Benedict Trump? Individual 1

What's crazier-- Trump's furious twitter stream howling at the moon about his legal jeopardy (above)-- much of which was certainly written by his current lawyer-- or the very timely Trump Code of Dishonor (below). Yesterday, tacitly admitting he directed Michael Cohen to pay off the hookers Trump feared would derail his presidential bid, Individual 1 claimed he did not direct Cohen to break the law while making the payoffs. Trumpanzee tweet: "I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law." At his sentencing session, Cohen attributed his offenses to his "duty to cover up [Trump's] dirty deeds."

Salon published an essay by Lucian Truscott, Maria Butina’s plea is the worst news ever for Trump and Trump is yet to make up what cockamamie story he wants his moron, primarily lo-education white evangelical followers to repeat to each other. The Russian spy plead guilty to engaging in a conspiracy against the U.S. The conspiracy, she admitted, was acting as an illegal foreign agent. Spies gotta spy.

She admitted to acting under the direction of Putin crony Alexander Torshin (who seems to have disappeared a couple of days ago). And here's the bad news for Trump and the Republican Party and the now bankrupt NRA: "She agreed to turn over any evidence of crimes she is aware of, submit a full accounting of her financial assets, sit for interviews with law enforcement (and waive right to counsel during those interviews) and testify before grand juries or in trials in Washington or elsewhere." Presumably she will have the goods on how the Russians laundered tens of millions of dollars into the Trump campaign through the NRA.



Back to Truscott who makes the point that this is the worst news Señor Trumpanzee has faced in months. Before she appeared and 'fessed up Thursday morning, Truscott wrote that she would "admit to conspiring with a Russian official believed to be Alexander Torshin 'to establish unofficial lines of communication with Americans having power and influence over U.S. politics . . . for the benefit of the Russian Federation' (Torshin recently retired from being a deputy director of the Russian central bank). She will also admit to attempting to influence the National Rifle Association and 'Political Party 1,' believed to be the Republican Party. Butina will admit to setting up a meeting between senior officials of the NRA and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in December 2015, in the early months of the Trump campaign. She later reported to Torshin, 'We should let them express their gratitude now, we will put pressure on them quietly later.'

Butina has been indicted by the U.S. Attorney of the District of Columbia, whose investigation was separate from that of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, so you would think that would come as good news to Trump. But Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was also charged by the D.C. U.S. attorney and the U.S.attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia as well, and it is known that Mueller has been cooperating with the U.S. attorneys for D.C., Eastern Virginia, and the Southern District of New York as well. So the fact that Butina is pleading guilty and agreeing to cooperate means that Mueller will be a beneficiary of what she knows about Russian influence in the election of 2016. But even that isn’t the worst news Trump got this week.

No, what Trump should really be worrying about is what Butina’s guilty plea says about his friend Vladimir Putin in Russia. Butina was obviously operating as an intelligence agent of the Russian state, and she wouldn’t be agreeing to plead guilty and cooperate with investigators for Mueller or anyone else if she hadn’t been given the go-ahead by her bosses back in Moscow. Butina faces a sentence of zero to six months under the federal statute she was charged with, and even if she ends up serving time, she will be deported immediately upon her release from prison.

Marina Butina wouldn’t have anyplace to go in Russia if her handlers at the Kremlin hadn’t told her it was okay to tell U.S. prosecutors everything she knows about how her attempt to influence American politics worked from 2015 through 2016. If Putin has decided to cut Butina loose, he’s cutting Trump loose as well.

...With all of the guilty pleas and sentencings in court this week, speculation has been flying that Special Counsel Mueller is reaching the end of his investigation. Don’t believe it. The Washington Post reported this week that 14 Trump friends, associates, and campaign and transition officials had contacts with Russians during the 18 months of his campaign.

Note: Congressman Lieu, a former Air Force JAG officer, serves on the House Judiciary Committee

Every single one of them lied about Russia. They started out by flatly denying they had any contacts at all with any Russians. Then they admitted they had a few, but the contacts were innocuous. When numerous meetings with Russians came to light, they said the contacts didn’t amount to anything. When it turned out the contacts were serious, they began denying there had been any “collusion” with the Russians. Trump made it a refrain, that there had been “no collusion” with Russians during the many times he now had to admit his people had met with them.

Robert Mueller, who has indicted and/or taken guilty pleas from 33 individuals and at least three companies, is turning from indictments of Russians to indictments of their American counterparts. He is focusing his investigation not on “collusion,” but on conspiracy to defraud the United States of America. That’s what he indicted 13 Russians who worked for the Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg: conspiracy “to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.”

Mueller indicted 12 Russian military intelligence agents for “Conspiracy to Commit an Offense against the United States” by hacking into Democratic Party emails and to “stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.” He accused the Russians of using false identities and making false statements to hide their connections to “Russia and the Russian government.”

Mueller has been after a conspiracy between Trump and the Trump campaign and the Russian government all along. And he’s using fraud and conspiracy statutes under the U.S. Code to do it.

Mueller is going to connect Donald Trump and his campaign directly to the government of Vladimir Putin. This week, with the guilty plea of his agent Maria Butina, Putin appears ready to help him.

Robert Mueller has never cared about “collusion.” All he has cared about is breaking the law, which Donald Trump has done plenty of. Trump can tweet all he wants, but he can’t stop the big truck coming straight at him driven by Robert Mueller.