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CNN: First charges filed in Mueller investigation

WaterAstro

Member
So watching some CNN, I see Manafort and Gates charged, and Papadopoulos is guilty? But there are 12 people charged?

Trying to get some more information.
 
Manafort and Gates could see up to 80 years in prison:

https://apnews.com/6394cb4368ca4464...tes-face-decades-in-prison,-millions-in-fines

The conspiracy charge is only worth 5 years, but the money laundering is a +20 bonus. The counts all stack. The "Failure to File Reports of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts" charge is 10 years each (x4 counts), plus $100k/half of the transaction total for every year of the charges.

I think I'm starting to understand the strategic significance of releasing the George P statement (and plea deal details) the same day as the arrests/indictment details. The message is "play ball, and we'll let you walk with a slap on the wrist. Lie or stay silent? You're gonna catch these hands."
 

WaterAstro

Member
Manafort and Gates could see up to 80 years in prison:

https://apnews.com/6394cb4368ca4464...tes-face-decades-in-prison,-millions-in-fines

The conspiracy charge is only worth 5 years, but the money laundering is a +20 bonus. The counts all stack. The "Failure to File Reports of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts" charge is 10 years each (x4 counts), plus $100k/half of the transaction total for every year of the charges.

I think I'm starting to understand the strategic significance of releasing the George P statement (and plea deal details) the same day as the arrests/indictment details. The message is "play ball, and we'll let you walk with a slap on the wrist. Lie or stay silent? You're gonna catch these hands."

He has nothing to worry since he'll get pardoned.
 
He has nothing to worry since he'll get pardoned.

Pardoning someone formally accused of conspiracy against the United States would be an...interesting career move. It would also create a constitutional crisis, especially if he does so preemptively. A pardoned person can still be compelled to testify under oath, and be held in contempt if they refuse.
 
I went to sleep after manafort and gates thinking it would be spun by breitbart as a nothing burger but woke up to papadopolous guilty document that appears to heavily link the trump campaign team to the kremlin policy. And saw manaforts bail is set to 10m of clean money which will be hard for him to get so he may want to flip, and Tom Barrack has fired Gates, and sanders told a ton of lies in the press conference.
So this hints this is the tip of a larger iceberg. And finally trump is tweeting basically so what?, prove *I* did anything *personally*.
Yeah no this isn't a nothing.
 

Laekon

Member
Flipping through the news channels this morning was interesting. MSNBC was all Mueller, CNN had some ICE/child story thrown in, and Fox gave equal time to Mueller, Trumps "old news" defense, Hillary, and players kneeling.
 

MIMIC

Banned
Pardoning someone formally accused of conspiracy against the United States would be an...interesting career move. It would also create a constitutional crisis, especially if he does so preemptively. A pardoned person can still be compelled to testify under oath, and be held in contempt if they refuse.

Right; compelled to testify to the crime(s) in which they were pardoned on. Being pardoned doesn't just flatly remove a person's Fifth Amendment rights.

So if they wanted Manafort to testify about all this money laundering and tax stuff, that's all fair game. Beyond that, he could refuse to testify. The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination (which could lead to a criminal charge), and a pardon removes the possibility of ever being charged with that specific crime...hence the reason why a pardoned person can be compelled to testify: it's no longer self-incriminating.

In order for the pardon to backfire, Trump would have to pardon someone charged with a crime related to the Russian interference with the election. That way, they could talk about the crime as it relates to Trump (or whoever) without fear of being prosecuted themselves. But even then, it's highly unlikely that he would issue such a pardon in this situation, as I'm sure his lawyers are well aware of the dangers it would bring.
 

DiscoJer

Member
I think the most interesting thing is the other guy. Manafort was always known to be a stooge for Ukraine's Russian backed government. He probably could have been indicted earlier if anyone cared.

But the other guy, Paradopolous (sp?) apparently turned informer and is tied to the actual Russian government, not Ukraine's old Russian backed one.
 
Any thoughts on Tony Podesta stepping down today? Sounds like he may be next.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/invest...up-mercury-are-companies-b-indictment-n815721

Yeah my thoughts are it is completely obvious where mueller is going and what he is building and podesta is a waste of his time as he leads nowhere. If he did something illegal he should fry but DC is full of people playing around with the rules for their own personal gain.

There is no grand conspiracy that links podesta, rosenstein, comey, Hillary, Obama and a uranium company that digs out ore in Canada. That's a fantasy that gets increasingly complex the more bad news is unearthed about what went on pre election among trump campaign staff.

One of the key things that the federal government has now established is the trump campaign was told way back before anyone else really knew that the Russians had hacked emails out of the dems and were desperate to fork them over. They also established that the campaign was keen to take help but wanted to avoid trump getting on a plane or meeting personally with his old contacts instead they wanted to hide the connection using low level staff.

Podesta group is a distraction. The uranium one plot relies on empty logic gaps. At this point a cornered administration and right wing commentators are literally prepared to say anything to muddy the water.
 
Manafort must of been hard for FBI, if they take down someone for being a agent and money laundrying, then Mossad will be scared there agents will be caught
 

Joe T.

Member
YouTube inadvertently hosted over 1,100 “state actor” trolling videos last year
Disclosure of even bigger numbers comes ahead of Tuesday testimony on Capitol Hill.
By Sam Machkovech, ArsTechnica

"Reports from the Washington Post and Recode separately claim that Facebook's Tuesday testimony will state that up to 126 million people were exposed to Russian operations on its site during the 2016 Presidential election season. Facebook's official statements have previously focused solely on the reach of paid advertisements. This new, larger number is due to Facebook now counting non-ad operations conducted by the Internet Research Agency, a disinformation organization with Russian ties. Reports have pointed to the IRA creating seemingly legitimate American accounts with aims of indirect political disruption."

In addition, Google published a report that included a stark admission of Russian disinformation on YouTube to the tune of 1,108 videos. Google says that these videos, which totaled 43 hours of content, were published by 18 channels "likely associated" with the Internet Research Agency, a disinformation organization with Russian ties.

Russians. Russians everywhere!
 

Xtyle

Member
Haven't been following the news today. Will have to check Maddow and others on YouTube tonight.. has there been any new development out of the indictments?
 
Haven't been following the news today. Will have to check Maddow and others on YouTube tonight.. has there been any new development out of the indictments?

Maddow had a good rundown on Manafort's money laundering operation. Shameless funneling of money into offshore shell companies, then moving it back into the US by paying exorbitant amounts ($25k+) for routine housekeeping and personal grooming transactions, and taking out cash loans against properties he purchased.

Clovis and Lewandowski may be the other senior campaign officials contacted by George P when he was trying to organize the Russia meetings, according to the WaPo:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...er-tried-to-work-with-the-russian-government/

Mueller's team's official statement on indictment is that this is just the tip of the iceberg of investigation.
 

Ombra

Member
A48iLtSCMAADJC2.jpg

Every time his name comes up.
Every. Time.

May he rest in peace.
 

Xtyle

Member
Maddow had a good rundown on Manafort's money laundering operation. Shameless funneling of money into offshore shell companies, then moving it back into the US by paying exorbitant amounts ($25k+) for routine housekeeping and personal grooming transactions, and taking out cash loans against properties he purchased.

Clovis and Lewandowski may be the other senior campaign officials contacted by George P when he was trying to organize the Russia meetings, according to the WaPo:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...er-tried-to-work-with-the-russian-government/

Mueller's team's official statement on indictment is that this is just the tip of the iceberg of investigation.

Yea I have now watch Maddow, The Last word, and Hardball...this seems to be developing quickly. Hopefully more will come out.
 

Ombra

Member
Yea I have now watch Maddow, The Last word, and Hardball...this seems to be developing quickly. Hopefully more will come out.
Maddow saw a lot of this coming, I always check in with her to wrap everything up with a meat little bow.
 
A lot of people seem to be very keen on the foot note that has papadopolous trying to hook people on an offer of hacked emails however even in the indictment as described it could be taken two ways and the original wapo article months ago covering the very same email chain explained it in the benign form, where manafort was basically telling the others they should reply to the Russians using a low level guy (that they were not going to have a meeting yet).

Hopefully since it's a footnote it's not the smoking gun and there is other information being held back. I think it's wrong to make this particular info from a foot note a key "told you so" moment that proves anything. It's too vague as it stands.
 
A lot of people seem to be very keen on the foot note that has papadopolous trying to hook people on an offer of hacked emails however even in the indictment as described it could be taken two ways and the original wapo article months ago covering the very same email chain explained it in the benign form, where manafort was basically telling the others they should reply to the Russians using a low level guy (that they were not going to have a meeting yet).

Hopefully since it's a footnote it's not the smoking gun and there is other information being held back. I think it's wrong to make this particular info from a foot note a key "told you so" moment that proves anything. It's too vague as it stands.

A newscaster last night suggested that the redacted version was probably leaked to the WaPo a few months ago by Manafort himself, to make the campaign look more innocent. Without the proper context, it does read like the campaign was doing the right thing; the very next sentence destroys that reading though.
 
A newscaster last night suggested that the redacted version was probably leaked to the WaPo a few months ago by Manafort himself, to make the campaign look more innocent. Without the proper context, it does read like the campaign was doing the right thing; the very next sentence destroys that reading though.

That is what I figured in the end.
Someone 'read' emails to the WaPo aloud and there is no way for the reporter to know whether they were selectively edited to spin the best possible impression. perhaps the WH did this after they were turned over the the FBI, thinking that they'll come out at some point so why not make hay out of them now.
It seems like poor reporting to draw conclusions in the story from such scenario and in such a high risk high profile story.
I'm disappointed in the washington post if that is what happened. I know little about journalism standards but it seems to me that the WaPo was used ( in a remarkably elementary way ) to create a smoke screen. If the emails end up being damaging, and excerpts were merely read aloud to a reporter.
 
This is weird.

https://pastebin.com/cdnbNLgD

contains a list of suspect URLs, origin unknown. I found it because MikeFarb on twitter is tweeting about them but I don't know if his source was the pastebin, or he put them in the pastebin, or he doesn't know about the pastebin but found them elsewhere.

Here is the weird part. The pastebin is a list of Trump Org domain URLs (haven't checked every one) that have random lettered sub-domains. The URLs 404 so don't contain anything useful. These sub-domains are not available in DNS unless you know them. You can't enumerate (typically) all sub-domains a given domain has. A domain may have a wildcard sub-domain though - but this isn't the case here with some I checked.

Ok so all sub-domains of a domain are unknowable. Unless the web has a memory of someone using one or someone has access to the full DNS info of a domain. How they got into the pastebin isn't clear. From the OTX site (web threat exchange) the pastebin refers to? not sure.

Either way, the peculiar part is the random lettered sub-domains don't point to the same IP address as the main domain - which is a typical US web host address - but they point to a .RU host. Yeah Russia. Red Alert Red Alert. Could also be that russia does a lot of cheap web hosting and cheap domain name support.

But its just .. weird.
And off topic.

But if anyone wants to verify this open the pastebin and resolve (ping) some sub-domains there and use ipinfo.io to check the IP location of the sub-domain and the main domain.
 

Ombra

Member
This is weird.

https://pastebin.com/cdnbNLgD

contains a list of suspect URLs, origin unknown. I found it because MikeFarb on twitter is tweeting about them but I don't know if his source was the pastebin, or he put them in the pastebin, or he doesn't know about the pastebin but found them elsewhere.

Here is the weird part. The pastebin is a list of Trump Org domain URLs (haven't checked every one) that have random lettered sub-domains. The URLs 404 so don't contain anything useful. These sub-domains are not available in DNS unless you know them. You can't enumerate (typically) all sub-domains a given domain has. A domain may have a wildcard sub-domain though - but this isn't the case here with some I checked.

Ok so all sub-domains of a domain are unknowable. Unless the web has a memory of someone using one or someone has access to the full DNS info of a domain. How they got into the pastebin isn't clear. From the OTX site (web threat exchange) the pastebin refers to? not sure.

Either way, the peculiar part is the random lettered sub-domains don't point to the same IP address as the main domain - which is a typical US web host address - but they point to a .RU host. Yeah Russia. Red Alert Red Alert. Could also be that russia does a lot of cheap web hosting and cheap domain name support.

But its just .. weird.
And off topic.

But if anyone wants to verify this open the pastebin and resolve (ping) some sub-domains there and use ipinfo.io to check the IP location of the sub-domain and the main domain.
Interesting may warrant its own thread if it catches fire.
 
Interesting may warrant its own thread if it catches fire.

It didn't pan out the most boring explanation is probably correct : trump org has poor server security and their parked domain control was hacked ages ago (godaddy) and they got done by sub domain shadowing - where hackers create subdomains to host bad things.

Of course it had to be russia doing the command and control and file serving. Sigh.
 

Ombra

Member
It didn't pan out the most boring explanation is probably correct : trump org has poor server security and their parked domain control was hacked ages ago (godaddy) and they got done by sub domain shadowing - where hackers create subdomains to host bad things.

Of course it had to be russia doing the command and control and file serving. Sigh.
Heh, thanks for the update, still that's some amateur hour shit. Its like they didn't.
 
Pardoning someone formally accused of conspiracy against the United States would be an...interesting career move. It would also create a constitutional crisis, especially if he does so preemptively. A pardoned person can still be compelled to testify under oath, and be held in contempt if they refuse.

its trump. he could declare himself emperor tomorrow and half of america would cheer. the other half needs to make sure that the constitution is respected.
 

Ombra

Member
Looking at the news its Looking like the racist Elf is about to get his comeuppance and Carter page testified he told Sessions he was going on the russian trip..Sessions is a snake he made it a point to answer questions no one asked rather than the actual question multiple times..this needs to be it this will be the 3rd and 4th ommission..

The article is in mother jones if you're interested

https://t.co/vcJZ81e4SB
Thanks, was looking for a good breakdown!
 

Kimawolf

Member
Turns out once again Jeff Session lied. Turns out HE WAS BRIEFED by popolpuous. Why the hell isn't this guy in jail yet?
 

Joe T.

Member
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/03/politics/manafort-trial-set-for-may-2018/index.html

so this is going to last until the fall of 18 at the earliest.

Yeah, this isn't going to resolve itself anytime soon unless some damning evidence gets released that implicates Trump and further hurts his public image somehow.

I'm left-leaning, even though a good friend of mine in the south of the US jokes that I sound more and more like a conservative, but I'm always curious to understand the points of view shared by the other side, even those of the far right, especially after they were all scared away or pushed into the shadows here in recent years. I've started following a relatively soft-spoken conservative from NY on Youtube as a result, but Trump rarely gets brought up and if he does it's not in a flattering light.

I dislike the Dems almost as much as I dislike the Republicans these days, so I'm happy to be living north of the border.
 
I dislike the Dems almost as much as I dislike the Republicans these days, so I'm happy to be living north of the border.
What do you dislike about Democrats? I don't even get what they could be doing since the 2016 election that would make you dislike them.
 

Kimawolf

Member
Yeah, this isn't going to resolve itself anytime soon unless some damning evidence gets released that implicates Trump and further hurts his public image somehow.

I'm left-leaning, even though a good friend of mine in the south of the US jokes that I sound more and more like a conservative, but I'm always curious to understand the points of view shared by the other side, even those of the far right, especially after they were all scared away or pushed into the shadows here in recent years. I've started following a relatively soft-spoken conservative from NY on Youtube as a result, but Trump rarely gets brought up and if he does it's not in a flattering light.

I dislike the Dems almost as much as I dislike the Republicans these days, so I'm happy to be living north of the border.
My issue with dems is they don't fight hard enough and dont see the bigger picture generally. I have friends who think all this Mueller shit is a waste for instance but they don't see thr bigger picture.
 
Turns out once again Jeff Session lied. Turns out HE WAS BRIEFED by popolpuous. Why the hell isn't this guy in jail yet?

Since the usual suspects on the alt right are in unison clamoring for the head of Jeff sessions it means they have a plan and that's bad. Jeff is a road block to sacking mueller or kicking up smoke screens so they want him gone. For all we know Carter page could be part of that effort. Either way, people should want sessions to stay in his job where he has to stay out of directing the DOJ to do anything the president wants.
At least for a while anyway.
 

Ombra

Member
Since the usual suspects on the alt right are in unison clamoring for the head of Jeff sessions it means they have a plan and that's bad. Jeff is a road block to sacking mueller or kicking up smoke screens so they want him gone. For all we know Carter page could be part of that effort. Either way, people should want sessions to stay in his job where he has to stay out of directing the DOJ to do anything the president wants.
At least for a while anyway.
Fuck that, get that bigoted asshole out of his position, dude is a piece of shit for real he's done enough damage. We'll deal with who ever else they send if necessary but this asshole needs to be booted and shamed.


Edit: yeah I kinda dislike the man so there's definitely a bias.
 

Joe T.

Member
What do you dislike about Democrats? I don't even get what they could be doing since the 2016 election that would make you dislike them.

They still fight against the idea of universal health care, believing that it's more practical to improve the ACA. Yes, in a country where the insurance companies have such a huge foothold it is indeed more practical, but that doesn't make it right. It's hard not to sound like Bernie Sanders here, but there's absolutely no reason why the US shouldn't be aiming for universal health care. It won't happen overnight, but at the rate the country has been moving we'll all be dead and gone before they finally achieve it. Incremental changes aren't good enough when they only happen once in a generation.

They've had the long-term aim of low cost, publicly funded college education with low tuition fees (like Europe and Canada) for every American, yet here were are in 2017 with the sad state of US schools and student debts still crippling people. This is an important matter that they need to address the minute they're in a position to do so because the world's superpower shouldn't be so far down the list of worldwide academic standards.

They consider $10/hour minimum wage a fair wage. Sure, it might be in rural areas, but over 80% of the US population lives in urban areas. This just doesn't go nearly far enough for a party that claims to want to shrink wealth inequality.

They practically rewarded Wall Street for the 2007-2008 recession with a huge bailout and not a single criminal offense for the big banks. The banks laughed, awarding themselves tens of millions in bonuses with the money the US taxpayer gave them. Dodd-Frank didn't go far enough. It was the perfect opportunity to send Wall Street a strong message and they failed. So, more of the same.

This is without even touching on finer points, like the election process with superdelegates that were instrumental in shaping the public opinion that Bernie Sanders never stood a chance against Hillary Clinton. When one of those superdelegates happens to be on CNN every day and takes a heavily biased approach towards campaigning for one candidate while repeatedly telling millions of viewers that the other one doesn't stand a chance, then winds up becoming interim DNC chairperson, well... Yeah, sorry if I don't buy your new book, Donna.

The Tom Perez vs Keith Ellison DNC chair situation was another mistake, allowing the establishment class to interject a candidate of their own in an attempt to continue blocking the progressive wing of the party.

Generally speaking, my issue with them is the same as Kima's, they don't fight hard enough for the ideas they claim to support. Sanders, an Independent, has been a far stronger candidate for the Democratic platform than any Democrat. Look at all the support he's managed to drum up for the Medicare for All plan many claimed would never fly a year or two ago.
 
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