstantin Kilimnick. He is almost certainly “Person A”. While that is not a surprise, from a legal standpoint, this is a major development. Mueller has now established that the Deputy Campaign Manager (Gates) and the one-time Campaign Manager (Manafort) communicated regularly with a Russian intel agent from the spring through Oct 2016. In addition, we know that two other significant foreign policy advisors to the campaign, Papadopoulos and Page, also courted Russian intel and Russian intermediaries, many of them high ranking. All of this also happened through the campaign. Add that to Junior, Wikileaks, C.A., and you’ve got a pretty expansive conspiracy.
This means that Mueller has enough to establish that the Trump Campaign conspired with agents of the Russian government to violate the federal election campaign act, the computer fraud and abuse act and campaign finance laws. If he can indict the Trump campaign, that’s a nice backdoor way to get to Trump without triggering the constitutional protections of his office. There is nothing that would prevent Mueller from calling Trump to testify and provide evidence in a case against the Trump campaign. There is nothing that would prevent Mueller from indicting anyone who worked with the campaign. In the case of Trump himself, given that most (if not all) of the actions attributable to the Trump campaign occurred before Trump was President, I doubt he could use the privileges of his office to stop an indictment. He might be able to delay, but not stop.
You’re seeing Michael Avenatti use a similar strategy in the Stormy Daniels case. His approach has been to set up forks in the road for Team Trump. The easy solution was for Trump to acknowledge that there is no agreement and let Stormy talk. But his insistence on denying the agreement while using the restrictive covenants to legally threaten and silence Daniels pushes Avenatti into a position where he can invalidate the agreement on public policy grounds, set up a case where federal investigators would be compelled to investigate and indict Michael Cohen (I think the State of NY or State of CA may be able to do similar things under their election laws), and force Trump under oath.
The UK hearing with Christopher Wylie on Cambridge Analytica, Aggregate IQ (the Canadian firm that developed the software program which C.A. used to target voters) and Facebook was completely lit. I recommend watching all 2.5 hours of it. Some highlights:
-
The UK authorities are almost compelled to indict Alexander Nix. He lied before that committee in his last appearance about material events: that C.A. used FB data; that C.A. worked with Vote Leave and other pro-Brexit entities; that his denials of the Channel 4 report about the use of intimidating tactics are basically lies; that Aggregate IQ was not essentially a captive entity of C.A. In addition the campaigns that C.A. did in Kenya, Nigeria, Romania, Trinidad, St. Kitts and Nevis and India involve many problematic practices, including possible violations of local laws and UK laws.
-
The UK may be compelled to hold another referendum on Brexit. Though that may still be a difficult lift in a politically paralyzed Britain where both major parties are captive of Russia’s campaign to undermine the EU, the original vote has been badly tainted by this inquiry. After Wylie’s testimony, there can be little doubt that the various groups supporting the “Leave” campaign: Vote Leave, Veterans for Britain, BeLeave, DUP violated UK campaign finance limits. UKIP was also a part of this. All hired AggregateIQ and pooled assets to run money to Aggregate IQ and exceeded campaign finance limits. There was a cooperative agreement (read: conspiracy) among the pro-Brexit groups to utilize the tactics and data of Cambridge Analytica. It was pushed by Robert Mercer who underwrote the research activities and allowed his company to underprice the services in order to not leave a paper trail to tie the work to the value of services received.
-
Wylie also confirms my own suppositions about the dodgy connections between Alexander Nix and the Russian professor, Aleksandr Kogan, and Lukoil and the latter’s connection to Russian intelligence. Wylie essentially states that the Russians received the data and the methodology for their campaign against the US from Cambridge Analytica. That means that C.A. is indirectly tied the election law violations identified in the Mueller indictment of the Internet Research Agency, and seems to be directly involved in several campaign finance, immigration, and other election law violations in its support of the Trump campaign.
Mueller is on top of the Cambridge Analytica matter as well. I would expect that Mueller makes a whole slew of indictments relating to violations of federal election laws.