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

Kevin McCarthy: "There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump."

Mueller Probing Pre-Election Flynn Meeting with Pro-Russia Congressman

WASHINGTON — Investigators for Special Counsel Robert Mueller are questioning witnesses about an alleged September 2016 meeting between Mike Flynn, who later briefly served as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a staunch advocate of policies that would help Russia, two sources with knowledge of the investigation told NBC News.

The meeting allegedly took place in Washington the evening of Sept. 20, while Flynn was working as an adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign. It was arranged by his lobbying firm, the Flynn Intel Group. Also in attendance were Flynn’s business partners, Bijan Kian and Brian McCauley, and Flynn’s son, Michael G. Flynn, who worked closely with his father, the sources said.

Mueller is reviewing emails sent from Flynn Intel Group to Rohrabacher’s congressional staff thanking them for the meeting, according to one of the sources, as part of his probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Rohrabacher, a California Republican, has pushed for better relations with Russia, traveled to Moscow to meet with officials and advocated to overturn the Magnitsky Act, the 2012 bill that froze assets of Russian investigators and prosecutors. The sources could not confirm whether Rohrabacher and Flynn discussed U.S. policy towards Russia in the alleged meeting.

Rohrabacher's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mueller’s interest in the nature of Flynn and Rohrabacher’s discussion marks the first known time a member of Congress could be wrapped into the investigation.

Most of what has been reported about Mueller’s questioning of Flynn’s lobbying work has concerned his efforts on behalf of Turkey. Less is known about his lobbying ties to Russia, though he was paid $45,000 plus expenses for attending a gala in Moscow in December 2015 and being interviewed by RT, the Kremlin-financed cable TV news channel.

Flynn was fired after just 24 days as Trump’s national security adviser over misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak.

Multiple sources have told NBC News that Mueller has gathered enough evidence to lead to an indictment in the investigation into Flynn and his son.

Federal investigators have been probing Flynn’s lobbying efforts on behalf of Turkey, including an alleged meeting with senior Turkish officials in December 2016 where he was offered millions of dollars to secure the return of the Turkish president’s chief rival to Turkey and see that a U.S. case against a Turkish national was dismissed.

A grand jury impaneled by Mueller is continuing to interview witnesses with knowledge of Flynn's business activities over the next week, the two sources said.

 

I don't really think Mueller's position is that precarious. If Mueller's investigation forced Sessions out, Trump would have to appoint someone to go through confirmation hearings again. Senators will ask him a thousand times if he supports the special counsel. If he says yes, he's on the record and it'll hard to backtrack; if he says no he'll have a hard time getting confirmed -- with all Democrats plus McCain, Flake, and Corker opposed probably; maybe one or two others. And, if Mueller was removed after all that, the congressional investigations and the press will go bonkers. One of the congressional investigations said before that if Mueller was fired by the DOJ, they would hire him to keep working. So Mueller isn't totally secure because Trump has done irrational things before, but even getting fired can help him achieve his goals. I don't think he'd avoid going after Sessions if that's where it took him.

 

I'll give you my thoughts on that as a respectful retort if you don't mind.

I get the confirmation process, but the Christopher Wray confirmation under the circumstances should give everyone cause for concern. Not one person confirming Wray asked about or probably even knew that Wray was Chris Christies key attorney in representing him during bridgegate, and that the fact that a Chris Christie associate went that far under the radar is astounding. Especially given the circumstances of taking over for Comey in the middle of an obstruction of justice case that the counsel is looking at that circles back to the FBI. So if Christopher Wray didn't have to recuse himself during confirmation, and passed through with flying colors, what evidence do we have that Trump wouldn't be able to maneuver someone that the Senate would have no reason to block, but ultimately is a Trump loyalist?

(To Wray's credit though, he's not done anything yet to be proven as a Trump loyalist in his job, but I do believe the Christie connection is suspect, and is something to watch).

I also am less confident that Trump firing the special counsel will lead to an outcome that gets Trump out of office. The Trump loyalty and the distrust of the media with Trump voters makes it less of a sure thing that it will be so politically toxic that Paul Ryan has to make the call to impeach or re-instate Mueller as lead of a House appointed Special Committee. We also have history of the Nixon impeachment and the Saturday Night Massacre to where you'd have to think that Trump and his people have studied that scandal and have taught Trump how to approach firing the special counsel. If I was in their shoes and wanted to do it, I would start with a slow burn move of slowly removing anyone under Rod Rosentein so the firings in the DOJ weren't sudden and shocking, but a slow burn removal (See Dana Boente forced resignation a week ago), or you work to damage Sessions enough to where he has to resign. Trump has been working overtime to do that, and I wouldn't be shocked if they leak out more information damaging to Sessions even about Russia just to get him to resign.

The big question is though... that new AG that gets confirmed... how would they remove Robert Mueller, and make a case that the American people will believe??... Not sure, but the Trump folks and FoxNews have been working overtime to try and build that case already so we just have to watch out, but I believe the closer we get to a Sessions resignation, the closer we get to Mueller being fired, and a constitutional crisis coming into play. Its really up the American people at that point to either take to the streets and outrage, or if there are enough folks out there that watch FoxNews religiously to buy into the notion that Mueller was unfit to serve.

We just don't know that right now, but I will say that I would bet money right now that we will see how this plays out unfortunately. I'll put 40 bucks in the tipjar today if I'm wrong and Trump doesn't end up firing Mueller at some point.

FYI I hope like hell I'm wrong

 

That was very respectful. Maybe you're right. Maybe we'll find out.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/liftin...691bf9ae8dcefc88d&reflink=article_email_share

The Steele dossier has already become a thing of John le Carré-like intrigue—British spies, Kremlin agents, legal cutouts, hidden bank accounts. What all this obscures is the more immediate point: The dossier amounts to one of the dirtiest tricks in U.S. political history. It was perpetrated by Team Clinton and yielded a vast payoff for Hillary’s campaign.

The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign hired the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Fusion in turn hired former U.K. spook Christopher Steele to assemble the (now largely discredited) dossier. That full dossier of allegations wasn’t made public until after the election, in January 2017. And the media and Democrats continue to peddle the line that it played no role during the election itself.

“Details from the dossier were not reported before Election Day,” ran a recent CNN story. Hillary Clinton herself stressed the point in a recent “Daily Show” appearance. The dossier, she said, is “part of what happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out in the public arena is accurate. So this thing didn’t come out until after the election, and it’s still being evaluated.”

This is utterly untrue. In British court documents Mr. Steele has acknowledged he briefed U.S. reporters about the dossier in September 2016. Those briefed included journalists from the New York Times , the Washington Post, Yahoo News and others. Mr. Steele, by his own admission (in an interview with Mother Jones), also gave his dossier in July 2016 to the FBI.


Among the dossier’s contents were allegations that in early July 2016 Carter Page, sometimes described as a foreign-policy adviser to Candidate Trump, held a “secret” meeting with two high-ranking Russians connected to President Vladimir Putin. It even claimed these Russians offered to give Mr. Page a 19% share in Russia’s state oil company in return for a future President Trump lifting U.S. sanctions. This dossier allegation is ludicrous on its face. Mr. Page was at most a minor figure in the campaign and has testified under oath that he never met the two men in question or had such a conversation.

Yet the press ran with it. On Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff published a bombshell story under the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” Mr. Isikoff said “U.S. officials” had “received intelligence” about Mr. Page and Russians, and then went on to recite verbatim all the unfounded dossier allegations. He attributed all this to a “well-placed Western intelligence source,” making it sound as if this info had come from someone in government rather than from an ex-spy-for-hire.

The Clinton campaign jumped all over it, spinning its own oppo research as a government investigation into Mr. Trump. Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director, the next day took to television to tout the Isikoff story and cite “U.S. intelligence officials” in the same breath as Mr. Page. Other Clinton surrogates fanned out on TV andTwitter to spread the allegations.

The Isikoff piece publicly launched the Trump-Russia collusion narrative—only 1½ months from the election—and the whole dossier operation counts as one of the greatest political stitch-ups of all time. Most campaigns content themselves with planting oppo research with media sources. The Clinton campaign commissioned a foreign ex-spy to gin up rumors, which made it to U.S. intelligence agencies, and then got reporters to cite it as government-sourced. Mrs. Clinton now dismisses the dossier as routine oppo research, ignoring that her operation specifically engineered the contents to be referred to throughout the campaign as “intelligence” or a “government investigation.”

Making matters worse, there may be a grain of truth to that last claim. If the Washington Post’s reporting is correct, it was in the summer of 2016 that Jim Comey’s FBI obtained a wiretap warrant on Mr. Page from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. If it was the dossier that provoked that warrant, then the wrongs here are grave. Mr. Page is suing Yahoo News over that Isikoff story, but he may have a better case against the Clinton campaign and the federal government if they jointly spun a smear document into an abusive investigation.


To that point, it is fair to ask if the entire Trump-Russia narrative—which has played a central role in our political discourse for a year, and is now resulting in a special counsel issuing unrelated indictments—is based on nothing more than a political smear document. Is there any reason to believe the FBI was probing a Trump-Russia angle before the dossier? Is there any collusion allegation that doesn’t come in some form from the dossier?

The idea that the federal government and a special counsel were mobilized—that American citizens were monitored and continue to be investigated—based on a campaign-funded hit document is extraordinary. Especially given that to this day no one has publicly produced a single piece of evidence to support any of the dossier’s substantive allegations about Trump team members.

So yes, Mrs. Clinton, the dossier—which you paid for—was used in the election. And we are only beginning to understand in how many ways.
​

 

lol the Dossier narrative.

I guess you have to cling to something if your house is collapsing around you.

 

Can anyone link me to a blow-by-blow analysis of dossier claims and their level of verification/discreditation? I see a lot of folks alternatively saying the dossier is in part verified or in part discredited, so it'd be good to get down to brass tacks in a list format.

 

I think it's both, which is normal for a dossier. A dossier doesn't ever present any information inside of it as being accurate. It is merely a collection of chatter and information picked up by intel sources.

A dossier is like a collection of rumors. They are presented as basically rumors. And also like rumors sometimes they end up being true, and some of them end up being complete BS.

In this particular dossier, some of the things mentioned turned out to be true, and a couple of items have been shown to be false because of it being impossible for Trump to have done some things stated because he was verified as having been somewhere else at the time. Other parts (I believe most) of it, haven't been verified or discredited but simply seem unlikely and far-fetched.

Sadly, I don't have the blow by blow statistics.

 

Surely, this is an opportunity for some investigative journalism outfit. I remember someone was maintaining an exhaustive timeline of every Russia interaction the Trump campaign had (sad to see how exhaustive it was). Something like that on this dossier would be useful because it's annoying to see people sling around claims about it being largely discredited (or verified) based on nothing.

 

I don't think either sides claims about it being discredited or verified are based on nothing. I don't know about all the claims, but I do know some specific ones that have been verified, and at least one that was discredited.

But that being said, having a bunch of the claims discredited doesn't mean the dossier is full of false information. Having some of the claims verified doesn't mean the dossier is 100% fact.

People who want to claim the dossier as a whole is credible or discredited either have a misunderstanding about what a dossier is, or they just want it to be that way because it satisfies their need to have everything wrapped up in a tidy way like a television show plot.

 

Not either, really. It's a propaganda point at this point. Conservative media always includes this descriptor when referencing the dossier, "largely discredited." Perhaps to a lesser extent, but Trump opponents are always quick to point out some of the findings were verified. Without ever getting into specifics, you can see the point of this is a tussle over public perception of Trump. If conservatives can get people to believe the dossier is "largely discredited" they can simultaneously launder Trump's reputation and make a political attack on these operatives who fabricated the story in the first place. It's now Clintonites who have to play defense for this hard-to-defend dossier. If someone -- like the WSJ in this case -- is going to stick this qualifier on there, I'm really going to need to see specifics to give them any credibility at all (brand reputation not withstanding).

 

Dossier... LOL.

Getting back to the serious topic, Flynn will now be accused of a felony. I'd expect him to start singing...

 

Ahhh the infamous Dossier again.

The Hillary plan where she would spend millions for salacious opp research.... not use it. Plan on losing the election. Then have liberal mole Hillary lover James Comey (who Trump fired for apparently mistreating Hillary) unveil the Dossier to the FBI to start an investigation in order to smear Trumps presidency.

Then Hillary would work in secret to make Trump fire Comey and have planted mole Rod Rosenstein start up a special counsel with known liberal Robert Mueller.

Makes sense.

 

Also all this talk about the Dossier and people on the right are either too dumb or just don’t want to remember how the Trump Russia investigations started in the first place. Michael Flynn... the Michael Flynn that Obama told Trump personally not to hire because they knew he would compromise Trump.

If only Trump and his fans would have listened to Obama...lol. It’s pretty damn ironic to say the least.

 

With Trump Back In D.C., Mueller's Investigation Enters The West Wing

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation has entered the West Wing.

Mueller's team is charged with looking into whether anyone on President Trump's campaign worked with the Russians who attacked the 2016 election, so it was inevitable that investigators would want to talk with aides now working in the White House.

Some, like top adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, communications director Hope Hicks and policy adviser Stephen Miller, were key players in the campaign as well.

Their outside lawyers did not respond to requests for comment, but Ty Cobb, the outside attorney brought in to help the White House, spoke with NPR about the probe.

"The interviews ideally will be completed by Thanksgiving or shortly thereafter," he said.

Cobb declined to get into the details of whom or even how many aides will ultimately face questioning.

"I sort of have a blood oath with Mueller that I don't get into that," he said. "It complicates his job. And it sort of defeats the confidence that people here have in me to protect them. So I can't talk about the 'who, what and where' stuff."

Cobb was asked whether this was simply a first round of interviews, focusing on lower level staff, and he insisted no, this would be all of them.

"It's pretty well set," he said. "I mean it's conceivable they may have isolated people back on, you know, on issues that they fail to ask them about," he added.

In fact, Cobb said, one aide had already been called back for a second conversation that lasted about 20 minutes.

Mueller's team has reportedly already spoken to former administration officials Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus. Members of the White House counsel's staff are on Mueller's list as well.

In addition to campaign activities like the June 2016 Trump tower meeting with a Russian delegation attended by the president's son and top aides, Mueller's investigation is also understood to be looking into the drafting of a misleading statement about that meeting, the firing of FBI Director James Comey and the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The many issues at stake in the sprawling imbroglio don't make life any easier for White House aides who must pay their lawyers and deal with investigators at the same time they try to do their day jobs.

"If everything were good and nobody had done anything, or met with the Russians, or talked about meetings with the Russians or emailed about meetings with the Russians — if everything were good, it would still be stressful," said Lanny Davis, a lawyer who served in the Clinton White House for two years handling the response to Ken Starr's independent counsel investigation.

"You would be worried about innuendo in the media, which convicts you even if there are no facts. You have the danger of being smeared in headlines nowadays especially on the Internet, where there are no facts at all. It's just pure rumors."

Davis says he's spoken with members of the Trump administration who were looking for advice about whether to hire private lawyers — yes, he said — and how to structure a White House in the midst of an investigation — try not to let it permeate everything.

Davis says he even spoke to Trump's former top adviser Steve Bannon.

But no matter how hard White House officials try to isolate the investigation, to put it out of their mind and focus on their work, "it's like a cloud or mist that never goes away," he told NPR.

Davis remembered how in the Clinton White House, everyone was so afraid of getting into the investigative crosshairs that many people stopped taking notes. He used 3-by-5 notecards that, as a practice, he'd throw out at the end of the day. He imagines aides in the Trump White House are experiencing similar highs and lows.

"You're so thrilled to be there, and when you walk down the driveway early in the morning and you see the house lit up and you think, 'Gosh, Abraham Lincoln walked down these very same stones,' " said Davis.

"You say, 'I'm so lucky to be here.' And then you walk into your office and you turn the lights on and you suddenly see some 3-by-5 cards from notes you took the day before and you think, 'Oh my God, I didn't throw those away last night. Now what do I do?' "

For his part, current White House special counsel Ty Cobb, who projects a permanently unruffled attitude, insists aides in the Trump administration are sanguine about the whole thing.

"I don't think there's, you know, much angst here," he said. Getting the truth out will be better than the worst of the breathless reporting on the investigation, Cobb argued.

That's why, he said, under Cobb's guidance, the White House posture has been full cooperation with the investigation. He also praised the investigative team itself.

"I think it's been highly professionally done. And I think they have moved with an alacrity that they're proud of and that the American people can be proud of," said Cobb.

Even so, the president and his allies often undercut the investigation, calling it a "witch hunt," or suggesting the real scandal involves Democrats.

As for how much longer the special counsel's microscope will stay on the president and his administration, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders insists things are nearing the conclusion. Cobb, on the other hand, says the timeline is up to Mueller.

 

Here's a pretty good run down...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ys-and-what-it-doesnt/?utm_term=.6fb778976efc

 

LOL who cares man let it go. If Hillary is guilty then jail her. Literally no ones cares at this point. Just let it go already. Are you really this easily manipulated?

 

Were other republican candidates having interactions with Russia during the timeframe before Trump was a certainty ??