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NRaleighLiberal

(60,013 posts) Mon Oct 30, 2017, 05:16 PM Oct 2017

Slate - "Trump Should Be Scared"

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/10/donald_trump_should_be_scared.html

On Monday, Mueller signaled where his investigation is headed.

By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Paul Manafort indictment is what it doesn’t say: the name Donald Trump. The indictment is a perfectly clean, amply substantiated case against two people—Manafort and his former business partner Rick Gates—accused of money laundering and tax evasion. By nowhere intimating that these charges have anything to do with the Trump campaign, or collusion between the campaign and Russia, the indictment denies Trump and his apologists the argument that the Mueller probe is a politically motivated witch hunt against the president.

This might be why Donald Trump’s first tweet in response to the indictment doesn’t claim that it is politically motivated but rather that it all happened a long time ago.

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?????

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2017
Still, so much of this document that is not about Trump is, in many ways, all about Trump. The charges against Manafort and Gates, for instance, mirror what many financial experts have long claimed about the Trump Organization: that they have been at pains to hide money from the IRS, including money from foreign sources; that they have engaged in conspiracies to launder foreign money; that they have made false statements and conspired to hide foreign funds. This is an indictment that should terrify Trump in that it shadows and hints at his own unlawful conduct and nabs two players who might be willing to cooperate to get out of their mess. And Trump can’t claim any of it is a direct attack on him.

The Manafort indictment was followed by the release of a guilty plea that George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, entered earlier in October. According to that plea, Papadopoulos admitted to making “material false statement and material omissions” during an FBI interview on Jan. 27. Back then, he told the FBI that an unnamed professor “told him about the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails,’ but stated multiple times that he learned that information prior to joining the campaign.”

Mueller does not need to go after Manafort for crimes that might implicate Trump—not yet, at least.
In truth, Papadopoulos had already been hired to join the Trump campaign when the professor contacted him. Moreover, the professor mentioned the “thousands of emails” after Papadopoulos had been working on the campaign for more than a month. And while Papadopoulos had initially claimed that this professor was “a nothing,” Monday’s release indicates that the professor has “substantial connections to Russian government officials”—of which Papadopoulos was aware. More broadly, the statement illustrates that Papadopoulos was extremely eager to coordinate with the Russian government throughout his work on the Trump campaign and that the Trump campaign was eager to find lower-level channels to cooperate on this project.

snip - more at the above link