Mueller's tactics may begin facing significant obstacles - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14911991
Federal judge accuses Mueller's team of 'lying,' trying to target Trump: 'C'mon man!'
It seems every Trump hater on PoFo saw the handwriting on the wall of throwing charges at Manafort to try to get to Trump. Now that a federal judge has done the same thing and is questioning the scope of the special counsel--since all of the charges against Mueller have nothing to do with the Trump campaign--it seems that many here on PoFo are silent about their very own commentary.

A federal judge on Friday harshly rebuked Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team during a hearing for ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort – suggesting they lied about the scope of the investigation, are seeking “unfettered power” and are more interested in bringing down the president.

"You don't really care about Mr. Manafort,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III told Mueller’s team. “You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you to lead you to Mr. Trump and an impeachment, or whatever."

Further, Ellis demanded to see the unredacted “scope memo,” a document outlining the scope of the special counsel’s Russia probe that congressional Republicans have also sought.

This is an issue for Rod Rosenstein too. As Congress and the courts begin questioning the scope of the investigation--two co-equal branches of government--it begins to cast a pall on the special counsel and its overseer.

Judge rejects Mueller's request for delay in Russian troll farm case
Under US law, criminals enjoy a rarely exercised right to a speedy trial. The Russian corporate defendants in the case Mueller charged have volunteered to enter a plea. Mueller claims he hasn't been able to serve them and is now trying to stop the case from moving forward on technicalities, only to be rebuffed by the court. It will be interesting to see if the Russian corporations press for a speedy trial that Mueller's team evidently isn't prepared for.

The three businesses accused of facilitating the alleged Russian troll farm operation — the Internet Research Agency, Concord Management, and Concord Catering — were also expected to simply ignore the American criminal proceedings.

Last month, however, a pair of Washington-area lawyers suddenly surfaced in the case, notifying the court that they represent Concord Management. POLITICO reported at the time that the move appeared to be a bid to force Mueller’s team to turn over relevant evidence to the Russian firm and perhaps even to bait prosecutors into an embarrassing dismissal in order to avoid disclosing sensitive information.

Very interesting...
#14913828
I think the establishment's core strategy has a psychological assumption from the Bill Clinton era of the politics of personal destruction that didn't work with Trump: when attacked, most people go into defense and flee. That's why they call people "racist," "sexist," "homophobe" and whatever. Trump doesn't go into defense. He counter attacks and fights. The Russians may be learning from Trump too. You can beat the establishment if you counterattack when their charges are false or immaterial, which is more often than not.

The ‘Russian Collusion’ Trial Is On, And Mueller May Be The First Casualty
While I've been out on business all week, apparently the case moved forward against Mueller's wishes. Concord Management and Concord Management, LLC entered not guilty pleas.

Mueller, weathering significant criticism that his Russian collusion case was thin, unveiled a grandiose indictment Feb. 16 against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies.

This is the best he's been able to do in a year's time now. It makes the special counsel look like a joke. Mueller tried to prevent them from entering pleas. They aren't ready to prosecute the case.

In my OP:
I wrote:Under US law, criminals enjoy a rarely exercised right to a speedy trial. The Russian corporate defendants in the case Mueller charged have volunteered to enter a plea. Mueller claims he hasn't been able to serve them and is now trying to stop the case from moving forward on technicalities, only to be rebuffed by the court. It will be interesting to see if the Russian corporations press for a speedy trial that Mueller's team evidently isn't prepared for.

emphasis added.

Mueller may now have to try the case, and Concord’s lawyers have put the special counsel on notice. The Russian company’s lawyers intend to invoke “discovery” to obtain U.S. intelligence about what they knew of Russian activities.

“I guess Mueller thought it was a freebie, for sure,” former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy told The Daily Caller News Foundation after the court proceeding.

“He thought it could make this association (of Russian collusion) and it would never be challenged in court,” McCarthy, also a National Review contributing editor, said.

Concord retained the services of two attorneys at mega law firm Reed Smith, and the company is demanding a speedy trial. The lawyers indicated they were going to exercise Concord’s rights under discovery to examine all of Mueller’s “evidence” of the conspiracy.

We know how Mueller and Rosenstein like to keep their cards close to the vest. These "Russians" aren't running away from the charges. They are demanding a speedy trial--unlike Manafort. That means that the pressure is on Mueller's team, not the defendants. As I said before, the right to a speedy trial is rarely invoked--mostly because (in my opinion) lawyers like to bilk people for as much money as possible. Yet, if Mueller violates their right, they will win their case on that technicality.

My guess is that Mueller is not going to want to share his counter-intelligence methods with the criminal defendants. It will be interesting to see if the court compels him to do so and if he fails, the defendants file a motion to dismiss.

MAGA! :rockon:
#14913856
Yes, Mueller wanted to continue intimidating people into creating a scenario he could prosecute. The demand for a speedy trial requires he lays his hand on the table. This makes his future intimidation impotent.
I wish someone would have thought of this months ago.
#14913944
Sounds like the Trump supporters think they've just tumbled onto yet another way to obstruct justice. Mueller doesn't have to sweat the timely trial hoohoo until a man's been charged. He can take his sweet time investigating the grounds for charges
#14914799
Stormsmith wrote:Sounds like the Trump supporters think they've just tumbled onto yet another way to obstruct justice.

Exercising a constitutional right isn't obstruction of justice. :roll: How do you come up with these twists of logic?

Stormsmith wrote:Mueller doesn't have to sweat the timely trial hoohoo until a man's been charged.

Maybe you missed this, but the independent counsel indicted a bunch of Russian individuals and a few Russian-owned corporations. At least one of them has plead not guilty and is challenging the charges.

Stormsmith wrote:He can take his sweet time investigating the grounds for charges

No he cannot. Once he makes a charge, he has to be ready to prosecute the case. Typically, lawyers delay a case. However, the defendant has a right to a speedy trial.

One Degree wrote:Yes, Mueller wanted to continue intimidating people into creating a scenario he could prosecute. The demand for a speedy trial requires he lays his hand on the table. This makes his future intimidation impotent.
I wish someone would have thought of this months ago.

I'm guessing Manafort didn't because he didn't pay taxes on some of his lobbying. Flynn was trying to protect his kid. These Russians were people who likely would never have shown up in court. Yet, now that the corporations have shown up and plead not guilty, Mueller has to play ball or dismiss the case.

The Russians Try to Call Mueller’s Bluff, File Request to View Secret Grand Jury Info
None of this stuff is going as planned. The Flynn case is likely to be reviewed to see if Flynn can withdraw from his agreement. The judge in the Manafort case wants to see the "super duper secret" scope memo. The Russians want to see the grand jury instruction.

Attorneys for an alleged component of Russian trolling efforts during the 2016 presidential election are demanding that special counsel Robert Mueller be forced to reveal the grand jury instructions used in count one of the government’s indictment against Concord Management and Consulting LLC.

This is hilarious. As I've said for so long, all somebody had to do was fight back against the establishment. Trump started a fantastic new trend: standing up to the establishment.

Concord’s argument is that Mueller failed to include a necessary knowledge requirement in count one of the indictment against Concord Management and other Russian entities and therefore, may need to be dismissed. (A knowledge requirement refers to intent or knowledge of criminal wrongdoing. Thus, an allegedly offending party would have knowledge of the criminality they’re alleged to have engaged in.) The motion notes, “violations of the relevant federal campaign laws and foreign agent registration requirements administered by the DOJ and the FEC require the defendant to have acted ‘willfully,’ a word that does not appear anywhere in Count One of the Indictment.”

If the defendants beat this back first, I'm guessing the Flynn case will fail too for failure to disclose exculpatory evidence.

Concord Management’s Monday motion contains at least one reference to U.S. case law where similar indictments were dismissed because they failed to adequately track statutory language. In other words, Concord Management is arguing that Mueller and his army of attorneys charged Concord Management (and other Russian entities) with a vague-sounding “crime” that isn’t actually a crime.

Hrmmm....Sounds like Mueller needs to tighten things up a bit. However, he may be a bit too late if sympathetic media picks up on this:

Russians lambasting Mueller wrote:[T]he Deputy Attorney General acting for the recused Attorney General has rejected the history and integrity of the DOJ, and instead licensed a Special Counsel who for all practical political purposes cannot be fired, to indict a case that has absolutely nothing to do with any links or coordination between any candidate and the Russian Government. The reason is obvious, and is political: to justify his own existence the Special Counsel has to indict a Russian – any Russian.

Wow. Mueller is up to his ass in alligators as my uncle would say...
#14914837
blackjack21 wrote:The Flynn case is likely to be reviewed to see if Flynn can withdraw from his agreement. The judge in the Manafort case wants to see the "super duper secret" scope memo. The Russians want to see the grand jury instruction.

Flynn can retract his confession and change his plea at any time (before sentencing). That makes the agreement "Null & Void." Once he's been sentenced, forget it, the fat lady has sung. The confession does however remain a part of the record and is assessible to the court.

The judge want's to see the memo, he gets to see the memo … it doesn't change anything. I think this more of an issue about the terms of his bail. It sure as hell isn't going to change the charges or get his case dismissed.

Grand Jury proceedings are by definition "Secret." The court may review them if it feels that may be pertinent, but I don't think the defense is going to see them. If "willful" was left out of the instructions it's not a big deal. The defendants alleged actions are tacitly willful and cannot be seen as otherwise. It's a 3rd grade legal argument.

This is hilarious.

Your commentary certainly is … "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" you know?

Zam
#14914891
I'm still optimistic enough to think that maybe Mueller is being thorough so that this whole thing can be put to rest.

Unfortunately, does anyone think that if Mueller comes up empty, he won't be attacked by the liberal press? I continue to speculate on how much psychiatric drug abuse it takes for someone to lose all sense of their integrity.
#14915734
But what if Mueller still comes up empty, @SpecialOlympian? Will the liberal press attack him? I guess they won't do that in that alternate universe. Because it's just impossible to come up empty for any random person investigating Trump for anything randomly for 0.00035 seconds at least.
Last edited by Beren on 17 May 2018 22:57, edited 1 time in total.
#14915748
The Senate Intelligence Committee just concluded Russia did help Trump in his election bid and Donald Trump Jr. has already admitted to it by tweeting out emails showing himself eager to meet with a person acting on behalf of the Russian government with dirt on Clinton. You can see the emails yourself at the Senate Judiciary Committee website, page 26 of the Exhibit PDF under Donald Trump Jr.

Oh wait I just responded to Suntzu, noted goodbrained genius.

This was my favorite part of the SIC report from the emails they obtained:

Image
#14915762
SpecialOlympian wrote:Mueller has already made 17 indictments that have resulted in 5 guilty pleas. He is not coming up empty; he has already produced results.


And one of them, Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan was convicted.
#14915815
Of course, this thread is about Mueller's tactics, just in case you guys forgot.

SpecialOlympian wrote:Mueller has already made 17 indictments that have resulted in 5 guilty pleas. He is not coming up empty; he has already produced results.

Plea agreements, not convictions--and all of them without exception on process crimes, which isn't that impressive.

suntzu wrote:None of them related to Russian collusion. :lol:

Which isn't a crime... The point of the whole thing--and I think they knew it going in--was that they would smear Trump, and Trump would lose support. It's not happening. The problem for the establishment is that they cannot make anyone else more hated than they are themselves. If you accept as a point of demurrer that Russia colluded with Trump, what law was broken? The only thing that would matter is if Trump enlisted Russia to hack the DNC's servers, which clearly didn't happen. So there is no story other than a diversion to hide Hillary Clinton's crimes.

Beren wrote:They're just related to the Russian mob. :excited:

So are Bill and Hillary Clinton and Mueller himself. So we're at the pot calling the kettle black. Where does that leave us?

Stormsmith wrote:And one of them, Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan was convicted.

Nope. Another plea agreement on a process crime. It's meaningless. It's all for show.

I wrote this post some time ago, and now Rush Limbaugh is picking up on my thread:

The Delicious Embarrassment of Robert Mueller
Rush Limbaugh wrote:RUSH: Mueller has had a major, major embarrassment and faux pas, and this is so delicious. He indicts those Russian entities, the troll farms, the 13 different outfits in Ukraine and Russia. He indicts them for tampering in the election and trolling our internet with bots at Facebook and Twitter and so forth. Well, one of those firms, Concord Management, threw the biggest wrench into Mueller’s investigation yet, by showing up and hiring a lawyer and pleading not guilty.

The last thing these people were supposed to do was answer the summons! The only way this works is if the accused stay in Russia and don’t say anything. But one of these outfits said, “Wait a minute. We didn’t do this. We want our day in court.” They showed up. They have a lawyer or two hired, they have proclaimed their innocence, and they have demanded to see the evidence Mueller has, and he can’t produce it because he doesn’t have it!

And the lawyers for Concord Management are still demanding the evidence, and Mueller hasn’t yet turned it over because he doesn’t have it. What’s he gonna do? He can’t proceed with this because it’s a bogus charge. It was never expected to be answered. It was supposed to linger there as the proof, the evidence of Russia tampering in our elections. But these people have thrown this gigantic wrench by saying (paraphrasing), “Hey, we’re here, we answered your summons, and we’re pleading not guilty.”

And Mueller’s office then tried to say, “Well, you can’t do that because we didn’t yet properly serve you.” And the Concord Management lawyer said, “How do you mean you didn’t serve us? We’re here, doofus! We know you charged us, doofus! We’re here! Now, where’s the evidence?” Now, Mueller’s got a problem. If he abandons the indictment — oh ho — what else is he gonna do? Stonewall it? Delay it?

You heard it here first...
#14915817
Not sure if anyone mentioned this yet since I don't read posts from some users... but Mueller has filed an unredacted memo to a judge that explains the scope of his investigation. The judge apparently has the option of throwing out some of the charges against Manafort. Perhaps more importantly, it establishes the scope for future actions taken in the investigation, which is facing questions over things like the raid re: Stormy Daniels that may have been extrajudicial and beyond the allowed scope of the investigation. There's also questions of how/why the special prosecutor can hand things off to the New York state attorney's office.

I personally suspect that the New York DA whose sex scandal came out, and he had to resign, is not unrelated to the New York raid on Trump's lawyer. I'm assuming that this came out because that guy was overstepping his bounds.
#14915867
Beren wrote:Maybe Trump just went too far with it, like he goes too far with his Saudi, Zionist, and Chinese collusion as well.

What does that mean to you? Is that a conclusion you came to yourself, or is it a conclusion you would like me to come to? As I've said all along, I'm not really a Trump guy. I was a Cruz guy initially. Why I like Trump is specifically because he's not of the Washington cabal that pulls shit like the phony Russian collusion charges. What's interesting to me is that many on the political left used to be serious about media corporations gaining too much power; yet, today they seem fine with it as long as it produces corporate political icons with a veneer of progressiveness--like Obama or Hillary Clinton, while fielding alternates like George and Jeb Bush who they trash, but who fulfill the goals of the corporations simultaneously. The 24/7 cable outlets like CNN, MSNBC and FoxNews illustrate the issue pretty well. The odd thing is that FoxNews is the least of the offenders since everyone knows it's run by Rupert Murdoch and his sons. CNN used to be the same way when it was run by Ted Turner, but those days are long gone. MSNBC has always been an also ran, but its name tells it all. It's NBC and Bill Gates.

What I think should interest people is who--in AMERICA--is behind Trump other than Trump? I've said for a long time that books like Clinton Cash had to have been by someone powerful. Disagree with the book's conclusions if you will or try to make light of them. However, unless you are just a shill for the Clintons, you are missing the bigger picture. For example, take Hong Wu's comment:

Hong Wu wrote:I personally suspect that the New York DA whose sex scandal came out, and he had to resign, is not unrelated to the New York raid on Trump's lawyer. I'm assuming that this came out because that guy was overstepping his bounds.

I'm inclined to agree to a point. However, I'm not so naive that I believe that this is all "poetic justice." As soon as they strike Trump one way, the politician or prosecutor that goes on offense quickly finds a need to be on defense. Trump is a talented guy, but nobody is that talented. Rather, Trump is prepared.

Now, I suppose this could be coming from Russia. Yet, even if it were, I would not be upset about it at all, because the Washington establishment is corrupt and essentially if not anti-American than at least bearing no allegiance to America and Americans. So the Russia bogeyman isn't particularly concerning to me.

To me, to know that the charges against the Russian-owned corporation were false and that they needed to defend, somebody somewhere had to understand the deeper workings of the deep state. The corporation coming forward and entering a plea only to have the prosecution object to the entrance of a plea tells you a lot about the nature of the charges--they were political and meant to linger or cast a pall. Instead, what is happening is that they are being challenged. If the constitution has any meaning left at all, Mueller has to provide evidence or drop the charges.
#14915894
Hong Wu wrote:Not sure if anyone mentioned this yet since I don't read posts from some users... but Mueller has filed an unredacted memo to a judge that explains the scope of his investigation. The judge apparently has the option of throwing out some of the charges against Manafort. Perhaps more importantly, it establishes the scope for future actions taken in the investigation, which is facing questions over things like the raid re: Stormy Daniels that may have been extrajudicial and beyond the allowed scope of the investigation. There's also questions of how/why the special prosecutor can hand things off to the New York state attorney's office.

I personally suspect that the New York DA whose sex scandal came out, and he had to resign, is not unrelated to the New York raid on Trump's lawyer. I'm assuming that this came out because that guy was overstepping his bounds.


Mueller is filing through two separate state courts and only one of them is asking for further documentation . And no, nobody involved in the raid on Cohen's office was overstepping bounds. Obtaining a warrant on a lawyer's office is one of the strictest and highest bars to clear. Saying the DA overstepped his bounds is fairly moronic as well, since a DA can not approve a warrant. No wonder you didn't pass the Bar.

It turned out to be justified because Cohen, being Trump's lawyer, apparently didn't understand how shell companies worked and used Essential Consultants as a general purpose slush fund for multiple bribes.

There's also questions of how/why the special prosecutor can hand things off to the New York state attorney's office.


What are those questions? Do they involve proper instructions on how to wipe your own ass? Because it's normal for law enforcement to hand off evidence and refer cases to the appropriate jurisdictions if they happen to find evidence of wrongdoing in an investigation.

Your usual "I'm just a simple moron with no law knoweldge asking questions" routine is kinda falling apart.
#14915940
blackjack21 wrote:What does that mean to you?

It rather matters whether what it means to the FBI and some other elements of the federal government. They may be really worried about this because Trump's just a shady figure. Should they actually trust him after his bankruptcies and shams like Trump University? To them he's a dark horse that won the race, a carpetbagger that became president suddenly (and unexpectedly).

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