Breaking news: at 4:43pm ET today Mueller reveal a filing NEW charges against Paul Manafort, connected to secret payments to former European politicians. The indictment, in DC Federal Court, alleges the laundering of $30 million. It also alleges that Manafort “secretly retained a group of former senior European politicians to take positions favorable to Ukraine, including by lobbying in the United States”
You can read the indictment at TPM. talkingpointsmemo.com/…
Update: earlier today we had the unidentified member of congress to puzzle over; TPM has established that, no surprise, it is almost certainly was Dana Rohrabacher: www.dailykos.com/...
In this new indictment we have a new mystery character: an unnamed “former European Chancellor” who was secretly paid by Manafort to lobby Congress on behalf of Ukraine. Speculation as to identity, anyone?
I’ll supply my own: former Chancellor of Austria Alfred Gusenbauer, who appears in a 2017 FARA lobbying registration from Podesta’s outfit. www.fara.gov/...
Another update: quoting the indictment
...when the Department of Justice sent inquiries of MANAFORT and Gates in 2016 about their activities, MANAFORT AND Gates responded with a series of false and misleading statements.
2016. What else happened in 2016? Potentially this puts Manafort as lying to the DoJ at the time he was at the ear of Donald Trump.
Another update: this indictment concludes with a long lists of assets that “the grand jury finds probable cause to believe [are] subject to forfeiture”. They include homes and financial assets.
Another update: I thought we had already established that Manafort is a moron of the first order. www.dailykos.com/…
But now there is more. The indictment says that in November 2016 and February 2017 Manafort and Gates were subjected to some questions from the DoJ regarding whether they had been acting as foreign agents without registering. The written response that Manafort and Gates authorized included a statement saying that their firm “does not retain communications beyond thirty days” and therefore they did a search of their records but could not produce any documents that were “responsive” to the DoJ’s request. They attached a document that purported to be their “Email Retention Policy”. The indictment says that the July 2017 no-knock raid on Manafort “reveal numerous documents” that were relevant to the matter and more than 30 days old at the time that claim was maid.
In other words: once again caught in a brazen lie.