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In 1994, Trump went to a party with Jeffrey Epstein, a billionaire who was a notorious registered sex offender, and raped a 13-year-old girl that night in what was a "savage sexual attack," according to a lawsuit filed in June 2016 by "Jane Doe." The account was corroborated by a witness in the suit, who claimed to have watched as the child performed various sexual acts on Trump and Epstein even after the two were advised she was a minor."Immediately following this rape Defendant Trump threatened me that, were I ever to reveal any of the details of Defendant Trump's sexual and physical abuse of me, my family and I would be physically harmed if not killed," Jane Doe wrote in the lawsuit, filed in New York.The lawsuit was dropped in November 2016, just four days before the election, with Jane Doe's attorneys citing "numerous threats" against her.
Felix Sater, a former business associate of President Donald Trump who was the chief negotiator for the defunct Trump Tower Moscow project, will testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday morning, according to a person familiar with the matter.The closed-door interview will cap a protracted back-and-forth between Sater and the panel, which has rescheduled his appearance several times since he was first slated to appear in March.Sater failed to appear for a voluntary appearance before the committee last month because he was sick and slept through his alarm, he told POLITICO at the time. Sater previously said his attorney, Robert Wolf, was already in Washington for the planned interview but the committee issued a subpoena anyway.Wolf maintained in a statement that Sater couldn't attend last month's interview due to “unexpected health reasons” and said Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s decision to issue a subpoena was “entirely unnecessary.”But a committee aide pushed back at the time, saying in a statement that "neither Sater nor his attorney advised the committee of his unexpected absence until moments before the interview was set to begin, and the committee is still not aware of any health reasons for his absence." The aide added that the panel had requested documents from Sater that he had not provided, which further justified the subpoena.Sater says he has handed over the requested documents, including phone records.“I always have and always will cooperate with anything my country and my government asks of me," he told POLITICO.Sater has testified several times in the last year about issues related to the Trump Tower Moscow project, which has been a central focus of the Democrat-led committee’s investigation into whether Trump is compromised by foreign actors.Sater was initially scheduled to testify before the panel in public in March, but the completion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation prompted Schiff to postpone the interview. It was later rescheduled and moved to a private setting because the topics also deal with highly sensitive national security issues related to Sater's prior work with the government.A federal judge confirmed for the first time in May, for example, that Sater helped the U.S. government track down Osama bin Laden.Sater’s informant work stems from a 1998 case in which he pleaded guilty to participating in a $40 million stock fraud scheme orchestrated by the mafia in New York. As a result, Sater agreed to secretly collect information for the government, which described his cooperation as “extraordinary” in national security cases that were named in open court in May.Trump did not disclose the ongoing Trump Tower Moscow negotiations while he was running for president in 2015 and 2016, and repeatedly claimed during the campaign that he has “nothing to do with Russia.” His former attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, is serving a three-year prison sentence in part for lying to the Intelligence Committee about the timing of those negotiations.
On July 17, Robert Mueller will testify publicly before Congress for the first time since June 2013, when he appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee in his role as FBI director. Democratic members of Congress have framed Mueller’s testimony as a final act of public service following his resignation as special counsel. “It’s his duty to the American people,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler. “I think it’s a question of duty to the country,” said Nadler’s Judiciary Committee colleague Rep. David Cicilline. And House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff argued, “Mueller has one more service to provide … duty calls once more.”This is a familiar story: Mueller, like Cincinnatus, reluctantly returns from retirement to come to the aid of his country. But it’s the wrong way to think about the former special counsel’s testimony. As Benjamin Wittes put it after Mueller’s May 29 press conference closing out the investigation: “Mueller himself is not riding in on a white horse to explain it all. If Congress is going to highlight what’s in that report and what Mueller found, it’s going to have to do it on its own.” Though Wittes was writing when it looked like Mueller might not testify, the same is true now. To put it another way, the weight of duty isn’t on Mueller’s shoulders but, rather, on those of Congress—and Congress needs to think systematically about what it wants to get out of the former special counsel’s testimony and how that goal fits into its broader agenda in the wake of the Russia investigation.Mueller has made clear that he views his own work as finished. “I’m resigning from the Department of Justice to return to private life,” he announced at his press conference. He went out of his way to dissuade Congress from soliciting his testimony, adding, "Beyond what I’ve said here today and what is contained in our written work, I do not believe it is appropriate for me to speak further about the investigation or to comment on the actions of the Justice Department or Congress.” In the weeks afterward, according to the New York Times, Mueller “was so averse to being pulled into the political arena that he never spoke directly with lawmakers or their aides” during the negotiations that ultimately led to a subpoena for his testimony, communicating instead through an intermediary.The Mueller report and Mueller’s public comments suggest that he understands his role in the story to be complete in part because the remainder of the responsibility lies with Congress. Mueller’s choice to foreclose a charging decision with respect to the president reflects his vision for the limited purview of the special counsel under the existing regulations. After noting the 2000 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion prohibiting indictment of a sitting president, the report goes on to state that “a federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would … potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct,” pointing to the constitutional clauses concerning impeachment and the OLC opinion’s discussion of the “relationship between impeachment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.” Together with Mueller’s assertion during his press conference that “the report is my testimony,” the implication is that Mueller has done all he can as a prosecutor under the existing regime governing investigations of the president. Whether or not Mueller was right to construe his role in this way, he has laid down the baton, and it is now for Congress to decide whether to pick it up.With this in mind, it is safe to say that Mueller is not going to make a dramatic statement. He is not going to reveal new bombshells that substantially change the political landscape. And if congressional Democrats are hoping that his testimony will single-handedly shift public opinion away from the president and in favor of impeachment, Mueller on his own is not going to make that happen.Instead, whatever happens on July 17 will be up to Congress as an independent branch of government—acting of its own accord, rather than following Mueller’s lead. For members of Congress who intend to use this time to seriously engage in the process of oversight—as opposed to getting a dramatic sound bite or quizzing Mueller on unsubstantiated theories about the president’s guilt or innocence—this has several implications for how best to approach the hearings.First, there is no smoking gun to be uncovered. Mueller has gone out of his way to state this explicitly: “The work speaks for itself,” he said of the report, continuing that “I would not provide information beyond that which is already public in any appearance before Congress.” Members of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees may convince themselves that they are capable of teasing a bombshell revelation out of Mueller that substantially changes the political landscape. But however quick members are on their feet and however good their staff work is, this is just not going to happen. All the information that Congress has to work with is already on the table—and has been since the report was released.The good news is that this means Congress already has everything it needs to do its homework. Members need to be conversant in the details of the report themselves, rather than waiting for Mueller to guide them through it. This is not going to be a situation in which a charismatic witness will carry the weight of the hearings on his or her own.This also means that members should stick as closely as possible to the text of the report. Here, I’m echoing Wittes, who has made this point separately. There is little to be gained in asking Mueller to speculate on things that might have happened but that he was unable to definitively establish; he has made it clear that he is not interested in going down that path. The same is true of his legal analysis: While it may be tempting to ask Mueller whether he might have indicted the president in the absence of the OLC memo, he is unlikely to publicly muse on how he and his team could have behaved in different factual or legal circumstances.This also means not chastising Mueller for the decisions he made, regardless of what members think of the way he handled the investigation. The special counsel has faced criticism on a range of subjects: Bob Bauer and Rick Hasen have argued that Mueller was too cautious in his decision to hold off on campaign finance charges concerning the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting; some observers, including Paul Rosenzweig, argue that Mueller took an artificially constrained view of what constitutes an “agreement” under conspiracy law. Mueller has taken the most flack for his analysis of potential obstruction of justice and his solution to the puzzle of how to deal with a president who may have committed chargeable offenses but who is shielded from prosecution while in office. On Lawfare, Jack Goldsmith and Josh Blackman have argued that Mueller’s application of the obstruction statutes to presidential conduct facially authorized by Article II is deeply flawed. Attorney General William Barr has suggested Mueller should have simply ceased his investigation when he decided he would not bring an indictment against the president, while others have argued that Mueller should have been more aggressive in either stating his belief that the president did commit a crime (if that was the office’s conclusion) or bucking the OLC memo and publicly bringing charges.There are serious questions here about the functioning of the existing system of presidential oversight and whether Mueller was correct in how he interpreted the scope of his role. But the July 17 testimony is not the time to berate Mueller over his interpretation of the regulations and the OLC memo. For Congress to focus on the absence of a criminal prosecution of the president—or even on the possibility of a hypothetical future prosecution, which Mueller also hints at—is for it to zero in on the mechanics of oversight of the executive branch from within the executive branch, instead of considering the legislature’s own capacity for interbranch oversight. Whether or not Mueller approached his own responsibilities as special counsel appropriately, Congress has its own responsibilities to consider as an independent branch of government. Take it from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “Members of Congress must honor our oath and our patriotic duty to follow the facts, so we can protect our democracy."So what does it mean to “follow the facts”? On one level, Congress will be performing a valuable service if it can simply highlight the report’s findings to a public that has not had the opportunity to fully grapple with the contents of a 448-page document—whether by walking Mueller through a careful line of questioning, or by simply asking him to read through sections of the report out loud. The more challenging task for Congress, though, is to use the hearings to begin the process of forming opinions and judgments about what to do with the material Mueller has provided. One way to tackle this would be to use Mueller’s testimony as a means of identifying other issues and witnesses for future hearings—like Trump confidante Corey Lewandowski, who was witness to significant acts of potential obstruction by the president and over whose testimony the White House has no plausible claim of executive privilege.Congress has spent much of its time since the release of the Mueller report in a reactive position, waiting for others to take the lead. First, House Democrats announced they wanted to wait until the release of the report before evaluating how to shape their oversight efforts against the president and whether to begin an impeachment inquiry. Then, once the Justice Department provided the report, House leadership dithered over what to do with the material Mueller provided, while the president’s allies in both the House and the Senate moved toward calls to investigate the investigators. Many prominent Democrats, most notably Pelosi herself, have argued that the House should not begin impeachment proceedings until polling shows majority support for such an effort—which is just another way of hoping that some other body, in this case the public, will tell Congress what to do next.Throughout the Trump administration, a common refrain of onlookers has been, in the language of the internet, “lol nothing matters.” Mueller’s testimony might matter—but only if members of Congress are thoughtful about what they want to get out of the hearings and realistic about what they can reasonably accomplish. No one else is going to do the work for them.
A House panel voted Thursday to subpoena 12 people with connections to President Trump, including his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner and former attorney general Jeff Sessions, as part of an ongoing investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice or otherwise abused his office.The vote along party lines by the House Judiciary Committee was the latest escalation in a battle between the Democratic-led chamber and the White House over multiple probes of Trump and his administration, including looking at whether the president sought to obstruct the investigation of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.“We will not rest until we obtain their testimony and documents so this committee and Congress can do the work the Constitution and the American people expect of us,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said at the outset of Thursday’s hearing.Trump lashed out at Democrats ahead of the planned vote, suggesting that they should focus on immigration issues instead.“Now the Democrats have asked to see 12 more people who have already spent hours with Robert Mueller, and spent a fortune on lawyers in so doing,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “How many bites at the apple do they get before working on Border Loopholes and Asylum.”Trump also chided Democrats for plans to hear testimony from Mueller next week about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of the probe by Trump.“Enough already, go back to work!” Trump said.Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, accused Nadler of being on a “subpoena binge.”“Today is the chairman’s chance to show he has what it takes and will not wilt when the spotlight is brightest,” Collins said. “That’s all today’s episode is about. It sure isn’t about oversight. It’s simply about politics.”The House panel also voted Thursday to subpoena documents related to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on migrants entering the country illegally, which led to the separation of thousands of children from their parents in 2018.The quest for information comes amid an intensified outcry over the treatment of children held in migrant detention centers and a debate over the humanitarian crisis caused by an influx of Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States.A little more than four months ago, Nadler’s committee cast a wide net for documents from an array of 80 individuals and entities, seeking information for a range of inquiries into Trump’s administration, campaign, business and personal finances.Trump has decried House Democrats’ probes as “harassment,” has largely refused to comply with their requests and has urged associates to ignore subpoenas. Last month, Democrats voted to allow committees to file lawsuits against those who defy congressional subpoenas.Thursday’s vote would allow Nadler to issue the subpoenas at his discretion to try to compel testimony and the handing over of documents. He has said he is willing to hold off if information is voluntarily provided.In addition to seeking subpoenas for Kushner and Sessions, the committee voted to authorize Nadler to summon former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly; former national security adviser Michael Flynn; former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski; former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein; former White House deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn; Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt; and former White House staff secretary Rob Porter.The committee is also seeking to compel testimony related to payments before the 2016 election to women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump years ago.To that end, the committee voted to authorize subpoenas of Keith Davidson, a former attorney for adult-film star Stormy Daniels, National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard and American Media Inc. chief executive David Pecker. Prosecutors allege that Howard and Pecker were involved in deals to silence Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
When General Flynn has been made whole in every way, I will be partially satisfied; and I hope to see many of these cretins, you all know the names well, dragged through the courts, dragged in cuffs with their families in early morning raids, and broken financially, and professionally, prior to finding themselves incarcerated.
In this post, I noted that for three initial subjects of the FBI’s investigation into Trump associates’ ties with Russia — Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and George Papadopoulos — the campaign gave similar reasons for firing them as the Mueller Report laid out about their behavior.The fourth initial subject of the investigation is Mike Flynn. The campaign did not fire Flynn for his ties to Russia; in fact, according to some Flynn associates, Trump directed him to reach out to Russia during the campaign.Nevertheless, last week, Trump complained that he hadn’t been informed that Flynn was under investigation earlier (presumably asking why he wasn’t given a defensive briefing that discussed the investigation into Flynn specifically).Of course, as I mentioned, we know how Trump would have responded to a warning because we know how Trump responded to Obama’s warning about Flynn: he blew it off.Still, that should in no way undermine the investigation into Flynn.The Russian side of the investigation into Flynn, partly for his trip to Moscow where he sat with Vladimir Putin in December 2015, goes largely unmentioned in the Mueller Report, suggesting it may have become a counterintelligence investigation into Russia instead.But we can review the Bijan Kian indictment — which is based significantly off Flynn’s cooperation — to see how sleazy Flynn was acting while ostensibly serving as one of Trump’s top advisors on the campaign trail.After the failed coup attempt against Recep Tayyip Erdogan in July 2016 — around the same time Flynn was leading chants of “Lock her up” at the RNC — Erdogan was trying to persuade the American government to extradite Fethullah Gulen, using the coup as an excuse to crack down on a source of power that challenged his regime. After DOJ determined there was still no basis to extradite Gulen, Kian, Ekim Alptekin, and some high ranking Turkish officials reached out to Flynn’s consulting company. They asked what kind of spin Flynn and Kian could generate “on the short and mid-term,” but warned not to read anyone else in.On July 30 — three months before the election — Kian and Flynn pitched a 3-month plan, again emphasizing the secrecy of the project. On August 2 — the same day Trump’s campaign manager got together with someone suspected of ties to Russian intelligence to talk about how to win Michigan and carve up Ukraine — Kian nudged Alptekin, again emphasizing the secrecy. On August 8, Alptekin approached the Turkish government.This was also the period when Flynn started getting involved in an effort to find Hillary’s deleted emails from any possible source, including foreign intelligence services.On August 11 — as the Turkish government grew closer to a deal and as Trump’s campaign manager started engaging in bigger and bigger lies to hide that he had been an Agent of Ukraine — Kian changed the name of the project, which had been “Truth” to “Project Confidence” and introduced Alptekin’s company, Inovo, as the funder as a cut-out t0 hide that Turkey was behind the plan. From that point forward, both Trump’s soon-t0-be-former campaign manager and one of his top national security advisors were engaged in subterfuge in an attempt to hide their work for foreign countries. In Flynn’s case, he was doing that work even as he campaigned for Trump.On August 17, while negotiating a deal with the government of Turkey, Flynn accompanied Trump for his first intelligence briefing.Flynn’s deal with Turkey was confirmed, with a 20% kickback to Alptekin for his company’s role as a cut-out, on August 25 and 26. When Kian put together the contract for the project on September 3, he set the start date two weeks after they really started it to hide that it was the same project for Turkey.On September 8, Flynn would politicize the intelligence briefings he was attending with Trump while being paid by Turkey, claiming briefers indicated some policy differences with Obama.“The intelligence we’ve received in the last two briefings were in stark contrast to the policy decisions being made,” Flynn said.“They would say the intelligence professionals, as they should, they would say those are policy decisions,” Flynn continued. “So Donald Trump, in a very, very sophisticated way, was asking tough questions, and they would back off and say, ‘That is not our job, those are policy decisions at the—in this case the White House is making.’ And we would sit there and go, OK, we understand.”Flynn, however, caught some controversy himself when NBC News reported on Thursday that Flynn was unruly in one of the briefings. The report stated that Trump’s transition chief, Chris Christie, had to calm Flynn down after he repeatedly interrupted intelligence officers with pointed questions.On September 9, the first check arrived, $200,000, of which $40,000 went back to Alptekin as a kick-back.On September 19, Flynn and his partners met with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and Turkish Energy Minister (and Erdogan son-in-law) Berat Albayrak in New York and discussed how to bring about Gulen’s extradition. James Woolsey, attending the meeting as an advisory board member with Flynn’s firm, described the meeting as “a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away.” Woolsey declined his consulting fee after attending the meeting, in part out of legal concern, and let Joe Biden know about it via a mutual friend.That was a week before the first Presidential debate.On October 11, two days after the second presidential debate, the second check arrived, $185,000, with another $40,000 kicked back to Alptekin. Two days later, Flynn started reading from talking points scripted by Kian: funding, “Islamists,” and Mullahs.On October 22, two days after the third debate, Flynn wrote members of the project team, referencing the Turkish officials who were the real customers for the project.On November 2, days before Americans went to the polls, Flynn’s cut-out demanded more: private investigative work targeting Gulen’s supporters, congressional hearings on his schools. That same day, Kian sent Alptekin an op-ed he had drafted. Kian told Flynn the next day an editor was tightening it up before showing it to Flynn. November 4, Kian sent it to Alptekin, who loved it.Flynn signed his name to Kian’s work and it was published in The Hill, blaming Gulen for the attempted coup, invoking “professionals in the intelligence community” viewing “the stamp of terror” in Gulen’s ideology, but the language was really written by Kian. The paid op-ed would go on to complain about Gulen’s “vast network of public relations” and his “false façade.”On November 10, two days after Flynn’s op-ed and Trump’s victory and the day Obama warned Trump against picking Flynn to be his National Security Advisor, the third check came, another $200,000 to do the bidding of Turkey.Even after the FARA office started nagging Flynn about registering, he stalled for the entire time he was in the White House, even while engaging Turkey and Russia in their joint peace plan for Syria. When he finally submitted his FARA filing on March 7, 2017, he falsely claimed he had written the op-ed as a public figure, not in the service of Turkey.Trump may not have fired him. But both his wails that he should have been informed Flynn was under investigation (at a briefing Flynn attended) and that this investigation was in any way without predicate belie the sheer audacity with which Flynn sold his name to the highest bidder even while claiming to work for Trump.
A court hearing on Friday revealed that US authorities have previously unknown information about former national security adviser Michael Flynn doing secret work for the Turkish government "because of (his) relationship with an ongoing presidential campaign."Flynn has previously only admitted publicly to filing false foreign lobbying disclosure documents regarding work for Turkey done by his lobbying group the Flynn Intel Group in 2016.Prosecutors wrote to lawyers for Flynn's ex-lobbying partner Bijan Kian that the US government was "in possession of multiple, independent pieces of information relating to the Turkish government's efforts to influence United States policy on Turkey and Fethullah Gulen, including information relating to communications, interactions, and a relationship between Ekim Alptekin and Michael Flynn, and Ekim Alptekin's engagement of Michael Flynn because of Michael Flynn's relationship with an ongoing presidential campaign, without any reference to the defendant of FIG."Kian's attorney Mark MacDougall read the statement at a court hearing Friday morning. He implied that the newly revealed information about Flynn -- which was not part of his admitted crimes in his plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller -- may be classified.Flynn's attorney Sidney Powell responded to the new accusation Friday, saying, "We have no idea what the government is talking about. It smacks of desperation."Powell continued, "Whatever it is, it cannot be new information to the prosecution, and it was only a few months ago prosecutors recommended probation for him. As we have said in our recent filings, this can only be retalition for his refusal to answer a question the way they wanted."Allegedly, Flynn's lobbying group and Kian had contracted with Alptekim, a Dutch-Turkish citizen who's been criminally charged in the US but lives in Turkey, in 2016 to smear Gulen while he lived in the US. The Turkish government has wanted to extradite Gulen to Turkey, and Flynn admitted to publishing an op-ed in The Hill newspaper on Election Day 2016 about Gulen and the US-Turkish relationship that was supervised by Turkish officials. Flynn then became Trump's first national security adviser and a top adviser during the presidential transition.After Flynn's guilty plea in late 2017, prosecutors charged his Flynn Intel Group partner, Bijan Kian, with illegally lobbying for Turkey. Kian's trial is about to start on Monday. Kian's defense team received the statement Friday morning from prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of the pre-trial preparations.This comes as Flynn's cooperation deal with prosecutors is in jeopardy, after they accused him of trying to change his story from what he pleaded to, and dropped him as a government witness at the Kian trial.Flynn has not yet been sentenced for his crime, but got one of the most lenient reviews among all cooperators in the Mueller investigation so far. He had helped for almost two years with both the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the President's attempts to obstruct justice, as well as the investigation into lobbying for Turkey.