Mueller as Special Counsel

[Jeff Lebowski]

I think it's also funny that you think mentioning how other countries have been interested in our politics in the past is an even remotely coherent or persuasive justification.

#whataboutothercountries
#whataboutchristophersteele

[Walter Sobchak]

#whataboutothercountries
#whataboutchristophersteele

It's not about scale at all, obviously. 13 twitter trolls CHANGED THE ELECTION!

Was it BlueK that said the election was decided by like 3000 votes in 4 states and therefore it *could* have had an impact? Completely false, but let's stick with the bullshit narrative.

[Uncle Ted]

Thank heavens that 13 no-name twitter trolls will finally be bought to JUSTICE. The long arm of the law and all that.

But speaking of which, when is the indictment for Christopher Steele going to be handed down?

Steele isn’t Russian, dum dum... but we can kick the Queen and her subjects butts on the way to teach those Reds a lesson, if we need to. We did it before and we can do it again.


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[Commando]

Wow sure a lot of Russian around these parts these days.

[Crockett]

Sure a lot of indictments for a fakenews nothingburger.

You and BlueK want SO BAD for Trump/Russia collusion to be true. Snap out of it. It didn't happen. Crooked Hillary, the crooked Obama administration, and some crooked FBI agents tried to fix the election for Hillary and then tried to cover their "insurance plan" / tracks plus resist Trump after the election with this bogus Russia collusion stuff.

There are a lot of warts with Trump, but it is still so delicious to me that Hillary lost and that Obama's agenda is being largely unwound.

[Crockett]

Wow sure a lot of Russian around these parts these days.

Anyone who voted for Obama instead of Mitt and complains about Russia needs to shut up.

[Walter Sobchak]

Wow sure a lot of Russian around these parts these days.

And there were a lot of Saddam ass-kissers back in late 2002 / early 2003... amirite?

(You might have been too young to vote back then.)

[Commando]

Anyone who voted for Obama instead of Mitt and complains about Russia needs to shut up.

And there were a lot of Saddam ass-kissers back in late 2002 / early 2003... amirite?

(You might have been too young to vote back then.)

Only struck dogs yelp!

[Walter Sobchak]

Only struck dogs yelp!

Arizona has some strange regional idioms.

[Moliere]

Anyone who voted for Obama instead of Mitt and complains about Russia needs to shut up.

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[BlueK]

Anyone who voted for Obama instead of Mitt and complains about Russia needs to shut up.

I didn't vote for Obama.

[Commando]

I didn't vote for Obama.

Stop it- you're disrupting his deflection tactic.

[Walter Sobchak]

This is probably not anything new for the lawyers on the board, but the following two articles helped me understand the "conspiracy to defraud" legal framework of the recent indictments.

The Charging Mystery in the Russian Indictments

The special counsel’s indictment of Russian individuals and organizations brought campaign finance law for the first time into formal charges in the case. But this development came with a mystery. The indictment alleges facts that support charges of federal campaign finance law violations—such as the prohibition on foreign national contributions—but does not charge any such offenses. This is clearly not for want of evidence, since the indictment sets out in considerable detail the millions in foreign national spending to influence the 2016 election. Yet Bob Mueller omitted any direct charge for violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act.

Instead, the indictment builds the campaign finance issues into a conspiracy to defraud the United States—it alleges that the Russians conspired to obstruct the capacity of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to enforce the law. The act of obstruction was a failure to report their illegal expenditures. If the FEC did not know about the expenditures, it could not enforce the law.

Now, of course, those engaged in illegal campaign finance activity, such as spending from foreign national sources, won’t ever make an exception and comply with self-incriminating reporting requirements. And the irony of the premise–that the FEC would get the job done if given the needed facts–will not be lost on those who have observed the agency’s decline. But there is a theory, of course, behind the structure of the charges, and it might hold a clue to what comes next in the campaign finance phase of the case.

Mueller and his team may have concluded that straight statutory campaign finance allegations rest on too much untested ground and would complicate what may well be the next phase of their investigation. This consideration would not affect the foreign national side of the case: Foreign nationals are plainly prohibited from spending in the manner detailed in the indictment. But how the law reaches American co-conspirators is less certain, and the special counsel’s theory of the case, pleading the campaign finance aspect of the case through conspiracy-to-defraud, may allow more securely for the prosecution of American actors.

In other words, if Mueller’s case for campaign finance violations affected only Russians, there would be no obvious reason to exclude Federal Election Campaign Act violations from the indictment. Russians spent substantial sums to influence an election, as expressly laid out in the charging document, and this is an unambiguous violation of federal law. If, however, Mueller possesses evidence of Americans’ complicity in these violations, he may have decided on a different theory of the campaign finance case that more reliably sweeps in U.S. citizen misconduct.

[more]

Follow that up with this one...

Why Conspiracy to Defraud the Unites States is the Backbone of the IRA and Manafort Indictments

One of the biggest complaints from Republicans about the Manafort indictment, including from the President, is that Manafort’s Party of Regions work has nothing to do with his campaign. But once you define it as a conspiracy to hide Russian involvement in our politics, it goes right to the heart of whether the people running the Trump campaign, via their one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort, were honest about whose interest the campaign served.

Which brings us to the stuff hanging over Manafort’s head, the stuff Mueller seems to be trying to flip him to get. Manafort is suspected of acting as Trump’s campaign manager during key periods of staffing and policy commitment while serving the interests of Russia via some oligarch cut-outs, notably but not exclusively Oleg Deripaska.

It’s not clear how you’d charge this, in an era where campaign finance and transparency are dead. Particularly given that Manafort worked for free, bypassing every law imposed on actual donations, and therefore making it really easy for a foreign country to pay you to run a campaign.

Until you get to the conspiracy to defraud framework, to Manafort’s role in a conspiracy to hide the fact that the Russians were actually paying him to ensure Trump got elected.

I don’t actually think Don Jr will be charged (as Bauer surmised might be possible) with conspiracy to defraud based off the IRA indictment because he attended that June 9 meeting; the campaign’s data people might be different.

Which is to say that Mueller is not going to name Trump or his spawn in a conspiracy to defraud the government based off really attenuated claims that the conspiracy all derived from the IRA operation. The import of the Manafort charges (even in the limited form they exist) is that Mueller seems to be larding on the “conspiracy to defraud” charges from multiple directions, from Russians and whatever co-conspirator intermediaries to those who paid Manafort’s bills for getting Trump past the challenge of the Republican convention.

[Walter Sobchak]

Outstanding.

The Fundamental Uncertainty of Mueller’s Russia Indictments

On Friday, the special counsel Robert Mueller filed an indictment of thirteen Russians, for meddling with the 2016 election. Over the long weekend, four ways of interpreting the document solidified. The White House focussed on a statement by the deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, who said the indictment contains no allegation that any American knowingly colluded with the Russian effort. President Trump tweeted, “They are laughing their asses off in Moscow.” Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice-president for ads, took to Twitter to assert that the primary purpose of Russian meddling was to “divide America,” not to influence the election. Meanwhile, most of the legacy media interpreted the indictment as a major blow to Trump, who, they write, can no longer dismiss the allegations of Russian meddling as a hoax. Here is the bad news: all of this is true at the same time.

It is true that the indictment tells us nothing about connections between the Russian efforts and the Trump campaign, and the Trump victory. It is also true that Moscow is laughing, at least in part because the Kremlin had no grand plan to elect Trump. To understand what happened in 2016, we have to understand, among other things, how Russians perceived their own efforts. Perhaps the hardest thing for humans to do is to imagine the world as it is imagined by others. We tend to confuse acting in accordance with the goals and values of the society in which we live with rationality; we tend to confuse intelligence with thinking in accordance with those goals and values. And, of course, we are always inclined to see events as predetermined—and we are almost always wrong. An event as shocking as Trump’s election demands that the forces that may (or may not) have contributed to his victory be rendered suitably monstrous in retrospect.

Trump’s tweet about Moscow laughing its ass off was unusually (perhaps accidentally) accurate. Loyal Putinites and dissident intellectuals alike are remarkably united in finding the American obsession with Russian meddling to be ridiculous. The intellectuals are amused to see Americans so struck by an indictment that adds virtually nothing to a piece published in the Russian media outlet RBC, back in October; I wrote at the time that the article showed the Russian effort to be more of a cacophony than a conspiracy. The Kremlin and its media are, as Joshua Yaffa writes, tickled to be taken so seriously. Their sub-grammatical imitations of American political rhetoric, their overtures to the most marginal of political players, are suddenly at the very heart of American political life. This is the sort of thing Russians have done for decades, dating back at least to the early days of the Cold War, but those efforts were always relegated to the dustbin of history before they even began.

Goldman, the Facebook V.P., has seen more of the Russian ads and posts than most Americans, and his imagination clearly strains to accommodate the push to take them seriously. It’s hard to square words like “sophisticated” (frequently used by the Times to describe the Russian campaign) with posts like one from an apparently fake L.G.B.T. group promoting something called “Buff Bernie: A Coloring Book for Berniacs” with catchy English-language copy: “The coloring is something that suits for all people.” It’s hard to apply the description “bold covert effort” (used by Politico) to the enormous amount of social-network static that Russian trolls produced. To Goldman, it may all look like a giant gray mass in which only a few colorful ads and posts have any meaning—and that meaning is hard to discern.

[...]

Stability is what Vladimir Putin has been promising Russians for eighteen years and still hasn’t delivered, making Russians all the more resentful of what they imagine as a predictable, safe American society. Americans, on the other hand, increasingly imagine American society as unstable and deeply at risk. While most people believe themselves to have a solid grip on reality, they imagine their compatriots to be gullible and chronically misinformed. This, in turn, means that we no longer have a sense of shared reality, a common imagination that underlies political life. In a society with a strong sense of shared reality, a bunch of sub-literate tweets and ridiculous ads would be nothing but a curiosity.

[...]

Both sides have rushed to interpret Rosenstein’s statements as offering certainty: with the White House claiming that the Trump campaign has been exonerated, and the legacy media running with the story of a sophisticated, bold Russian plan to meddle in American elections. In fact, the plan was not at all sophisticated, and about as bold as, say, keying a neighbor’s car under the cover of night. Rosenstein’s message was one of uncertainty. The investigation may or may not turn up evidence of intentional coöperation between the Trump campaign and Russian agents. It is exceedingly unlikely that we will ever have a clear understanding of whether Russian meddling affected the outcome of the election. But a huge number of Americans imagine that it did. They imagine that exposure to a foreign effort to muddle American politics can fundamentally change the fate of this country—and by imagining it, they render the country all the more muddled, divided, and vulnerable.

[beefytee]

It's pretty obvious that the Mueller investigation is costing too much, taking too long, with little to no results!


https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...freaking-fast/




Shut it down!