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Originally posted by 1kiki:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/prosecutors-end-investigation-trump-or
ganizations-involvement-hush-money/story?id=64392384

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Federal judge orders documents released in Trump hush money probe as investigation winds down

Federal prosecutors have ended their investigation into the Trump Organization's involvement in hush-money payments to two women who alleged they had affairs with President Donald Trump, according to court documents filed in a New York court on Wednesday.

The conclusion of the investigation prompted the judge in the case to order prosecutors to release unredacted documents related to the raid of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen's home in April 2018, including copies of the warrant, warrant applications and supporting affidavits.

Typically, prosecutors do not announce the conclusion of an investigation that doesn't result in formal charges being filed. News of the probe's conclusion came in the judge's order to release unredacted versions of the documents. ...

"The campaign finance violations discussed in the Materials are a matter of national importance," a federal judge wrote in his order, denying the government's request for limited redactions. "Now that the Government's investigation into those violations has concluded, it is time that every American has an opportunity to scrutinize the Materials."

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Judge William Pauley III must be a good friend of Putin and a Russian Troll™. /snark





And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Just as a reminder of where all this impeachment stuff is going ...

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Originally posted by sloppy:

What Will knows is that Trump has already changed the presidency

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and our culture -- in profound ways that will not simply "snap back" once he leaves office. His imprint on the office is deep and wide.

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Circus Mueller Is Delayed

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

The circus will be coming to town a week later, but not to worry, the show will go on longer and there will be many added attractions, including a full troop of 800-pound gorillas and an entire herd of 8000-pound elephants in the room. And once the balancing acts, the clowns and the ferocious beasts pack up and move on, America might find itself without a Democratic Party, or at least one it would recognize.

The circus is the testimony of Robert Mueller before the House Judiciary (extended to 3 hours) and Intelligence Committees (2 hours). The Democrats will aim to use Mueller’s words to finally achieve their long desired impeachment of Donald Trump. But is there anyone who’s not a US Democrat who thinks that is realistic? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t seem to think so.

In order for the Dems to get their wish, Mueller would have to say a lot of things that are not in his report. It all appears to hang on the interpretation of his assessment that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted, which the Dems take to mean that there actually was a crime that could -or should- be prosecuted.

It’s not clear why the hearing was delayed from July 17 to 24, but don’t be surprised if it has to do with US District Judge Dabney Friedrich’s decision that Mueller must stop talking in public about a case that is in front of her, because his words might prejudice a jury. That is the case that Mueller brought in February 2018 against Internet Research Agency, Concord Management, their owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin (aka Putin’s cook), and 12 of his employees.

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Mueller thought he could get away with presenting a case against them because they would not show up, but Prigozhin did hire a major law firm. Ironically, Friedrich has reportedly also decided that the lawyers cannot talk about the case to their own client(s). She hasn’t thrown out the case or anything, she’s simply told everyone including Mueller to stop discussing it in public.

So it’s quite possible that once the House Democrats figured this out (the decision stems from May 28 but was unsealed only on July 1), they had to change strategy. Mueller has been barred from saying a single word about it, including in the House.

In his report, Mueller tried to establish a link between the Russian firms and the Kremlin, but never proved any such link. They are accused of meddling in the 2016 election through emails and social media posts, an accusation that looks shakier by the day.

With that part of his report out of the way, what is left for him to talk about? He himself already gave up on the whole collusion narrative, which would appear to leave only obstruction. Well, there’s the Steele dossier, but with John Solomon blowing another gaping hole in it https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/453384-fbis-spreadsheet-puts-a
-stake-through-the-heart-of-steeles-dossier yesterday, that may not be the wisest topic to discuss on the House floor. By now, only the very faithful still believe in the dossier.

The Republicans surely don’t, and they also happen to be House members, and [THEY] get to ask questions of Mueller on the 24th. The spectacle last night where Nancy Pelosi insisted on calling Trump a racist was nutty (you don’t do that in the House), but the Mueller hearings promise to be much much more nuts still.

In the background a second investigation is playing out: DOJ IG Michael Horowitz has been probing if DOJ or FBI officials abused their powers to spy on the Trump campaign. His report has been delayed, if reports are correct, because Christopher Steele at the very last minute agreed to testify. Those talks apparently were long and detailed. Wonder what he had to say.

And there’s a third probe too: AG Barr has tasked John Durham, the US attorney for Connecticut, to follow up on the Horowitz report and look at whether officials at the CIA, the NSA, and/or foreign intelligence agencies (think MI6), violated protocols or statutes.

That case is about whether the FISA court was misled to secure a warrant to put Trump campaign aide Carter Page under surveillance. It can also take a new look at the text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, messages that Trump tweeted about on Saturday: “This is one of the most horrible abuses of all. Those texts between gaga lovers would have told the whole story. Illegal deletion by Mueller. They gave us “the insurance policy.”

The deletion reportedly may have been accidental. But it does set the tone. The door is wide open for the Republicans to go after Mueller. And he knows it, always has. He never wanted the hearings, he said it was all in his report. But the Dems wanted more, they want Mueller to say Trump is guilty of obstruction (of a probe that perhaps should never have taken place).

Personally, I wonder whether a Republican congressman/woman will have the guts to ask Mueller why he refused to talk to Julian Assange, the most obvious person for him to talk to in the whole wide world.

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But since the GOP hates Assange as much as the Dems, I don’t have high hopes of that happening.

What they certainly will ask is when he knew his probe wasn’t going anywhere. And if that was perhaps as much as a whole year before he presented his report. The Dems will tear into Mueller looking for obstruction. Like: if Trump were not the president, would you sue him? Problem with that is none of this would have happened if Trump were just a citizen.

But I lean towards Ray McGovern’s take, who says that the circus may not come to town on July 24 either. Because there’s no there there (something Peter Strzok himself said about the Steele dossier), and because the Dems know this is their last shot at glory. And the GOP doesn’t mind another week or so of preparation.

Since the Democrats, the media, and Mueller himself all have strong incentive to “make the worst case appear the better” (one of the twin charges against Socrates), they need time to regroup and circle the wagons. The more so, since Mueller’s other twin charge — Russian hacking of the DNC — also has been shown, in a separate Court case, to be bereft of credible evidence. No, the incomplete, redacted, second-hand “forensics” draft that former FBI Director James Comey decided to settle for from the Democratic National Committee-hired CrowdStrike firm does not qualify as credible evidence.


Both new developments are likely to pose a strong challenge to Mueller. On the forensics, Mueller decided to settle for what his former colleague Comey decided to settle for from CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC despite it’s deeply flawed reputation and well known bias against Russia. In fact, the new facts — emerging, oddly, from the U.S. District Court, pose such a fundamental challenge to Mueller’s findings that no one should be surprised if Mueller’s testimony is postponed again.- McGovern

And I was serious when I said before that once the Mueller hearings are done, “America might find itself without a Democratic Party, or at least one it would recognize”. Because if and when the Mueller circus fails to provide the impeachment dream (try elections!), where are they going to go, what else is there to do?

They’ve been clamoring for impeachment for collusion (big fail), for obstruction (Mueller wouldn’t have it) and now racism, but that is merely based on interpretation of tweets. Nancy Pelosi wrote about ‘women of color’, not Donald Trump.

America needs a strong Democratic party, and it certainly doesn’t have one right now. The Dems should be calling for an end to regime change wars,

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that is a popular theme among their voters. But they don’t, because guess where their money comes from. They are in a very deep identity crisis, and Trump just has to pick them off one by one. They should look at themselves, not at him. Do these people ever do strategy?

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
What did I say?

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Just as a reminder of where all this impeachment stuff is going ...

House Impeachment Effort Goes Down In Flames
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=63163

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Originally posted by captaincrunch:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
What did I say?

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That was old f*cking news when you first posted about it, and now you're trying to take credit for it.
They were negotiating to have him for more time, hence the delay.
You'd have a legit beef with Mueller if he were to dodge subpoenas and refuse to testify like all of the current administration's ex-employees, swamp creatures are doing. What are they afraid of? Nothing says you got something to hide like hiding does.

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Hey buddy

T

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Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

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Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines

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OMG! TOO FUNNY! That's like the fox guarding the hen house.




And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac

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Better that then a Putin rat...

T

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

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Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines

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OMG! TOO FUNNY! That's like the fox guarding the hen house.




And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac

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Originally posted by THG:

I know jack and kiki are to stupid to realize that Microsoft knows, if democracies fail around the globe, then they too will have to answer to the likes of another Putin.

What's that mean? Say goodbye to self determination. So no, it's not free or a loss of privacy for Americans. Microsoft is doing this in the name of self preservation. They are investing in their future, and Americans benefit.

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Add JSF as well...

T

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How Mueller deputy Andrew Weissmann's offer to an oligarch could boomerang on DOJ
By John Solomon, opinion contributor

The ink was still drying on special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment papers when his chief deputy, the famously aggressive and occasionally controversial prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, made a bold but secret overture in early June 2017.

Weissmann quietly reached out to the American lawyers for Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash with a tempting offer: Give us some dirt on Donald Trump in the Russia case, and Team Mueller might make his 2014 U.S. criminal charges go away.

The specifics of the never-before-reported offer were confirmed to me by multiple sources with direct knowledge, as well as in contemporaneous defense memos I read.

Two years later, Weissmann’s overture may have far-reaching consequences for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), here and abroad. His former boss, Mueller, is slated to testify Wednesday before Congress.

The DOJ, Mueller’s office and Weissmann did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment on Monday.

At first blush, one might ask, “What’s the big deal?” It’s not unusual for federal prosecutors to steal a page from Monty Hall’s “Let’s Make a Deal” script during plea negotiations.

But Weissmann’s overture was wrapped with complexity and intrigue far beyond the normal federal case, my sources indicate.

At the time, pressure was building inside the DOJ and the FBI to find smoking-gun evidence against Trump in the Russia case because the Steele dossier — upon which the early surveillance warrants were based — was turning out to be an uncorroborated mess. (“There’s no big there there,” lead FBI agent Pete Strzok texted a few days before Weissmann’s overture.)

Likewise, key evidence that the DOJ used to indict Firtash on corruption charges in 2014 was falling apart. Two central witnesses were in the process of recanting testimony, and a document the FBI portrayed as bribery evidence inside Firtash’s company was exposed as a hypothetical slide from an American consultant’s PowerPoint presentation, according to court records I reviewed.

In other words, the DOJ faced potential embarrassment in two high-profile cases when Weissmann made an unsolicited approach on June 4, 2017, that surprised even Firtash’s U.S. legal team.

To some, the offer smacked of being desperately premature. Mueller was appointed just two weeks earlier, did not even have a full staff selected, and was still getting up to speed on the details of the investigation. So why rush to make a deal when the prosecution team still was being selected, some wondered.

Second, Weissmann’s approach was audaciously aggressive, even for a prosecutor with his reputation.

According to a defense memo recounting Weissmann’s contacts, the prosecutor claimed the Mueller team could “resolve the Firtash case” in Chicago [where commodities trading takes place- SIGNY] and neither the DOJ nor the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office “could interfere with or prevent a solution,” including withdrawing all charges. “The complete dropping of the proceedings … was doubtless on the table,” according to the defense memo.

Firtash’s team suspected Weissmann’s claim was exaggerated. While Mueller had full authority to investigate the Russia case, he wasn’t an independent counsel separate of the DOJ but, rather, a special counsel subject to the attorney general’s oversight.

The third red flag came in how much Weissmann communicated to Firstash’s lawyers about his hopes for the Ukrainian oligarch’s testimony.

Prosecutors in plea deals typically ask a defendant for a written proffer of what they can provide in testimony and identify the general topics that might interest them. But Weissmann appeared to go much further in a July 7, 2017, meeting with Firtash’s American lawyers and FBI agents, sharing certain private theories of the nascent special counsel’s investigation into Trump, his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russia, according to defense memos.

For example, Firtash’s legal team wrote that Weissmann told them he believed a company called Bayrock, tied to former FBI informant Felix Sater, had “made substantial investments with Donald Trump’s companies” and that prosecutors were looking for dirt on Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Weissmann told the Firtash team “he believes that Manafort and his people substantially coordinated their activities with Russians in order to win their work in Ukraine,” according to the defense memos. And the Mueller deputy said he “believed” a Ukrainian group tied to Manafort “was merely a front for illegal criminal activities in Ukraine,” and suggested a “Russian secret service authority” may have been involved in influencing the 2016 U.S. election, the defense memos show.

Weissmann’s private observations and sharing of prosecutor’s theories went beyond what prosecutors normally do in proffer negotiations and risked planting ideas that could lead the witness to craft his testimony, according to legal experts I consulted.

Remarkably, Firtash turned down Weissmann’s plea overtures even though the oligarch has been trapped in Austria for five years, fighting extradition on U.S. charges in Chicago alleging that he engaged in bribery and corruption in India related to a U.S. aerospace deal. He denies the charges.

The oligarch’s defense team told me that Firtash rejected the deal because he didn’t have credible information or evidence on the topics Weissmann outlined.

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But now, as Firtash escalates his fight to avoid extradition, the Weissmann overture is being offered to an Austrian court as potential defense evidence that the DOJ’s prosecution is flawed by bogus evidence and political motivations.

In a sealed court filing in Austria earlier this month, Firtash’s legal team compared the DOJ’s 13-year investigation of Firtash to the medieval inquisitions. It cited Weissmann’s overture as evidence of political motivation, saying the prosecutor dangled the “possible cessation of separate criminal proceedings against the applicant if he were prepared to exchange sufficiently incriminating statements for wide-ranging comprehensively political subject areas which included the U.S. President himself as well as the Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

After years of litigation, the U.S. Justice Department won a ruling in Austria to secure Firtash’s extradition to Chicago. But then his legal team secretly filed new evidence that included the Weissmann overture, and Austrian officials suddenly reversed course last week and ordered a new, lengthy delay in extradition.

That new court filing asserts that two key witnesses, cited by the DOJ in its extradition request as affirming the bribery allegations against Firtash, since have recanted, claiming the FBI grossly misquoted them and pressured them to sign their statements. One witness claims his 2012 statement to the FBI was “prewritten by the U.S. authorities” and contains “relevant inaccuracies in substance,” including that he never used the terms “bribery or bribe payments” as DOJ claimed, according to the Austrian court filing.

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That witness also claimed he only signed the 2012 statement because the FBI “exercised undue pressure on him,” including threats to seize his passport and keep him from returning home to India, the memo alleges. That witness recanted his statements the same summer as Weissmann’s overture to Firtash’s team.

Firtash’s lawyers also offered the Austrian court evidence of alleged prosecutorial wrongdoing.

A key document submitted to Austrian authorities to support Firtash’s extradition was portrayed by DOJ as having come from Firtash’s corporate files and purported to show he sanctioned a bribery scheme in India. In fact, the document was created by the McKinsey consulting firm as part of a hypothetical ethics presentation for the Boeing Co. and had no connection to Firtash’s firm.

Moreover, McKinsey claims in an official statement that it had no knowledge of a bribery scheme by Firtash, and the PowerPoint’s use of the phrase “bribery payments” never came from Firtash or his company and were, instead, hypothetical “assumptions by McKinsey about standard business practices in India,” according to the new Austrian court filing.

Firtash’s U.S. legal team told me it alerted Weissmann to DOJ’s false portrayal of the McKinsey document in 2017, but he downplayed the concerns and refused to alert the Austrian court. The document was never withdrawn as evidence, even after the New York Times published a story last December questioning its validity.

“Submitting a false and misleading document to a foreign sovereign and its courts for an extradition decision is not only unethical but also flouts the comity of trust necessary for that process where judicial systems rely only on documents to make that decision,” Firtash’s American legal team wrote in a statement to me. “DOJ’s refusal to rescind the document after being specifically told it is false and misleading is an egregious violation of U.S. and international law.”

Weissmann long has been a favorite target of conservatives, in part because his earlier work as a prosecutor in the Enron case was overturned unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court because of overly aggressive prosecutorial tactics. Former DOJ official Sidney Powell strongly condemned Weissmann’s past work as a prosecutor in “Licensed to Lie,” a book critical of DOJ’s pressure tactics.

It is now clear that Weissmann’s overture to a Ukrainian oligarch in the summer of 2017 is about to take on new significance in Washington, where Mueller is about to testify, and in Austria, where Firtash’s extradition fight has taken a new twist.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Mueller's FBI 'Attack Dog' Weissmann Begged Ukrainian Oligarch For Dirt On Trump ....

Quote:

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How Mueller deputy Andrew Weissmann's offer to an oligarch could boomerang on DOJ
By John Solomon, opinion contributor

The ink was still drying on special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment papers when his chief deputy, the famously aggressive and occasionally controversial prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, made a bold but secret overture in early June 2017.

Weissmann quietly reached out to the American lawyers for Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash with a tempting offer: Give us some dirt on Donald Trump in the Russia case, and Team Mueller might make his 2014 U.S. criminal charges go away.

The specifics of the never-before-reported offer were confirmed to me by multiple sources with direct knowledge, as well as in contemporaneous defense memos I read.

Two years later, Weissmann’s overture may have far-reaching consequences for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), here and abroad. His former boss, Mueller, is slated to testify Wednesday before Congress.

The DOJ, Mueller’s office and Weissmann did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment on Monday.

At first blush, one might ask, “What’s the big deal?” It’s not unusual for federal prosecutors to steal a page from Monty Hall’s “Let’s Make a Deal” script during plea negotiations.

But Weissmann’s overture was wrapped with complexity and intrigue far beyond the normal federal case, my sources indicate.

At the time, pressure was building inside the DOJ and the FBI to find smoking-gun evidence against Trump in the Russia case because the Steele dossier — upon which the early surveillance warrants were based — was turning out to be an uncorroborated mess. (“There’s no big there there,” lead FBI agent Pete Strzok texted a few days before Weissmann’s overture.)

Likewise, key evidence that the DOJ used to indict Firtash on corruption charges in 2014 was falling apart. Two central witnesses were in the process of recanting testimony, and a document the FBI portrayed as bribery evidence inside Firtash’s company was exposed as a hypothetical slide from an American consultant’s PowerPoint presentation, according to court records I reviewed.

In other words, the DOJ faced potential embarrassment in two high-profile cases when Weissmann made an unsolicited approach on June 4, 2017, that surprised even Firtash’s U.S. legal team.

To some, the offer smacked of being desperately premature. Mueller was appointed just two weeks earlier, did not even have a full staff selected, and was still getting up to speed on the details of the investigation. So why rush to make a deal when the prosecution team still was being selected, some wondered.

Second, Weissmann’s approach was audaciously aggressive, even for a prosecutor with his reputation.

According to a defense memo recounting Weissmann’s contacts, the prosecutor claimed the Mueller team could “resolve the Firtash case” in Chicago [where commodities trading takes place- SIGNY] and neither the DOJ nor the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office “could interfere with or prevent a solution,” including withdrawing all charges. “The complete dropping of the proceedings … was doubtless on the table,” according to the defense memo.

Firtash’s team suspected Weissmann’s claim was exaggerated. While Mueller had full authority to investigate the Russia case, he wasn’t an independent counsel separate of the DOJ but, rather, a special counsel subject to the attorney general’s oversight.

The third red flag came in how much Weissmann communicated to Firstash’s lawyers about his hopes for the Ukrainian oligarch’s testimony.

Prosecutors in plea deals typically ask a defendant for a written proffer of what they can provide in testimony and identify the general topics that might interest them. But Weissmann appeared to go much further in a July 7, 2017, meeting with Firtash’s American lawyers and FBI agents, sharing certain private theories of the nascent special counsel’s investigation into Trump, his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russia, according to defense memos.

For example, Firtash’s legal team wrote that Weissmann told them he believed a company called Bayrock, tied to former FBI informant Felix Sater, had “made substantial investments with Donald Trump’s companies” and that prosecutors were looking for dirt on Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Weissmann told the Firtash team “he believes that Manafort and his people substantially coordinated their activities with Russians in order to win their work in Ukraine,” according to the defense memos. And the Mueller deputy said he “believed” a Ukrainian group tied to Manafort “was merely a front for illegal criminal activities in Ukraine,” and suggested a “Russian secret service authority” may have been involved in influencing the 2016 U.S. election, the defense memos show.

Weissmann’s private observations and sharing of prosecutor’s theories went beyond what prosecutors normally do in proffer negotiations and risked planting ideas that could lead the witness to craft his testimony, according to legal experts I consulted.

Remarkably, Firtash turned down Weissmann’s plea overtures even though the oligarch has been trapped in Austria for five years, fighting extradition on U.S. charges in Chicago alleging that he engaged in bribery and corruption in India related to a U.S. aerospace deal. He denies the charges.

The oligarch’s defense team told me that Firtash rejected the deal because he didn’t have credible information or evidence on the topics Weissmann outlined.

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NO CREDIBLE INFORMATION ON TRUMP-RUSSIA COLLUSION

Quote:

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But now, as Firtash escalates his fight to avoid extradition, the Weissmann overture is being offered to an Austrian court as potential defense evidence that the DOJ’s prosecution is flawed by bogus evidence and political motivations.

In a sealed court filing in Austria earlier this month, Firtash’s legal team compared the DOJ’s 13-year investigation of Firtash to the medieval inquisitions. It cited Weissmann’s overture as evidence of political motivation, saying the prosecutor dangled the “possible cessation of separate criminal proceedings against the applicant if he were prepared to exchange sufficiently incriminating statements for wide-ranging comprehensively political subject areas which included the U.S. President himself as well as the Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

After years of litigation, the U.S. Justice Department won a ruling in Austria to secure Firtash’s extradition to Chicago. But then his legal team secretly filed new evidence that included the Weissmann overture, and Austrian officials suddenly reversed course last week and ordered a new, lengthy delay in extradition.

That new court filing asserts that two key witnesses, cited by the DOJ in its extradition request as affirming the bribery allegations against Firtash, since have recanted, claiming the FBI grossly misquoted them and pressured them to sign their statements. One witness claims his 2012 statement to the FBI was “prewritten by the U.S. authorities” and contains “relevant inaccuracies in substance,” including that he never used the terms “bribery or bribe payments” as DOJ claimed, according to the Austrian court filing.

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So the FBI was pressuring Firtash's business colleagues in order to build a case against Firtash, and then using that case to pressure Firtash for dirt on Trump? Gee ... whooda thunk?

Quote:

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That witness also claimed he only signed the 2012 statement because the FBI “exercised undue pressure on him,” including threats to seize his passport and keep him from returning home to India, the memo alleges. That witness recanted his statements the same summer as Weissmann’s overture to Firtash’s team.

Firtash’s lawyers also offered the Austrian court evidence of alleged prosecutorial wrongdoing.

A key document submitted to Austrian authorities to support Firtash’s extradition was portrayed by DOJ as having come from Firtash’s corporate files and purported to show he sanctioned a bribery scheme in India. In fact, the document was created by the McKinsey consulting firm as part of a hypothetical ethics presentation for the Boeing Co. and had no connection to Firtash’s firm.

Moreover, McKinsey claims in an official statement that it had no knowledge of a bribery scheme by Firtash, and the PowerPoint’s use of the phrase “bribery payments” never came from Firtash or his company and were, instead, hypothetical “assumptions by McKinsey about standard business practices in India,” according to the new Austrian court filing.

Firtash’s U.S. legal team told me it alerted Weissmann to DOJ’s false portrayal of the McKinsey document in 2017, but he downplayed the concerns and refused to alert the Austrian court. The document was never withdrawn as evidence, even after the New York Times published a story last December questioning its validity.

“Submitting a false and misleading document to a foreign sovereign and its courts for an extradition decision is not only unethical but also flouts the comity of trust necessary for that process where judicial systems rely only on documents to make that decision,” Firtash’s American legal team wrote in a statement to me. “DOJ’s refusal to rescind the document after being specifically told it is false and misleading is an egregious violation of U.S. and international law.”

Weissmann long has been a favorite target of conservatives, in part because his earlier work as a prosecutor in the Enron case was overturned unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court because of overly aggressive prosecutorial tactics. Former DOJ official Sidney Powell strongly condemned Weissmann’s past work as a prosecutor in “Licensed to Lie,” a book critical of DOJ’s pressure tactics.

It is now clear that Weissmann’s overture to a Ukrainian oligarch in the summer of 2017 is about to take on new significance in Washington, where Mueller is about to testify, and in Austria, where Firtash’s extradition fight has taken a new twist.

---

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/454185-how-mueller-deputy-andr
ew-weissmanns-offer-to-an-oligarch-could-boomerang

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Originally posted by THG:
T

We've Already Begun Impeachment Probe Against Trump

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

Only 2,081 days remaining on the Impeachment Clock.

How exciting. 002780


This thread was started 2 years and 27 weeks ago. A poor example of a countdown. Unless you're CNN, which is why their viewers are all asleep.

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Originally posted by SECOND:
You do realize that the legal process is ridiculously slow? Right?

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

Only 2,075 days remaining on the Impeachment Clock.

How exciting.

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Will these halfwits impeach this chucklefuck already?

America used to care, but they got bored of it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by SECOND:

Democrats’ bid to get Trump’s tax returns before the 2020 election isn’t looking good

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Originally posted by SECOND:For the Democrats, it is futile because there are more than 34 GOP Senators who won't remove Trump. The Democrats cannot even check Trump's tax cheating because Trump controls the IRS and he is going to absolutely crazy legal efforts to keep his taxes a secret.

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Originally posted by JO753:

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Originally posted by SECOND:For the Democrats, it is futile because there are more than 34 GOP Senators who won't remove Trump. The Democrats cannot even check Trump's tax cheating because Trump controls the IRS and he is going to absolutely crazy legal efforts to keep his taxes a secret.

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Lameness.

The GoPs dont hold bak on doing anything. Any hint uv skandl during Obama'z administrtation and they turned it into a forest fire.

How many hearingz did they squeez out uv the Hillary email thing? How much smoke did they jenerate with Ben Gazi? How long did they run the Fast & Furious gun runner show?

If a letter from the Prez had insufficient postaj but got delivered anyway, they woud hav started impeachment proseedingz!

The Demz, on the other hand, look for excusez to not take action.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .

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