How Yevgeniy Nikulin Might Play into the Mueller Investigation

For three reasons, Yevgeniy Nikulin, the Russian hacker alleged to be behind massive breaches of the LinkedIn and MySpace hacks, is in the news of late.

  • The report that Michael Cohen was tracked traveling from Germany to Czech Republic in 2016 has raised questions about whether both Cohen and Nikulin were in Prague at the same time, Mohammed Atta-like
  • Nikulin was suddenly extradited from Prague some weeks ago
  • His (Russian-provided) lawyer says he’ll entertain a plea deal

All of which provides a good opportunity to lay out what role he may have (or may be said to have) played in the DNC hack-and-leak.

The Michael Cohen in Prague story

The McClatchy report describing Robert Mueller receiving evidence of Cohen traveling from Germany to Czech Republic and some unknown date in 2016 seems to derive from outside investigators who have shared information with Mueller, not from Mueller’s team itself (which is consistent with his locked down shop). As such, it falls far short of being a confirmation of a meeting, or even validation that Mueller has confirmed any intelligence shared with his investigators. Moreover, the report has little detail as to timing, either of the visit or when Mueller actually got this intelligence.

And while it took a bit of time (Cohen can be forgiven for the delay because he apparently has very urgent business hanging with his homies smoking cigars), he did deny this report, offering the same partial story he offered last year.

That said, given the claimed timing, any coincidental presence in Prague by both Cohen and Nikulin is unlikely. Cohen’s presence in Prague is said to have roughly aligned with that reported in the dossier, so August or September. According to the FBI’s arrest affidavit for Nikulin he passed from Belarus into Poland on October 1, 2016, and probably was still there when posting from Warsaw on October 3; Nikulin was arrested in Prague on October 5. So unless Cohen went to Prague during his known October 2016 trip to England (definitely a possibility, but inconsistent with the dossier reporting), then they would no more have met in Prague (or planned to) than Mohammed Atta and Iraq’s Ahmad Samir al-Ani did.

The sudden Nikulin extradition

That said, I do think the sudden Nikulin extradition, even as pro-Russian Czech President Milos Zeman fought with Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikan over it — even to the point of threatening to replace him — is worth noting. That’s true, first of all, because it appears Paul Ryan — purportedly on vacation with his family, but making appearances with everyone but Zeman — had a hand in it.

During a visit to the Czech Republic, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said on March 27 that “we have every reason to believe and expect that Mr. Nikulin will be extradited to America.”

“The United States has the case to prevail on having him extradited, whether it’s the severity of the crime, which is clearly on the side of U.S., or the timing of the request for the extradition,” he told reporters.

In an interview with RFE/RL in Prague on March 26, Ryan said that the “case for extraditing [Nikulin] to America versus Russia is extremely clear.”

Ryan, who met with Prime Minister Andrej Babis and other Czech officials during his visit, told RFE/RL that he would raise the issue in those talks.

“He did violate our laws, he did hack these companies…. So the extradition claim is very legitimate,” he said. “And I just expect that the Czech system will go through its process, and at the end of that process, I am hopeful and expecting that he’ll be extradited.”

Nikulin was extradited just days later, even as the decision looked like it would be reviewed.

Zeman has since made very bizarre comments criticizing Ryan for his involvement.

Zeman said he had a different view of the Nikulin case than Justice Minister Robert Pelikan (ANO), who had given consent to the extradition of this Russian citizen to the USA, but that he fully respected the minister’s right to decide on this matter.

Apart from the United States, Russia was seeking Nikulin’s extradition, too, based on a suspected online theft.

“When Donald Trump was elected American president, (U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul) Ryan wore a black tie. The same Mr Ryan arrived in the Czech Republic (last week). He publicly stated that he had arrived basically in order to get Mr Nikulin to the United States, in which he succeeded. Well, one of the versions is that Mr Nikulin may in some way serve as a tool of the internal American political fight – to which the black tie served as well,” Zeman said.

“I do not consider this a very good solution if Czechs were to meddle in the American political situation,” Zeman added.

Ryan, who appreciated the Czech government for the extradition of Nikulin, did not meet Zeman during his recent visit to Prague without citing the reasons.

It may be that Ryan was doing the bidding of Trump. Or, more likely, Ryan may have made the move in what appears to be fairly unified NATO response to the attempted Sergei Skripal assassination.

Nikulin’s Russian-provided lawyer makes it clear they will negotiate

That said, I find it very interesting that Nikulin’s lawyer, whom the Russians asked to get involved, is explicitly already talking about a plea deal.

The legal team for Yevgeniy Nikulin, the Russian hacker accused of stealing data from LinkedIn and other American tech firms, will explore a plea deal with the U.S. government, according to Nikulin’s lawyer, Arkady Bukh.

“The likelihood of a trial is not very high,” Bukh said. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where Nikulin’s trial would occur, “has over a 99 percent conviction rate. We are not throwing clients under the bus,” Bukh said.

[snip]

Bukh was first contacted by the Russian consulate and asked to help on the case. He  was approved on Wednesday to act as a lawyer for Nikulin by the court. Although Bukh has been in regular and sustained contact with both Nikulin’s family and the Russian consulate, he had yet to speak with his client as of Wednesday night.

The Russian consulate has expressed concerns about Nikulin’s mental condition, and Bukh said he “appears to be depressed.”

Perhaps Bukh is taking this route because the Feds have Nikulin dead to rights and a plea is the most logical approach. Perhaps Russia has learned its lesson from Roman Seleznev, the son of a prominent Duma member, who has been shipped around to different jurisdictions to have additional onerous sentences added to his prison term; I’m fairly certain there are other sealed indictments against Nikulin besides the one he was charged under that DOJ could use similarly.

Or perhaps Russia has reason to want to bury any public airing of evidence regarding what Nikulin has done or could be said to have done.

How Nikulin might be involved in the 2016 operation

I’ve long suggested that Nikulin may have had a facilitating role in the 2016 operation. That’s because credentials from his LinkedIn hack were publicly sold for a ridiculously small amount just before May 18, 2016, rather inexplicably making them available outside the tight-knit group of Russians who had been using the stolen credentials up to that point.

Almost all of the people whose email boxes were sent to Wikileaks were affected by the LinkedIn (and/or MySpace) breach, meaning passwords and emails they had used became publicly available in the middle of the Russian operation. And those emails were exfiltrated in the days immediately following, probably May 19-25, the public release of those credentials.

In other words, it is possible that stolen credentials, and not GRU hacks, obtained the emails that were shared with WikiLeaks.

None of that is to say that Russia didn’t steal the emails shared with Wikileaks or arrange that handoff.

Rather, it’s to say that there is a counter-narrative that would provide convenient plausible deniability to both the Russians and Wikileaks that may or may not actually be how those emails were obtained, but also may be all wrapped up ready to offer as a narrative to undercut the claim that GRU itself handed off the emails.

Note, too, how that timing coincides with the public claims Konstantin Kozlovsky made last year, which I laid out here.

April 28, 2015: FSB accesses Lurk servers with Kaspersky’s help.

May 18, 2016: LinkedIn credentials allegedly stolen by Yevgeniy Nikulin made widely available.

May 18, 2016: Kozlovsky arrest.

May 19-25, 2016: DNC emails shared with WikiLeaks likely exfiltrated.

October 5, 2016: Yevgeniy Nikulin arrest in Prague.

October 20, 2016: Nikulin indictment.

November 1, 2016: Date of Kozlovsky confession.

December 5, 2016: Arrest, for treason, of FSB officers Dmitry Dokuchaev and Sergey Mikhailov.

February 28, 2017: Indictment (under seal) of FSB officers, including Dmitry Dokuchaev, Alexey Belan, and Karim Bartov for Yahoo hack.

March 15, 2017: Yahoo indictment unsealed.

August 14, 2017: Kozlovsky posts November 1 confession of hacking DNC on Facebook.

November 28, 2017: Karim Baratov (co-defendant of FSB handlers) plea agreement.

December 2, 2017: Kozlovsky’s claims posted on his Facebook page.

March 30, 2018: Extradition of Nikulin.

April 2, 2018: Report that Dokuchaev accepted a plea deal.

April 17, 2018: Scheduled court appearance for Nikulin.

With each new hacker delivered into US custody, something happens in Russia that may provide an alternate narrative.

And consider that in the wake of Nikulin’s extradition, Dmitry Dokuchaev and another of the people accused of treason in Russia have made a partial confession that will, like any Nikulin plea, serve to bury much of the claimed evidence against them.

Two of the four suspects in a Russian treason case, including a former agent in the FSB’s Information Security Center, have reportedly signed plea bargains where they confess to transferring data to foreign intelligence agencies. Three sources have confirmed to the magazine RBC that former FSB agent Dmitry Dokuchaev and entrepreneur Georgy Fomchenkov reached deals with prosecutors.

One of RBC’s sources says the two suspects claim to have shared information with foreign intelligence agencies “informally,” denying that there was anything criminal about the exchange. Dokuchaev and Fomchenkov say they were only trying to help punish cyber-criminals operating outside Russia and therefore outside their jurisdiction. Lawyers for the two suspects refused to comment on the story.

As a result of the plea bargains, the two men’s trials will be fast-tracked in a special procedure where the evidence collected against them isn’t reviewed. Dokuchaev and Fomchenkov will also face lighter sentences — no more than two-thirds of Russia’s maximum 20-year sentence for treason, says one of RBC’s sources.

The other two suspects in the treason case, former FSB Information Security Center agent Sergey Mikhailov and former Kaspersky Lab computer incidents investigations head Ruslan Stoyanov, have reportedly turned down plea bargains, insisting on their innocence.

All of which is to say that Nikulin offers at least a plausible counter-explanation for the DNC hack-and-leak, one that might shift blame for the operation to non-state actors rather than GRU, which is something Vladimir Putin has been doing since Nikulin’s extradition first became likely, even if he has changed his mind about whether such non-state Russians will be celebrated or demonized upon their roll-out.

Rolling out plea deals here and in Russia may be an effort to try to sell that counter-narrative, before Robert Mueller rolls out whatever he will about the hack-and-leak in coming days.

Update: A reader notes correctly that all the dossier’s reporting on Cohen, especially that describing a meeting in Prague, post-dates the Nikulin arrest. See this post for more on the timing of the Cohen reporting, piggy-backing off of PiNC’s analysis.

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57 replies
  1. orionATL says:

    my head is swimming. who came up with those names? it took me days just to remember how to correctly spell the names of the four russians in the june 9 meeting.

    • JD12 says:

      Obviously nothing is conclusive either way, but YN is only known to be in Prague for a short time in October, not when Steele reported. The info on Cohen is still not tangible and questionably sourced, possibly just an attempt to steer the narrative.

      • JD12 says:

        Looks like they tried to implicate Mueller to use his credibility, but it’s doubtful his team would leak to McClatchy.

  2. Domye West says:

    So very confusing. I hope the Cohen-Prague issue is cleared up ASAP.

     

    Say YN and Cohen are found to have been in Prague at the same time- is that too big of a coincidence for you?

     

    is his plea deal to hide blame? I am too dumb for any of this to make sense

    • emptywheel says:

      This post points out that’s virtually impossible, and if they did meet it means they did so at an entirely different time than the dossier says Cohen was in Prague.

      • maybe ryan says:

        I’m not seeing any information here about what Nikulin was doing in August/September, during the alleged Cohen trip.  What was left unstated that does make it virtually impossible?  Do we know Nikulin’s whereabouts prior to his crossing from Belarus to Poland?

        Is it likely that Ryan likes Trump so much that he’s arranging an alibi for him?  Perhaps Trump has something on him.  It also seems possible that Ryan would love to see Trump strung up by his unusually short p****, and that extraditing Nikulin will damage Trump.

        Whatever his motive, Ryan’s involvement, a couple weeks before his retirement, is certainly fascinating, and could point us in a half dozen mutually exclusive directions.

        I’m still struck by the mystery of the “McCarthy tapes” — the audio of McCarthy suggesting that Trump and Rohrabacher are on Putin’s payroll, and Ryan’s “don’t tell a soul.”   The leak of that tape in a week when so many other things happened that it was guaranteed not to be marquee news, to me suggested that it was leaked as a warning to Ryan, rather than for its own value.  If you wanted to hurt Ryan, you’d have leaked it some other week.  Part of the message is “we have other tapes that are more damaging.”

        Secretly recording a conversation like that is difficult and potentially hazardous to important relationships.  You don’t do it without a reason, and you don’t do it once.

        Knowing the identity of the person who recorded and leaked that tape might give us a window into why Ryan pushed for Nikulin’s extradition.

  3. SpaceLifeForm says:

    Ryan – Mission Accomplished?

    Retiring, the timing is interesting

    Cohen – Mission Accomplished?

    For a day.  I’m sure he will not show up Monday at 2:00pm EDT, SDNY, otherwise he may have to invoke 5th.  Judge Kimba Wood will be even more ticked off.

    Maybe the best outcome for Cohen is that he gets arrested for contempt, and is jailed indefinitely.

    He does not want to flip, that is obvious.

    He does not want to piss off mob.

    He can’t be pardoned until convicted. But a trial would reveal facts that he wants to hide.

    If he were to plead fifth, the facts will come out anyway.  His ploy to plead 5th is a delay tactic.  But he does not want to go there.

    I think he ultimately wants immunity and to be put into witness protection.

    It is doubtful that is even needed from prosecution standpoint.

    He literally is between a rock and a hard place.

    In other words, he is royally fucked.

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      Since Gerald Ford, it has been clear that pardons can apply prospectively, before conviction.

        • earlofhuntingdon says:

          Indeed.  Pardons only limit federal criminal jeopardy.  Even if accepted, the conviction stands, but without legal consequence.

          • SpaceLifeForm says:

            And yet, Cohen legal team (ha), are trying to angle for delay on the Civil Case *because*, as they try to argue, that there is a *CRIMINAL* investigation going on.

            This would make for a great movie.

            Except it would take years and the viewer would forget the plot.

            Intentional, see SCO vs IBM.

        • SpaceLifeForm says:

          There is some fishy shit in the filing.
          Parse closely. It is not a long read.

          Note the parts where Trump is *NOT* mentioned.

          At the top.

          • bmaz says:

            Baloney. Is Trumps name in the caption? Yes. Referenced in the preamble? Yes. Attorney signed the stipulation? Yes. That is all that is necessary. Trying to part that stip for more is ludicrous. It is not “fishy”.

      • Avattoir says:

        Mere lack of any challenge whatsoever does not amount to a positive finding about the reach of presidential pardon power.

        That said, I’d wish not to litigate the issue before this SCOTUS panel.

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      I agree that, as with Trump, the mob is Cohen’s biggest concern.  He has apparently been mobbed up since high school. Among his various, allegedly mob-connected investments over the years, he sold off an interest in a mob-frequented dining club only after Trump’s election.

      That stunt he pulled holding court and smoking expensive cigars while the federal court was hearing privilege arguments about contents seized at his premises was very mob-like.  Not the formal solicitation of support – I’m sure he needs it, and money – but the very public doing of it, with the implied “fuck you” to the court (even if he was not obligated to attend that hearing).

      It may also have been his chance to exchange messages with his proverbial Uncle Oleg (and a runner to Trump), to offer assurances and receive instructions.  He may not have another for a while.

      Short of his being added piecemeal to the Ready Mix, I think he’ll stick around and show up for hearings.  He’s probably under surveillance against his not; a threatened departure would land him in the pokey.  He seems short of money.  Anyone found to have transported him would be in for serious charges.  Anyone found harboring him would bear the brunt of US persuasion to bring him home.  He’s probably relatively safer here, unless he joins Snowden, which might give the game away.

      • Teddy says:

        I remain convinced that Michael Cohen lost a bet unrelated to all this, and was therefore obligated to wear that hideous sports coat in public on Friday the 13th.

         

        Also, Josh Marshall seems to have identified one of the clubhouse boys with Cohen:
        Rotem Rosen, a fairly made man in RU.

        Excerpt from Politico:

        Its patriarch, the late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia and arrived in 1976 in New York, where he opened an electronics store in the Flatiron district that, according to the New York Times, catered largely to KGB agents.

        Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.” In December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company.

        https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/can-you-identify-this-person

         

  4. Palli says:

    Cohen is royally self-fucked.
    Is Cohen the kind of person who can change his life enough to be effectively safe-guarded under any Witness Protection program.

    Been wondering, why aren’t any of these guys running to their money in a safe haven in a country without extradition?

    • Frank Probst says:

      Because they’ve been running this racket in NYC for decades without any serious threat of getting caught up in any sort of law enforcement operation.  They’re sloppy and cocky.  And they seem incapable of getting much serious legal advice or following any serious advice if they manage to get it.  Michael Cohen was apparently on the phone chatting with Trump yesterday, and he’s posting on Twitter today about the Prague trip.

       

      And yes, Trump can pardon him for any federal charges, but not from any state charges.  I don’t know how the laws for recording conversations work, but the fact that they vary from state to state suggests to me that they’re state laws.  If you’re in a one-party state, but you’re recording a phone call with someone in a two-party state, can you be charged with a state crime in the two-party state?  Because if you can, I would imagine that a LOT of heads went up when word leaked out that Michael Cohen has a habit of recording his phone calls.

      • bmaz says:

        Yes, you absolutely have exposure in a two party state. Not to mention that many states have ethical rules for lawyers that prohibit taping conversations without consent. Mine does, other have varying degrees of it, but it is never a good idea for a lawyer to do without notice and consent.

        As to quality of lawyering, I see many lawyers on twitter have opined that it is smart to not take your client to a hearing where they could be asked questions, like the Cohen TRO hearing on Friday. To me, that is nuts. You are going to the court for an emergency hearing seek extraordinary relief. If the court has questions, as Judge Wood did, and your client is not there, the court just gets mad, delays the case, and tell you to get your client’s ass to court pronto. Just as Judge Wood, indeed, did. And now she’s not only pissed, but has seen Cohen’s antics of having a Goodfella’s like sidewalk cigar party when he should have been in court. Her level of being pissed got exacerbated exponentially. Take your fucking client with you to court when seeking emergency extraordinary relief.

        • earlofhuntingdon says:

          Not taking your client to a hearing where she could be blindsided into answering questions she’s unprepared for might be useful in more routine cases.  Its utility seems very case and judge specific.

          In such high-profile circumstances, where you’re asking for special – please be kind to me, judge – relief, it is nuts not to have the client either in court or a cellphone call and a five-minute walk away.  Having him hold court on a Manhattan sidewalk is self-immolating.

          The conduct feeds into the allegations of Cohen’s alleged oft-repeated intimidation tactics, which will only irritate this judge.  Michael Cohen is not Al Capone or Roy Cohn, but he is telling the judge to treat him like Tom Hagen.

          • bmaz says:

            Oh, I have parked my client in an attorney room on another floor, or in the nearest coffee shop. But you don’t have them unavailable. And looking like a public idiot. Not on this kind of gig. Nope. Frankly, if this had been me, I would have just taken him in with me. He is a lawyer. Don’t make him look like a Mafiosa. Put his face, as a lawyer, right there in front of the court. That is how a lawyer should act.

  5. Frank Probst says:

    For those of us who are trying to keep up, could you please remind us when the Steele dossier said Cohen was supposed to have been in Prague?

      • bmaz says:

        August-September. Although, to my eye, if “The Dossier” was only off by a few weeks into October, I don’t think that particularly discredits the dossier.

          • bmaz says:

            Although, to be fair, in a way it does, because to be meaningful, the date needs to earlier rather than later vis a vis the election.

            • emptywheel says:

              It can’t be July, when he was in Italy, as I’ve already proven, bc then he couldn’t have been responding to the mid-August events he was described as responding to (including Manafort’s resignation). It could be October, but if you get too far in October you bump up against the actual reporting on the event. If he was in Prague on October 4 — the only day he could have been there w/Nikulin (though why the fuck the FBI wouldn’t see him I don’t know)–the timeline MIGHT just work, though I haven’t checked his known presence in London around that period.

              • Desider says:

                If he somehow managed a charter out of Bahamas, it’s a 10 hour flight to Munich or Dresden. Out of Toronto, it’s 8 hours. Add another 4 hours drive time (1 1/2 hours if Dresden) assuming they’re trying not to speed too much to avoid detection), it’s basically 12-14 hours each way, plus whatever time to get what was needed done (assume he might have slept on the plane/in the car), so just over 24 hours if it were truly an emergency.
                Then there’s the question whether it was actually Prague they met in or close enough to let Cohen say “nope, ain’t been there” – Carlsbad, a notoriously Russian spa town in west Czech? Plzen/Plsen, right on the freeway from Nürnberg…? Teplice, another Czech spa town just over the hills from Dresden? Or any number of Czech border/slightly inland towns within 60 miles on the autobahn from Dresden airport? (i.e. Nikulin might have been in Prague, but their meeting point could have easily been outside, giving Cohen his deniability – though I’m assuming the leak that Cohen entered the Czech Republic from Germany is accurate).

      • Bob Conyers says:

        Based on that Buzzfeed article, my guess is that he has (at least) two passports. Manafort had more than one. The rule is that if you’re visiting a country that might hassle you if they see you’ve visited another country they don’t like, you can apply for another passport. I think it’s mainly a matter of phrasing things right on the application, maybe provide a couple of letters proving you have business interests, and you’ll get another approved.

        The list of countries the passport showed he had visited over the previous years was pretty thin for him.

        Cohen was on the board of the Miss Universe pageant, but there’s no indication on the passport he could have gone to Moscow in 2013 either during the preparations or during the pageant. There’s no stamp for Russia during the time the Trump Tower negotiations were going on up until 2016. Maybe he did all of his work for Trump over the phone and electronically, but I’m skeptical. I think he has a separate passport or two.

  6. Frank Probst says:

    And the judge here–Kimba Wood–is the same Kimba Wood that was considered for the post of Attorney General in 1993, correct?

    • bmaz says:

      Yes. And she is a very good judge. Small bit of trivia, when she was much younger, Kimba Wood was once a Playboy Bunny.

      • earlofhuntingdon says:

        She’ll have inside knowledge about how the life is not like the mythology, and will see through the bullshit.  Perfect fit for the stuff likely to confront her here.

        • emptywheel says:

          Right. As someone noted, the fact that Kimba Wood is presiding over this challenge is quintessential 2018.

      • Trip says:

        No one would ever buy the pitch for a movie script like this. It’s just too unbelievably layered.

        Her background is fantastic and important trivia. The defense can’t pull the old, “She’s not reliable because she was a Bunny, adult film star, dumb, and not credible, shtick”, if it comes down to any testimony from the women and Cohen’s ‘fixing’ business with Davidson.  I mean, sure, they can try it, but it will be offensive, and the evidence of the opposite (the judge) will be in charge of the proceedings.

  7. Rapier says:

    “When Donald Trump was elected American president, (U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul) Ryan wore a black tie.

    Bizarre hardly covers it.  Your going to need some help on this black tie stuff.  Where does one find a Czech expert?  I mean this must have a specific meaning there.

    What the hell would Ryan have to do with NATO?
    NATO is thought of, if it is thought of at all here, as a benign sort of  thing.

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      EW has some background in Czech and the country from her dissertation research, a book one might want to leaf through.  It’s mentioned in her wiki entry.

      As for Ryan, as Speaker, he has more juice than the average congresscritter.  Federal and international agencies might well pay him a variety of professional courtesies. He would need to coordinate any international acts with the executive branch.

      As an international military pact, NATO, headquartered in Brussels, has a large bureaucracy of service members seconded from their national armed services.  With twenty-nine largely western European member states, it has a considerable presence and range of activities.  The US is regarded as its dominant member.

    • emptywheel says:

      Yeah, as EOH suggested, I read Czech from my graduate years, though it’s rusty.

      I still don’t understand the black tie reference though I’ve got others looking at it.

      • earlofhuntingdon says:

        I guess the homage about, “a book one might want to leaf through,” was too arcane for anyone not a scholar of the feuilleton.

  8. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Ryan probably has delusions of grandeur. When Trump and then Pence implode, he must expect to fill the gap. Vacuum, meet dead air.

    Last time I checked, the president is “Commander in Chief” of the armed services of the United States, and of the state militias when called into active service of the United States. He is not anyone else’s Commander in Chief. Not even a little bit.

  9. Rapier says:

    I wonder what kind of plea deal it will be. Let me guess. An admission of guilt to a couple of specific charges. End of story.

    To my eyes plea deals serve two entirely different functions. For nobodies it is to get them into jail. For somebodies or those connected to somebodies it’s a way to let them or those up the line off the hook

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