Robert Mueller, Former F.B.I. Director, Is Named Special Counsel for Russia Investigation

per the tweet "They say these people have not been publicly named before in the case."

perhaps it is the names you listed and they haven't been linked to this case, but for sure manafort isn't seeking immunity to testify against himself....

 

these potential witnesses could be

• people who, such as bankers lobbyst, etc, has never been in the news before,

• former members of / volunteers for the Trump campaign, or
• both

 

Well at least Mueller no longer has to investigate Trump. The whole world just witnessed that Trump is a Russian Ageny

 

... and roger stone... Mueller hasn't forgotten about you...

 

After this week’s performance, it’s amazing that the Republicans refuse to protect the Mueller investigation from Trump interference.

 

Well, I think there are still some Congressional republicans very much on board with Mueller, even if they don't tweet about it, etc.
But what I keep reading is that every GOP member up for re-election this fall believes they CANNOT dare cross 45 publicly. They must have the polling data, but they believe his block is that strong. Hard to believe there aren't more supposedly conservative voters who could vote for a republican who speaks truth to this national disgrace.

 

There are too many bat **** crazy House Republicans (looking at you Nunes) for the Congress to ever vote to protect Mueller.

 

More pressure on manafort...
Mueller releases list of more than 500 pieces of evidence against Manafort

http://thehill.com/policy/national-...t-of-more-than-500-pieces-of-evidence-against

 

What i

What is the reason for releasing these publicly? Is it because he wants him to cooperate? Or for some reason(s) all together ??

 

Mueller is running through all of Roger Stone's connections:

Mueller's team wants to talk to me, says Manhattan Madam Kristin Davis
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/mueller-s-team-wants-talk-me-says-manhattan-madam-n893301

The "Manhattan Madam" who boasted of providing prostitutes to New York's rich and famous, including Gov. Eliot Spitzer, says someone in special counsel Robert Mueller's office called her attorney Thursday to ask her to speak to investigators.

Kristin Davis, 41, said the Mueller representative asked if she would accept a subpoena or if the FBI would need to serve it to her. She said her lawyer called the representative back Friday to say she would accept it.

Davis said she doesn't have any information about why she was contacted. Her attorney, Daniel Hochheiser, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Mueller's office declined to comment.

"It's very out-of-the blue for me, very upsetting," Davis said. "For them to come to me for information on Russian collusion — I don't have anything on that."

However, Davis said, she has worked for former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone for many years, and she says she thinks four people who worked with Stone have already been subpoenaed.

"I’ve been with Roger since 2010 doing web design and writing position papers," she said. Davis ran for governor of New York in 2010 and for New York City comptroller in 2013. "Since my campaign [for governor] I've worked for him."


As the New York Times previously reported, Andrew Miller, a Stone associate who ran Davis's campaigns in 2010 and 2013, was subpoenaed by Mueller.

Davis said she couldn't have worked on Trump's presidential campaign and has no information about it because she was in prison during much of that time.

She was arrested in 2013 after allegedly selling drugs to an FBI cooperating witness between January and March. She pleaded guilty to a charge of selling prescription drugs. Sentenced to two years in prison, she was released in May 2016.

Davis, a one-time hedge fund employee, had previously spent several months in New York's Rikers Island jail for procuring prostitution. She earned the nickname the "Manhattan Madam" in New York's tabloids after saying publicly that her high-end escort service had about 10,000 well-heeled clients, half of them Wall Streeters. She said Spitzer had been among her clients, but had been banned for his behavior.


Spitzer resigned as governor in 2008 after his relationship with a prostitute — who did not work with Davis — was revealed.

Davis said that as of Friday afternoon she had not yet received a subpoena from the special counsel's office.

 

Worth reading her entire tweet thread...



And news on the Page FISA documents...

 

Of course, Nunes was lying and the FISA judge didn't act improperly. The sad thing is how many folks on this website bought into it.

 

The right-wing traitors on this website don't care about the truth. They care about Trump and what he represents - a white America that gets rid of all the brownies. If that means Putin will be their daddy, so be it. Lies, propaganda, power - none of that matters to them so long as this country becomes more white.

 

I guess we know who wore the black hats...

 

trump continued attempts to lie...

 

This twitter thread goes through the FISA document in tremendously deep detail...

 

LawFare's summary of the FISA...

What to Make of the Carter Page FISA Applications
https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-make-carter-page-fisa-applications

The Carter Page FISAs are out via the Freedom of Information Act. Here are a few observations, relatively brief but still just a bit too long for Twitter.

First, a huge amount of information is redacted in these FISA applications, but they still represent a monumental disclosure to the public. The government considers FISA applications to be very sensitive—and their disclosure, even heavily redacted, may have long-term, programmatic consequences long after we’re finished with President Trump. The government seems to have accepted that FOIA applies to FISA. Without taking a position on the issue it made me recall this Lawfare post that argues to the contrary.

Second, for those who don’t remember, the controversy about these FISA applications first arose in February when House intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes released a memo claiming that the FBI misled the FISA Court about Christopher Steele, the former British secret agent who compiled the “dossier” on Trump-Russia ties and who was a source of information in the FISA applications on Page. The main complaint in the Nunes memo was that FBI whitewashed Steele—that the FISA applications did not “disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials.”

In response to the Nunes memo, the Democrats on the committee released their own memo. That memo quoted from parts of the FISA applications, including a footnote in which the FBI explained that Steele was hired to “conduct research regarding Candidate #1,” Donald Trump, and Trump’s “ties to Russia,” and that the man who hired him was “likely looking for information that could be used to discredit [Trump’s] campaign.”

Based on this back and forth between the HPSCI partisans, I wrote on Lawfare at the time that the FBI’s disclosures on Steele “amply satisfie[d] the requirements” for FISA applications, and that the central irony of the Nunes memo was that it “tried to deceive the American people in precisely the same way that it falsely accused the FBI of deceiving the FISA Court.” The Nunes memo accused the FBI of dishonesty in failing to disclose information about Steele, but in fact the Nunes memo itself was dishonest in failing to disclose what the FBI disclosed. I said then, and I still believe, that the “Nunes memo was dishonest. And if it is allowed to stand, we risk significant collateral damage to essential elements of our democracy.”

Now we have some additional information in the form of the redacted FISA applications themselves, and the Nunes memo looks even worse. In my earlier post, I observed that the FBI’s disclosures about Steele were contained in a footnote, but argued that this did not detract from their sufficiency: “As someone who has read and approved many FISA applications and dealt extensively with the FISA Court, I will anticipate and reject a claim that the disclosure was somehow insufficient because it appeared in a footnote; in my experience, the court reads the footnotes.” Now we can see that the footnote disclosing Steele’s possible bias takes up more than a full page in the applications, so there is literally no way the FISA Court could have missed it. The FBI gave the court enough information to evaluate Steele’s credibility.

There’s also more detail on the previous disclosure from the House intelligence committee Democrats’ memo on how Steele went to the press with the “dossier” when FBI Director James Comey sent his October 2016 letter to Congress disclosing the possible newfound importance of the Weiner laptop in the Clinton investigation. According to the FISA applications, Steele complained that Comey’s action could influence the election. But when Steele went to the press, it caused FBI to close him out as an informant—facts which are disclosed and cross-referenced in the footnote in bold text.

While I am sure people will try, my initial impression is that with all the redactions it is going to be very tough to figure out the full scope of information supporting the Court’s repeated finding of probable cause to believe that Carter Page was an agent of Russia. There is a mention of two Russians, one of whom pleaded guilty to being an unregistered agent of a foreign government and was sentenced to 30 months, but even that is disconnected from the redacted discussion that precedes it. Substantively, the government seems to have hewed as closely to the prior disclosures as it could in applying FOIA.

But it is worth noting that—and as the Democrats previously pointed out—the judges who signed off on these four FISA applications were all appointed by Republican presidents, including one George H.W. Bush appointee (Anne Conway), two George W. Bush appointees (Rosemary Collyer and Michael Mosman) and one Reagan appointee (Raymond Dearie). I know some of those judges, and they certainly are not the types to let partisan politics affect their legal judgments.

 

This paragraph:

 

His followers will believe the lies.

Unfortunately, the media still has not yet adjusted to these on-going lies and are likely to pass these on to the public as-is. The public at large thus would be confused. Media needs to do a better job of calling a lie a lie.