In the Bloomberg News story today about Robert Mueller’s subpoenas of Paul Manafort’s bank records is this little tidbit:
…Manafort had alerted authorities to a controversial meeting on June 9, 2016, involving Trump’s son Donald Jr., other campaign representatives and a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton, according to people familiar with the matter.
So it was Manafort who dragged them into it. Which means he’s cooperating — to an extent. Clearly, yesterday’s no-knock warrant at Manafort’s home indicates they want him to cooperate just a teensy bit more, or they don’t trust everything he tells them and they’re looking to turn up the heat.
Here’s another little tidbit from the story:
Part of the reason Manafort is getting intense early scrutiny is that Mueller is drawing on investigations that were well underway, including one by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, when he was appointed in May.
This might be the first official confirmation that Mueller’s and NY Attorney General Eric Scheiderman’s investigations are overlapping, and that they are sharing some resources.
Good.
No-knock warrants are an abomination which should be made unconstitutional by law. If they already aren’t.
They are used extensively in dictatorships and other Fascist states.
Manafort, Trump, Scaramucci, Wilbur Ross, Tillerson, the Mercer’s, the Koch’s, etc. are all corrupt, thieving oligarch’s who belong in prison.
Others who belong in jail include the mental case John McCain and his band of warmongering General’s McMaster, Mattis, Dunford and Kelly because they are all dangerous to the peace and our general tranquility.
Manafort is in deep doo doo. Wouldn’t want to be him right about now.
Mueller probably sees him as more useful in cracking the Trump nut than Flynn, who has credibility issues to say the least, and now a lot of pressure is being brought to bear on Manafort, who was supposedly cooperating with the subpoenas and document requests, but Mueller’s team has to have just submitted an affidavit that convinced a judge otherwise.
His son in law is apparently being investigated for a so-called ponzi scheme involving California and NYC real estate that some of Paul’s money was involved in, and then there’s the laundry list of Russian and Ukrainian money that has passed through his hands for various reasons, some of which look a lot like money laundering, and the three year ten million dollars a year contract with Oleg Deripaska to, among other things, “further the interests of the Putin government in other countries, including the US.” So yeah, I can see why they would want him under their microscope.
That said, speaking as someone who has had his house raided by local cops a couple of times, pre-dawn feebies do seem sort of extreme.
Also, I have read elsewhere that while it was pre-dawn, it wasn’t no-knock, but some news outlets are reporting that it was, so do we really know? The feebies won’t say until/unless it comes out in discovery at trial, and we don’t even know if there will be a trial..