I agree with you that if the FBI was aware of Manafort doing something criminal re Ukraine way back when, they should have prosecuted at the time. It's not at all clear to me that they were aware, or when it was that they found out about what he was up to. Or if they had evidence enough to prosecute (the money laundering charge, for example, is recent activity). Do you have something about when the FBI knew?
It's amazing that someone can lie just about every time he opens his mouth and then call everyone else a liar. Like, what? Trump needs to be given a mental health exam.
What's really stunning are the things that he lies about and how easy they are to disprove. I mean, I get how typical politicians are able to get away with lying about policy or what's in a particular bill because it often takes extensive research and effort to establish that those types of statements are lies but this idiot just straight up denies saying or doing things that take a 2 second google search to disprove. I knew the second I saw his tweet about Papadopoulos that there would be some video of him praising the guy in the past and sure enough... Trump and others emerging from his mold (like Roy Moore and that crazy Kentucky governor) are shining examples of how a very large portion of Republicans will defend literally anything someone on "their team" says or does. I know there are some who will respond "but but the Dems do it too!" but there's no left-wing version of Trump or Roy Moore, at least not currently.
He was hired and getting paid(not sure how) by Yanukovych (anti-nato, pro-russia, pro-putin) to help get elected and despite being way behind every poll won Ukraine presidency by 3%. His leadership in 2013 pulled out of a pro-EU agreement and joining with Putin instead. This led to Euromaiden and hundreds of deaths in the process. You could argue his actions also led to annexation of Crimea. So you've got an American hired by an "enemy" of the USA to help put him in power and we do nothing about this for 13+ years? Unless we didn't know and how the hell am I supposed to believe that with our security and defense budgets? We knew and either we wanted Yanukovych and the related fallout to happen or we knew and let it happen. Impossible we didn't know an American was working for a foreign presidential campaign who politics were anti-nato, anti-eu, anti-american, and pro-kremlin. This sure as hell is illegal: "While working for Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, Manafort and Gates allegedly accrued tens of millions of dollars which they then hid from U.S. authorities and laundered through a convoluted series of foreign companies and bank accounts." https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entr...-indictment-trump_us_59f72e5ae4b03cd20b82fe20
He was being investigated but I don't know how many resources were devoted to that campaign. It is possible that as his prominence rose more resources were devoted to the investigation. It is possible that it took this long to get the evidence they needed to make a slam dunk case in court. I guess there are a lot of reasons why he was suspected of doing some illegal things before, but the building of the case against him took this long to unfold. It's all guesses, though.
I'll throw this conjecture on the pile: there might have been foreign policy reasons to not go after him given the precarious position Ukraine was in. I'd say I don't know nearly enough about the whole thing to have a valid opinion on it.
Serious question, do POTUS or Candidates have to perform a credit report, background check, and security clearance? It sounds like it should be law that an aptitude test, credit report, FBI background check, and security clearance should be required for all POTUS candidates. At the very least the party nominee. And findings should be published with redaction for safety and security. I mean if we have to do that to get a job or rent a house why not the POTUS?
Clearly no one did including both campaigns but it begs the question, who introduced Trump and Podesta to Manafort. I go back to good foreign agents/spies embedding themselves with the incumbents and prospective winners. They don't have no influence if they can't infiltrate the folks in charge.
Ukraine wasn't an issue in 2004. I understand the argument against selective enforcement but given the resources available and priorities it's not always possible or practical to enforce every single law on every single suspect. As noted before these are complex cases that require a lot of investigation. Mueller as a cautious prosecutor isn't going to press for indictments unless he feels it is a very solid case.
To follow on my previous post. The FBI is primarily charged with address domestic crimes. While Manafort's actions prior to the Trump candidacy were serious and very well might've led to chaos and deaths in Ukraine the FBI is going to take actions that affect the US far more seriously and urgently.
Another good point... trump's obsession/compulsion to tweet his inane lies can and will used against him in court...
No. If that was the case then that would have to be a Constitutional requirement. The odd point is that many appointments in the Executive branch require background checks an other vetting. Also to get secuirty clearances require background checks and vetting. This is one reason why many were saying during the campaign that either Clinton, Trump or both shouldn't be given secuirty clearance even if they won.
My friends disagree with you. That scumbag Manafort was working for was trying to usurp power for many many years going back to the early 2000s. With Manafort's help he "won" and push Ukraine to turmoil. Depending on which news you read we (FBI, DOJ) knew about Manafort and his work in Ukraine for many years now. Even if the Feds didn't there is no way our intelligence services wouldn't have known about an American hired to help unfriendly political opposition in a key state such as Ukraine. I'm glad he's in custody now but I'm sorry, the work he did and folks he helped caused so much damage and it looks like our government made him, let him, or ignored him. Any of those are awful.
This is crazy and I made this point as well. My company and staff have to perform background checks for our federal clients and sub-contractors. How can folks in executive branch or cabinets avoid those same checks. I hope they weren't green lighted because of who they were or worked for. Seems an obvious way for a foreign nation to have deeply embedded agents in the highest office. I can't believe that Manafort was screened in such a manner because of so many old (prior to joining Trump) red flags.
It'd be undemocratic to have some government requirements of vetting of presidential candidates. It makes it too easy for the sitting president to disqualify political opponents under some pretense. We see this in weak democracies today, using trumped up criminal charges, accusations of sedition or of homosexuality, etc. However, I don't think there is anything to stop the DNC and the RNC from requiring such vetting to get the party nomination. They could face the similar accusations that they are using the vetting as a pretense to pick candidates, but they aren't government so I think they'd be free to do it. I would advise them to not disqualify anyone; just make results public and let the voter decide.
Mueller over riding attorney-client privilege. What a boss... Mueller team won battle to force testimony from lawyer for Manafort and Gates By Edward-Isaac Dovere Judge concluded there was substantial evidence attorney was duped into relaying falsehoods to Justice Department. Prosecutors convinced a federal judge to require a lawyer for Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates to testify before the grand jury investigating Russian involvement in the 2016 election, a court ruling unsealed on Monday showed. The unusual move is an indication of the aggressiveness of special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecution team as they prepared to indict Manafort and Gates on charges of money laundering and failing to register as foreign agents. The 12-count indictment was made public on Monday. Lawyers for Manafort and Gates fought the prosecution's drive to intrude on attorney-client communications. But Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that an exception, which involves using a lawyer to commit crime or fraud, applied to contacts with an attorney who helped respond to inquiries about why the pair had not filed foreign-agent lobbying registrations with the Justice Department. The judge's 37-page opinion did not name the attorney prosecutors sought to put before the grand jury. CNN reported in August that Mueller's team was seeking the testimony of Melissa Laurenza, a partner at Akin Gump. Spokespeople for Mueller's office and for Manafort declined to comment. Laurenza and spokespeople for Akin Gump and Gates did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Howell said evidence the Mueller team brought forward showed that Manafort and Gates were misleading or worse in their efforts to minimize their Ukraine-related work, especially in the U.S. The judge said some facts, deleted from her opinion, "establish" that the pair's denial of U.S. activity for Ukraine's Party of Regions "is false, a half-truth, or at least misleading because evidence shows that Target 1 and Target 2 were intimately involved in significant outreach in the United States on behalf of [a European think tank,] the Party of Regions and/or the Ukrainian government." New York University law professor Stephen Gillers said the judge was persuaded that there was significant evidence Manafort and Gates had duped their lawyer into sending inaccurate letters to Justice about their lobbying efforts and about what emails might exist about the work. "Essentially, the judge is saying that it is probable or likely that the clients had a criminal or fraudulent purpose in hiring the lawyer, even if (we would hope) the lawyer did not know it," Gillers told POLITICO. Much of the prosecution's case for believing that the statements were false was redacted from the public version of Howell's opinion, but the professor said the fact that the judge was persuaded is meaningful for the pending case and beyond. "The implications of this decision are significant. First, a judge has decided that the clients were committing a crime or fraud and using a lawyer to do it. So that tells us something about the strength of the OSC’s evidence. The OSC had the burden of proof and it met it," Gillers said. "Further, once you can pierce the privilege, there’s no telling what information you can go on to discover. This decision will be useful in other contests to discover lawyer-client communications, even communications with different law firms, if any." While Mueller's team generally prevailed in the privilege fight, the judge allowed prosecutors to ask only seven of eight questions they'd proposed. Howell said a question about whether the attorney made any record of her conversations with Manafort or Gates violated a protection for the mental observations of lawyers. The chief judge moved with haste in the privilege fight, holding three hearings on the issue in the second half of September, before ruling on Oct. 2. It appears the court held off releasing the opinion until Monday, when the indictment of Manafort and Gates was unsealed and the two men appeared for an arraignment at the federal courthouse near the Capitol.
