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After spending millions of dollars on his 15-lawyer dream team, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Paul Manafort primarily for failing to file paperwork that many Democrats also failed to file. Indeed, a group co-founded by Hillary Clinton’s top adviser John Podesta failed to timely file the same paperwork that Manafort allegedly overlooked.

Yet Mueller did not indict anyone in Podesta’s group, or anyone opposed to Trump. The American people elected Donald Trump as president after he promised to prosecute Hillary for her apparent corruption, and now the exact opposite is transpiring as it is Hillary’s side that is bilking the American taxpayers to lock up Trump supporters.

Many innocent people are being forced to spend enormous legal fees to defend against the out-of-control Mueller, who is acting like an independent federal prosecutor even though that law was terminated in 1999. There was nearly unanimous consensus after abuses by independent federal prosecutors in the 1980s and 90s that such spectacles should not recur, yet Mueller apparently has carte blanche to pursue President Trump and his supporters.

Mueller was installed under the pretext of being merely a “special counsel” for the purpose of looking into possible interference by Russia in the 2016 presidential election. Instead, Mueller has acted without accountability or real oversight in going far beyond the outer limits of his charter.

Nothing in Mueller’s indictment of Manafort has a shred of evidence connecting President Donald Trump or his Administration to the unusual charges against Manafort, which relate to activities predating his involvement with Trump’s campaign. Where’s the beef that justifies giving Mueller a blank check on the U.S. Treasury to engage in such a partisan, one-sided witch-hunt against persons, rather than any real crimes that would be within Mueller’s authorization?

The real purpose of Mueller’s bizarre indictment of Manafort is not to end lobbying on behalf of foreign interests, which is rampant in D.C., but to intimidate former and current Trump officials into playing ball with Mueller’s war against Trump. Already many potential targets of Mueller’s one-sided investigation are being pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by having to hire $1,000-per-hour attorneys simply to defend themselves against alleged crimes that never happened.

Mueller’s top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, has a track record of over-the-top prosecutions ultimately reversed on appeal. As pointed out in a stinging exposé at TheHill.com, Weissmann had a lead role in the destruction of the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen and the loss of its 85,000 jobs, by seeking a conviction that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed, after it was too late to save the company.

Supposedly Mueller’s conduct is made constitutional by a modicum of supervision and accountability that he should be receiving from the Department of Justice. But judging by Mueller’s off-the-rails indictment of Manafort, Mueller is not being reined in by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or anyone else.

It is time to do so. President Trump, for whom the Department of Justice works, should begin by demanding an accounting of how much money Mueller’s team is wasting, and Trump should tweet that information directly to the American people.

With Attorney General Jeff Sessions having recused himself from this issue, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein is supposedly in charge of Mueller. But Trump can fire Rosenstein, and should do so if there is not immediate transparency on Mueller’s expenses and significant changes that rein in the runaway prosecutions.

Mueller’s team is obviously picking the targets and then searching for crimes, even obscure ones, to charge that target with. “Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted,” as renowned U.S. Attorney General (and future Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson observed in 1940.

The indictment against Manafort even seems to be written more for the newspapers than for a court of law. “Conspiracy against the United States” shouts the first charge, a rarely used, politically misleading phrase.

The indictment also tosses in a laundry list of demands for forfeiture of assets, a widely criticized technique of prosecutors ordinarily reserved for drug kingpins and notorious criminals. But its message is for other Trump supporters: tell us what we want to hear, or you’ll lose your home too.

“With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes,” the future Justice Jackson said to a gathering of U.S. Attorneys in 1940, “a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.” That is tyranny-by-prosecution, and Trump should instruct the Justice Department to stop it.

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"Where’s the Oversight of Mueller?"

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ORIGINAL: Lucylastic

As its paul singer that is the backer, not the two chaps you mention AT WFB, thats really not hard to understand...
Plus I hope you will remember to "corroborate" every claim you make now...
point by point, with court documents, evidence and proof.
instead of opinion....

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ORIGINAL: HHLover718

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lucylastic

As its paul singer that is the backer, not the two chaps you mention AT WFB, thats really not hard to understand...
Plus I hope you will remember to "corroborate" every claim you make now...
point by point, with court documents, evidence and proof.
instead of opinion....

Who the fuck died and made you god of the forums? What the fuck is the matter with you. What a loudmouth bitch!

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ORIGINAL: bounty44

oh and lucy---since your comrade WD gave the link to support his claim, the charge was not an issue of just who paid for it financially, but who did the work and what happened to it afterwards.

he contended the work from one morphed into the other.

are you really that bad?

actually yeah, I think you are---when you make the claim of the "dossier has been 100% corroborated"---and someone asks for proof of that, you somehow think its an equivalent for you to say what you just did?

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ORIGINAL: bounty44

here lucy, you need this:

https://www.princeton.edu/pr/pub/integrity/pages/cite/

pay particular attention to #4

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Twitter buried significant portions of tweets related to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in the last two months of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Twitter’s systems hid 48 percent of tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets using #PodestaEmails, Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett said in his written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

“Approximately one quarter (25%) of [#PodestaEmails tweets] received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches,” Edgett said.

He added that “our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee.”

Just two percent of the tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag came from “potentially Russian-linked accounts,” according to Edgett. He explained that Twitter hid the tweets as “part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas.”

Anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks published the DNC and Podesta emails, which were damaging to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, throughout the election.

Among other things, the leaked emails revealed party officials secretly aided Hillary Clinton during her primary battle against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and exposed ostensibly neutral journalists as pro-Clinton partisans. (RELATED: One Year Later, Journalists Exposed By WikiLeaks Carry On As Before)

The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russian operatives were behind the original hacking of both the DNC and Podesta emails, which were part of Russian influence operations meant to disrupt the American electoral system.

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The right had nothing to do with the fake dossier

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ORIGINAL: ThatDizzyChick

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The right had nothing to do with the fake dossier

Bullshit, it was paid for by right wingers on behalf of a right wing candidate running for a right wing party.

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ORIGINAL: bounty44
because you just dont get this perspective from alternet...

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ORIGINAL: bounty44

here lucy, you need this:

https://www.princeton.edu/pr/pub/integrity/pages/cite/

pay particular attention to #4

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ORIGINAL: Lucylastic

quote:

ORIGINAL: bounty44

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ORIGINAL: MasterJaguar01
Now that the dossier is being corroborated piece-by-piece, I figure you will start hoping that is NOT what he was trying to mark!

first ive heard of that.

should be an easy post then to make with each point of the dossier and its corresponding corroboration?

worthy of its own thread even.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/10/25/schiff_on_trump_dossier_sometimes_opposition_research_is_true.html

SCHIFF: We've known for some time, at least it has been publicly reported, that the dossier --the hiring of Christopher Steele-- was originally on behalf of one of the Republican candidates, and later on behalf of the Democratic candidate. This was the first confirmation of half of that. But it doesn't really shed light where we need light shed -- and that is: How much of what Mr. Steele found can be corroborated, how much of it is accurate.

We've been working hard to answer that question, and that is really what the American people need to know. Indeed some of the dossier has been corroborated.
What I find most interesting is that Christopher Steele, no matter who was paying for his services, may have discovered before our own intelligence agencies that the Russians were going to interfere in our election on behalf of Donald Trump.

We have a lot of work to do on behalf of some of the claims in the dossier, but it doesn't add much value to learn who paid for it necessarily and I view this as the effort to discredit [primary author Christopher Steele] which really doesn't advance the investigation...

Here the Republicans are less interested in what did Russia do and how did they do it and how do we protect ourselves? But rather, let's shift the focus on to any kind of government misbehavior, and maybe if we can suggest that the whole investigation goes back to this dossier and this dossier was opposition research, maybe we can discredit the whole investigation and maybe we can get the country to ignore what Russia, in fact, did.

more at the link


As the investigation isnt over, there wont be a lot of information on what they are....sworry

Oh and here is a link to specific analyses done by wapo recently.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/10/25/what-the-trump-dossier-says-and-what-it-doesnt/?utm_term=.30b074b98252

quote:

Okay—so we all know the Trump dossier was compiled by former MI6 operative the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded Christopher Steele. The lawyer for both entities, Marc Elias of Perkins Coie, hired the research firms Fusion GPS in April of 2016. GPS then retained Steele who used sources from within the Kremlin to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Millions of dollars were sent to Perkins Coie. Opposition research is not illegal of course, but you cannot hire a law firm who then hires other folks to do this research without detailing the expenditures for these actors in Federal Election Commission reports. That’s the complaint that was lobbed against the Clinton camp by the Campaign Legal Center last week. Thus far, what we know is that the money the Clinton campaign gave Perkin Coie was listed as “legal services.” It looks like it went a bit beyond that. Jonathan Turley, a constitutional scholar and professor at the George Washington University School of Law, said there is a possibility that some in the Clinton camp could be facing criminal charges. That’s what he told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum last Thursday (via RCP)

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JONATHAN TURLEY: As you know, I've been very skeptical about the past Russian collusion claims as being a criminal matter, even though I supported the appointment of the special counsel after Comey was fired I've been cautioning and many others have that it really isn't a crime to collude. In the same, it wouldn't be a crime on the Trump side to receive information on the other side from a foreign national.

The allegations against the Clintons could potentially be criminal. It doesn't mean that they are criminal. The $500,000 given to Bill Clinton might have been innocent. The timing might just have been horrible. But that would be a cognizable crime if a linkage was found.

In the same way, the allegation over the dossier does involve a potential violation of federal law. The Federal Election Commission Act requires campaigns to state a purpose for any money spent over about $200, to sort of have an item description for each of those amounts. There isn't an item description for this law firm for the amount of money that is being alleged to have been given to this research firm.

Concerning the $500,000 check Bill received, that has to do with the sale of Uranium One. Fox News Greg Jarrett mentioned how this transaction raised its ugly head again, along with adding to Turley’s point about campaign funds being used for opposition research:

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It is against the law for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to funnel millions of dollars to a British spy and to Russian sources in order to obtain the infamous and discredited Trump “dossier.” The Federal Election Campaign Act (52 USC 30101) prohibits foreign nationals and governments from giving or receiving money in U.S. campaigns. It also prohibits the filing of false or misleading campaign reports to hide the true purpose of the money (52 USC 30121).This is what Clinton and the DNC appear to have done.

Most often the penalty for violating this law is a fine, but in egregious cases, like this one, criminal prosecutions have been sought and convictions obtained. In this sense, it could be said that Hillary Clinton is the one who was conspiring with the Russians by breaking campaign finance laws with impunity.

But that’s not all. Damning new evidence appears to show that Clinton used her office as Secretary of State to confer benefits to Russia in exchange for millions of dollars in donations to her foundation and cash to her husband. Secret recordings, intercepted emails, financial records, and eyewitness accounts allegedly show that Russian nuclear officials enriched the Clintons at the very time Hillary presided over a governing body which unanimously approved the sale of one-fifth of America’s uranium supply to Russia.

Yet, Hillary shall not despair. She might have company in Barack Obama, whose campaign arm—Organizing for Action—also started paying Fusion GPS around the time the Hillary campaign and the Democrats decided to hire Fusion GPS who then retained an ex-British spy to compile that unverified dossier.