According to the first charges filed against Tom Barrack’s alleged co-conspirator, Paul Manafort had a much bigger role in Barrack’s successful influence over a Trump speech than the current indictment reveals.
When challenged to explain why January 6 defendants are being brought to trial after lots of Portland protest cases have dismissed, DOJ explained that January 6 defendants made their alleged crimes much easier to prosecute.
Tom Barrack gave a short explanation of his role in editing a Trump Energy speech when Mueller’s team interviewed him in December 2017, including describing Paul Manafort’s role in the process.
The Tom Barrack is quite clear about who his boss is: Mohamed bin Zayed, who is described as Emirati Official 1. It’s far more circumspect about Barrack’s conversations with Trump.
There were a bunch of stories about the results of Commerce Inspector General report yesterday: That the IG had found that Wilbur Ross lied twice to Congress, but that after Commerce IG referred his conduct to DOJ, Bill Barr’s DOJ refused to prosecute. But the most interesting parts of the stories may be what got left out, like the possibility of a parallel investigation at DOJ IG.
Judge Randolph Moss sentenced Paul Hodgkins to 8 months in prison.
The sentence that Paul Hodgkins gets on Monday may have as much to do with how Judge Randolph Moss thinks his behavior compares to that of other defendants charged with obstruction before him as it does with the government’s bid for an 18-month sentence.
The story told in a questionable story from Luke Harding — that the 2016 operation didn’t get approved until January 22, 2016 and all got tasked through Russia’s intelligence agencies — deviates in interesting ways from the known facts of the operation.
Since the days before Lev Parnas was arrested he and those around him have been trying to hide their actions in an interlocking nest of attorney-client privilege claims. Yesterday, Judge Paul Oetken just denied Parnas’ latest attempt to exploit that effort in his defense.
The Twitter rant that Trump supporters claim provides an excuse for the Trump attack on the Capitol ultimately amounts to a claim that likely 2016 Russian disinformation led a bunch of Trump supporters, inexorably, to attack the US Capitol.
