Pages

Friday, December 6, 2019

MAJOR UPDATE: Was Manafort A Plant, Willing Or Otherwise?

I've long been suspicious of the insertion of Paul Manafort into the Trump campaign. I haven't seen any solid evidence that he was a plant, but the circumstances have always seemed fishy to me. After all, his mere presence on the campaign gave at least superficial credibility to the fledgling Russia Hoax narrative.

Long ago a trusted source told me that the Clinton campaign had very early on come to the conclusion that Trump would be the most dangerous GOP candidate, from a Clinton perspective. That would have meant that the Clinton organization would have mobilized to take Trump down, and the Russia narrative seems to have been decided on at an early date. Thus we see the persistent attempt by Felix Sater to somehow link Trump to the moribund Trump Moscow project, the Trump Tower meeting with Veselnitskaya, etc.

The usual story is that Manafort was introduced into the Trump campaign through the efforts of Tom Barrack, a Syrian born real estate magnate who was friends with both Trump and Manafort. Barrack had been a major help to Ivanka and Jared Kushner in a difficult real estate situation and used that connection to urge the Kushners to get Barrack onto the campaign. Sound familiar? Sound possible? Of course. The question is: Was there an ulterior motive to all this?

I just came across an article by Diana West at Epoch Times which first appeared in February, 2019: Paul Manafort: A Time Bomb? While the article doesn't pretend to offer proof that Manafort was maneuvered onto the Trump campaign by anti-Trump forces, what it does is paint a portrait of Manafort as a troubled and even desperate figure who would be susceptible to pressure. For what it's worth, here is that picture of Manafort, gleaned for articles in The Atlantic and the WaPo:


What follows are the salient points from the Foer piece in chronological order.  
  • In the spring of 2014, Viktor Yanukovych, Manafort’s main meal ticket for nearly a decade, was forced from the presidency of Ukraine. “Fearing for his life,” Yanukovych fled to Russia. Manafort “avoided any harm by keeping a careful distance from the enflamed city.”
  • After Yanukovych was overthrown, Manafort suddenly had career problems. “Money, which had always flowed freely to Manafort and which he’d spent more freely still, soon became a problem. … He seemed unwilling, or perhaps unable, to access his offshore accounts; an FBI investigation scrutinizing his work in Ukraine had begun not long after Yanukovych’s fall. Meanwhile, a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska had been after Manafort to explain what had happened to an $18.9 million investment in a Ukrainian company that Manafort had claimed to have made on his behalf.”
  • Manafort had domestic problems, too. In November 2014, Manafort’s wife and grown daughters discovered he was conducting an extremely expensive extra-marital affair. Despite pledges and couples counseling, he continued the affair, which came to light again six months later.
  • According to daughter Andrea’s text, Manafort was by this time in “the middle of a massive emotional breakdown.” Foer wrote that Manafort entered a “clinic” in Arizona six months after the initial discovery of the affair in November 2014, which places his entry time around May 2015.
  • At the “clinic,” Manafort was allotted the daily 10-minute phone call to his wife—”in tears” and possibly suicidal.
Foer didn’t tell us when Manafort left the clinic. He backed into Manafort’s departure in the context of the newly discharged patient’s reportedly desperate effort to gain access to Donald Trump. 
He opened the section this way: “’I really need to get to’ Trump, Manafort told an old friend, the real-estate magnate Tom Barrack, in the early months of 2016.”

West's short version:

It’s early 2016. Manafort has debts, he has a Putin-linked-oligarch looking for that $19 million he “invested,” his family life is chaos, and what does he do? He calls up Barrack after Iowa and says: ” ‘I really need to get to’ Trump.”

In other words, he's vulnerable. If someone approached him and suggested he could be helped if he accepted a job on the Trump campaign ...

Why not?

Or, once again, as West puts it:

To put it another way, after Manafort’s 2014 financial smash and 2015 breakdown, this once high-priced Igor to Global Crookdom was shattered goods—humanly, financially, politically, and legally. He was a walking time bomb for any of Trump’s political enemies to maneuver into the Trump camp and then wait for Manafort’s toxic life story to explode all over Trump.
If this was the case, who set the trap?

OK. That's speculative. However when placed in the following context, as reported by the NYT, Agents Tried to Flip Russian Oligarchs, there's a certain attractiveness to it as a theory. Remember, Deripaska believed that Manafort had cheated him out of $19 million:

Between 2014 and 2016, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant. They signaled that they might provide help with his trouble in getting visas for the United States or even explore other steps to address his legal problems. In exchange, they were hoping for information on Russian organized crime and, later, on possible Russian aid to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to current and former officials and associates of Mr. Deripaska. 
In one dramatic encounter, F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced and uninvited at a home Mr. Deripaska maintains in New York and pressed him on whether Paul Manafort, a former business partner of his who went on to become chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign, had served as a link between the campaign and the Kremlin. 
The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader, clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia’s richest men, nearly all of whom, like Mr. Deripaska, depend on President Vladimir V. Putin to maintain their wealth, the officials said. 
Two of the players in the effort were Bruce G. Ohr, the Justice Department official who has recently become a target of attacks by Mr. Trump, and Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled a dossier of purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia. 
The systematic effort to win the cooperation of the oligarchs, which has not previously been revealed, does not appear to have scored any successes. And in Mr. Deripaska’s case, he told the American investigators that he disagreed with their theories about Russian organized crime and Kremlin collusion in the campaign, a person familiar with the exchanges said. The person added that Mr. Deripaska even notified the Kremlin about the American efforts to cultivate him.

Maybe at some point we'll find out. If I were Bill Barr and John Durham I'd want to talk with Paul Manafort, regardless. And it is interesting that Barr intervened on behalf of Manafort when the State of New York wanted to drag the hapless Manafort to NYC and keep him in solitary at Rikers Island.

UPDATE: I failed to fully digest an article at AmThinker yesterday that commenter Cassander pointed out: Ukraine was the Origin of the Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax, by Lawrence Sellin, "a retired US Army Reserve colonel, an IT command and control and cyber security subject matter expert ..." The title of the article fails to note that its main focus is precisely on Paul Manafort. Sellin provides quite a bit of detail that suggests that, beginning in January, 2016, Eric Ciaramella at the NSC headed a push to reopen investigations of Paul Manafort.

Relevant questions in this regard include: Who was aware that Roger Stone and Tom Barrack were recommending that Manafort be added to the Trump campaign--beginning in the second half of 2015? Could this information have been gathered use of 702 searches? And, above all, did this include efforts to maneuver Manafort into the campaign?

Sellin concludes:

It appears that Paul Manafort became a vehicle by which the Obama Deep State operatives could link Trump to nefarious activities involving Russians, which eventually evolved into the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.  Remember, the key claim of the follow-up Steele dossier, the centerpiece of the Mueller investigation, was that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was the focal point of a "well-developed conspiracy between them [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership." 
Nellie Ohr, Fusion GPS employee and wife of Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, not only worked with Christopher Steele on the so-called Trump dossier, but, in May 2016, was the conduit of information to her husband and two Department of Justice prosecutors of the existence of the “black ledger” documents that contributed to Manafort’s prosecution. 
Bruce Ohr and Steele attempted to get dirt on Manafort from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, efforts that eventually led to a September 2016 meeting in which the FBI asked Deripaska if he could provide information to prove that Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia. 
The surveillance and entrapment attempts of Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos and others were designed to collect evidence about Trump without formally documenting that Trump was the target. 
After the election, to cover their tracks, James Comey, representing the FBI and the Department of Justice, misleadingly told Trump that the investigation was about Russia and a few stray people in his campaign, but they assured him he personally was not under investigation. 
They lied. 
Donald Trump always was, and still is, the target of the Deep State, the left-wing media and their Democrat Party collaborators.

39 comments:

  1. Re Ukraine and Manafort

    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/12/ukraine_was_the_origin_of_the_trumprussia_collusion_hoax.html

    A little more grist for the mill...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tx. My bad for not keying in on that. The details definitely strengthen the case. I'll update.

      Delete
    2. I've now read the entire Foer piece. Very interesting. And highly recommended reading for those of us trying to understand what is happening.

      Manafort was a bigger sleazeball than I had imagined (if that's possible) and it is pretty amazing that Trump could live with this association and, in fact, emerge victorious in the election and unscathed from his dealings with Manafort in the Mueller Report.

      When the whistleblower blew, Ukraine exploded into view as the major issue confronting Trump's presidency. Then we learned more about the Bidens and Burisma. Which led to the resurrection of interest in Chalupa's role in the election. And to the Obama Administration's activities in Ukraine in 2013-2016. And before that Manafort's role in Ukraine. A very, very tangled web.

      Tangled enough for Brennan, Comey, Weissmann and Schiff et al to try to overthrow Trump? Perhaps.

      I'm afraid we'll be learning much much more about Ukraine before this is over. I'll bet John Durham has his hands full.

      Delete
  2. What follows are the salient points from the Foer piece

    This is the first time your article mentions "the Foer piece".

    Did you leave something out before you got to this point in your article?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I left out lots. That's a quote (indented) from West's article. I linked to Foer's article at The Atlantic so readers could go to that.

      Delete
  3. I'd favor a slightly less conspiratorial explanation for Manafort's zeal to offer his services to Trump.

    Being that he was having a cash flow problem, and had no clients to speak of, figuring out a "silver bullet" solution would have been been very appealing to him as he sat around in rehab.

    Perhaps it occurred to him -- without any persuasion from others at all -- that the surest (though not necessarily quickest) fix for his predicament was to offer to run Trump's campaign. Everyone in politics knew that Trump's first campaign manager, Lewandowski, had very little campaign management experience, and none at all at a national level. Manafort's experience as a long time GOP campaign operative would be a big selling point for Trump to consider him, especially if Manafort sweetened it by offering to work for FREE! (The potential financial payout -- if Trump won -- would be enormous, and even if he lost, the free publicity for Manafort would help him win new paying clients to support his lavish lifestyle. Just the ticket for a down and out guy with a big appetite for living large.)

    So he reaches out to the mutual friend, introductions are made, and Manafort is brought on board, and Lewandowski us shunted to idle on a siding off the main campaign track... no conspiracy required.

    That said, it would not surprise me if it turns out some of the people who encouraged Trump to hire Manafort did so at the behest of Dems. In that sense, it may well have been a set up -- for both Manafort and Trump, but I don't see Manafort being part of a conspiracy that leads to his own prosecution, conviction, and sentencing to jail!

    Alexandra Chalupa -- DNC operative -- was collecting dirt of Manafort, going back to at least the meeting with Ukrainian Prosecutors in Washington, including one WH meeting hosted by the fake Whistle-blower, at which I believe Chalupa was also in attendance, in January 2016. Digging dirt on Manafort was apparently one of the topics of interest being pushed on the Ukrainians at the time of their visit to DC.

    So, while there was a conspiracy of sorts run by shadowy DNC operatives and possibly Hillary's minions, it is not necessary to assume that Manafort was in on it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nothing I wrote assumes that "Manafort was in on it." That's why I included the "?" in the title. The idea is that working for the Trump campaign could have been suggested to Manafort as a solution to his problems by others who did have ulterior motives toward Trump.

      Delete
  4. Barack Hussein Obama: To Medvedev, We can coordinate the future after the next election

    ReplyDelete
  5. I suspect it could go one level deeper, Mark... meaning that suspected plants (knowing or otherwise) were identified, welcomed, and nurtured by the Trump Campaign.

    September 2015, Simpson/Fusion's first target of interest is Felix Sater. By some coincidence, Trump engages Sater for a half-cocked, quasi-secret, Moscow Tower deal a few weeks later. What ought to be the closest evidence of any Russian Collusion *by far* ends up being shelved quietly by Schiff after spooky closed door hearings with Sater that offer zero answers. It is later revealed by Sater that his attorney Robert Wolf was in communication with Trump's personal attorney Alan Garten in the prelude to the Moscow Tower 'operation'. https://twitter.com/MonsieurAmerica/status/1175176291856703488

    Steele, Chalupa, Fusion, all digging up dirt on Manafort. Then like clockwork, Trump engages Manafort for campaign work. How lucky (again) for Fusion, that Trump *agreed* to step *perfectly* into their ongoing investigation!

    Halper & Co were targeting Flynn in late 2015 or perhaps as early as 2014. Naturally, Trump will *willingly engage* this pre-targeted individual for his campaign also. Why would we expect anything less, right? Because the Cabal is targeting *Trump* (in 2014?)... or do we have the targeting backwards?

    Veselnitskaya is Fusion's 2nd (or more) source of Russian funding. Trump Team takes a meeting in June with her that Simpson genuinely appears to be ignorant of (goes against his interests vis a vis Trump, not mentioned in Dossiers, etc). Was Fusion just "lucky" again, or is Trump targeting HIM?

    FBI is pre-targeting Carter Page per Loretta Lynch testimony as early as June 2016 in NatSec Cabinet meetings. Right on cue, Carter marches to Moscow for a provocative 1st amendment exercise.

    In EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE, the targets were documented as already being under suspicion BEFORE being *intentionally engaged by Trump* and/or *playing perfectly into suspected role*.

    Thoughts?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. While I'm loathe to go there, I'll definitely grant you this: Trump has more political lives than the proverbial cat. This is a guy who seems to dodge bullets just for the fun of it.

      Delete
  6. Barrack was known to Trump for a long time - in a business environment, not a political one. I imagine that his recommendation counted for quite a lot. I recall how heavily Barrack was featured around the time of the Inauguration and accompanying festivities.

    Business is brutal. That was Trump’s milieu. Politics are brutal times ten with many additional layers. A much tougher chess game.

    Manafort was supposedly a whiz at nomination convention/delegate management at a time when Cruz was pulling shenanigans to take away even committed Trump delegates. I remember it as being a very tense time. One can understand the appeal when a Barrack would suggest him to the campaign. And he had a previous history with other Republican campaigns...

    ReplyDelete
  7. Memories are very short- Trump became the nominee because the mainstream media- outlets like CNN and MSNBC, built him up into it. Had the media treated Trump like all the other Republican nominees, I think it quite likely the nominee would have been someone else, and we would be hailing President Clinton this afternoon.

    I think the Clinton Campaign and their media supporters didn't think Trump was a serious contender, but hoped to promote him long enough to drive him into a 3rd party run for President from the right, thus repeating the 1992/96 elections that Bill Clinton won in large part because of Ross Perot (Bush wins in 92 without Perot in the race, though Perot probably didn't affect the outcome in 96- Clinton would have won anyway).

    I think the Clintons were as shocked as everyone else on November 8th 2016- they never believed they were going to lose.

    It is possible that mechanisms were used to guide Manafort into the Trump Campaign, but it is more probable that they had spies everywhere and used that knowledge to pre-target people for opposition research and OCONUS lures. This is why I would, if I were Bob Barr, be carefully looking wider than just the actions directed at the Trump Campaign- I guarantee you there are the remains of efforts directed at Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, and others.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. While I'm sure the Clintons were shocked to lose, I'll stick with my source who says the Dems considered Trump to be the most dangerous possible candidate and focused on him. That same source was telling me about the NSA stuff long before we were hearing about it.

      Casting a wide net is a good idea. It might be difficult to uncover the traces at this point, but the FISC did say that 702 abuse appeared to go back AT LEAST to 2012.

      Delete
    2. I know I'm not the only one who knew Trump would beat Clinton. As soon as Trump spoke the magic "wall" word I started paying attention to him. And many millions of others too.

      Election night with the fake exit polls I expected. I took a drink or two or three and then everything went my way. It was a great night.

      Delete
    3. Heh. I was glued to the computer screen watching, especially, the late PA returns. My bottom line was I couldn't believe the country was so far gone as to vote for Hillary.

      Delete
  8. We need robust memories, and sometimes equally robust imaginations, to go back and attempt to recreate what was going on. Donald J. Trump had attracted many who feared his candidacy:

    GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger and a longtime aide to Speaker Paul D. Ryan each were given an early look at the final report added to the infamous “Steele dossier,” court documents in a lawsuit against BuzzFeed News show.

    Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence agent who compiled the unsubstantiated research booklet in 2016 about Donald Trump’s connections to Russia before he became president, gave the report to Kinzinger and Jonathan Burks, Ryan’s longtime chief of staff, after he completed it on Dec. 13, 2016, according to the court memo.

    In addition to Kinzinger and Burks, Steele also handed off the 17th and final report of his dossier, Report 166, to a longtime associate of Sen. John McCain and the top Russia expert on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. (Snip)

    But in fact, Steele’s efforts were initially funded through the opposition research firm Fusion GPS by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website backed by hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who supported Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid. After Rubio dropped from the race, the Democratic National Committee’s law firm, Perkins Coie, hired Fusion GPS to renew its research into Trump’s business ties.


    https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/paul-ryan-aide-rep-adam-kinzinger-received-steele-dossier-early-court-documents-show

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nice catch. We tend to forget the bipartisan nature of it all.

      Delete
    2. Paul Ryan, John McCain, DC, Chamber of Commerce, DNC, Paul Singer, George Soros? I no longer use the word "bipartisan". From out here in the hinterland it just looks like the Uniparty vs the American people.
      Tom S.

      Delete
  9. Here's the one shortcoming about the Paul Manafort et al. plant story: they tried six ways to Sunday to get Trump and they failed to find anything to stick on him as even slightly soiled, much less dirty.

    While the cited/linked stories read as a suspenseful narrative, they end as a dud. They don't take you to the expected--inferred--conclusion. Plants work when there's evidence to uncover. Dems, the Deep State, wanted to believe there was evidence to uncover. The best they could do was a fictional dossier, and some prosecutorial shenanigans. It almost worked. But Trump knew it was BS and wasn't going to be bullied with BS.

    Trump "keeps his own counsel," he keeps everyone at an arms length--like hiring a contractor who can be fired at a moment's notice. So there doesn't seem to be any relationship that can dirty him. Manafort came and went, Cohen came and went, Flynn was fired, Comey was fired, Sessions "resigned," Rosenstein "resigned," et cetera, etc.

    This has hurt him as he doesn't have a bench of awaiting political and policy people, but that's the trade-off. He relies on his instincts, and cuts his losses as soon as they're apparent. Hence, the revolving doors.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a shrewd observation about Trump, I think. His personnel appointments have included some real disasters as well as well some gems, but he's always been able to distance himself when needed and on one has "dirt" on him.

      Delete
    2. Very shrewd indeed. Many (even the “loyal”) fault President Trump for his failed appointments. What they don’t realize is that few of those persons were probably well known (or even known at all) to him but came recommended by persons he did know and/or trusted. We rarely here the origin of those appointments, but several were acknowledged to have been strong recommendations by Condoleeza Rice. Mattis. McMaster (who turned out to be a master leaker and maybe more as we learn that he was responsible for Ciaramella’s being given such heavy access). Possibly John Kelly. A political newcomer, Trump had to rely on recommendations. Some worked out better than others. His surgical cutting of his losses - the best thing he could have done - is another gripe by those who either are against him or simply don’t understand him.

      Delete
    3. And many of those recommenders and appointees only knew Trump through the media, didn't realize that he had serious ideas of his own. Like the intel briefers complaining that he didn't just sit and listen, he kept arguing with them.

      Delete
    4. An excellent point. I wonder how many of those elite swampers - especially the IC - realized how smart, how shrewd PDJT was. His own man, owned by no one, he had been talking about many of what would become his official policies for years. It was facile for them to call him a “reality show star” to demean him by characterizing him as a performer. And with zero knowledge of the level of business in which he engaged - including international business - they didn’t care to acknowledge just how much real experience he had accumulated.

      Delete
    5. An important attribute for someone who sees himself (as Trump does) as a deal-maker and master negotiator is to be under-estimated. It didn't hurt that his public persona as a glib showman reinforced the idea of not ready for prime time.

      How many times did media run stories that Trump didn't really want to be president? That it was about personal vanity--self-promotion and a publicity stunt?

      It would be difficult to be more underestimated than that--to be taken less seriously for someone who's gotten quite far in life.

      Delete
    6. "How many times did media run stories that Trump didn't really want to be president? That it was about personal vanity--self-promotion and a publicity stunt?"

      Holman Jenkins at the WSJ has been running that story once a week from before the election.

      Delete
  10. The FBI surely perceived that Manafort was vulnerable to being recruited by Russian Intelligence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The bottom line from The Atlantic and WaPo is that any Intel service would likely view Manafort as a strong recruitment candidate--a very vulnerable guy who still had important access that several important parties (Putin, Dems, USIC) would be very interested to exploit. By the same token, how to control and trust him is a major problem, unless you have him near you. That would be the problem for Putin, but not for the US Deep State. Manafort himself has been almost eerily silent.

      Delete
  11. FWIW, I think Manafort's usefulness to CIA was that he was already seriously compromised (and compromise-able) and could be used as a dupe (perhaps there is a more accurate word) to create the appearance of Russian Collusion (the hoax) within the Trump Campaign and/or to be flipped to incriminate Trump (the coup) if at all possible.

    This is what Page, Flynn, PapaD and Manafort all had in common. They were all vulnerable (whether they were knowingly working for CIA or not) and it looks like CIA took full advantage to build the hoax narrative.

    Perhaps you guys already know this and, once again, I am saying nothing new...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes. Perhaps 'dupe' is the word I should've used. The usefulness of Manafort, at least initially, was simply in his presence on the campaign. Perhaps he was unwitting of this--I can see that. I can also see that at some point he might have been approached and an attempt made to get him to play a more active role. All this is admittedly speculative, but in coming to a correct understanding of what happened in 2016 it's necessary and important speculation. IMO.

      Delete
  12. Dear Mark... This is the first time I’ve been introduced to your blog. THANK YOU! I agree completely with your source’s assertion that the Clinton machine thought Donald Trump was the most formidable among the Republican candidates in 2016.

    The reason why this is so is quite simple: Donald Trump knows what he has done, but... more importantly, President Trump knows what he has NOT done!

    I lived in NYC from the late 1970s until 2014 when I moved to California. I’ve followed Donald Trump a long time. He’s been in the news constantly for decades including two decades ago when he ran an exploratory committee to run for President on the Reform Party ticket. Hillary Clinton has had her sights set on becoming President since she was in college so the Clinton Cabal has continuously monitored their opposition and calibrated their responses to it.

    President Trump IS the most dangerous person to the Clinton Cabal and the toady-totalitarian Democrat leadership because they know that he knows THEY have nothing on Donald Trump. Quite simply, there is nothing there in DJT’s life for the toadies to latch onto! Truth is Trump’s armor.

    ReplyDelete
  13. "the Clinton Cabal has continuously monitored their opposition"

    Good point. They have a small army of researchers doing this pretty much full time. That's why I found that story very convincing. That and the fact that the Russia Hoax was being prepared so early on, before most of the country realized Trump was for real.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I’m Deborah Baber (Savalla). I don’t know how to add my URL.

      Further to my remarks yesterday, there are two critically-important lessons President Trump has taught me over the past three years as President after watching him for nearly 40 years and since I’ve been a political junkie for nearly 50 years!

      1) Our nation is a lot closer to the socialist/communist abyss than I believed we were.
      2) Donald Trump is far more genius than I thought!

      Since reading your article and that from Foer, I’ve begun to wonder if President Trump may knowingly have brought Manafort onboard precisely for the purpose of trapping his and our nation’s enemies! Once again, DJT knows what he has NOT done so bringing Manafort onboard could have been POTUS’s 4-D chess move to the Clinton Cabal’s checkers.

      Delete
    2. Deborah, I believe you can add your URL by choosing a non-anonymous way of commenting, in the comment form.

      The question of what Trump knew and when did he know it is complex and interesting. It's a matter of speculation, as far as I can tell.

      Delete
  14. I commented only a little about your article, but I want to say that it was an enormous, thought-provoking revelation for me about Manafort.

    I hope that tomorrow's Horowitz report will reveal much more about the FBI investigation of Manafort during 2016 and earlier.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mike, like I said, this is more or less on the level of intuition--maybe educated guess based on what are often indicators. But there can be no thorough investigation if they don't examine all angles re Manafort. That's a bottom line thing.

      Delete
  15. Mike and Mark

    Yes, but...

    I totally agree that the Manafort angle needs to be thoroughly understood. Esp to the extent that there was govt wrongdoing in respect of the investigation of Manafort before Mueller or by Mueller.

    I am concerned however that Horowitz will have limited his investigation to misconduct by DOJ/FBI personnel in connection with FISA matters.

    I hope I'm wrong. If I'm not, I would certainly expect Durham to have no such limitations.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh no, this has nothing at all to do with Horowitz--no grounds for him to be involved. This is all up to Barr/Durham.

      Delete
  16. Agreed. That's what i was trying to say... :)

    ReplyDelete
  17. On Horowitz’s report, an excellent article by Margot Cleveland at The Federalist.

    Today, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz will reportedly issue his findings on the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI’s compliance (or lack thereof) with the legal requirements and internal policies and procedures related to the Carter Page Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications. Horowitz’s report follows a 20-month investigation into possible FISA abuse, as well as an inquiry into the DOJ and FBI’s relationship and communications with dossier author Christopher Steele, triggered by requests from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and members of Congress.

    Horowitz’s investigation was limited in scope and thus will leave unanswered many of the questions surrounding the FBI’s targeting of the Trump campaign in the spring and summer of 2016—concerns hopefully addressed soon by Attorney General William Barr and the federal prosecutor he assigned to investigate those matters, Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham.


    Much more here:

    https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/09/13-things-to-look-for-in-the-inspector-general-fisa-abuse-report/

    ReplyDelete