They (deep state, swamp, intelligence community, who ever they are) raided Cohens office after letting Hillary sort her own emails, destroy evidence, and store a server with above Top Secret intelligence in her bathroom.

What other campaign finance violation investigation raided a lawyers office?

The intelligence agency is criminal, but who polices the police? Nobody!

And as all this crap is ongoing the network of people just becomes an ever more shocking web of marriages, cousins, and business partners spanning the globe, spanning corporations and spanning governments.

As all this info slowly emerges its not hard to imagine that there could be a few thousand elites and many followers globally that live a totally different reality than the rest of us regarding societal social structure, governing rules, and wealth. Some would undoubtedly see themselves as gods and of some greater intrinsic worth that the rest of humanity.
I'm not convinced all elites are orchestrated in their efforts to undermine the rest of us like some illuminati cult. More like mafia families on steroids with influence over national governments and global regulators instead of city governments and local regulators.

And then they marry within the other mafia families and strike business deals with the other families, and pull in up and coming influencers to gain control and influence over them or they take extra steps to keep them out.

The first document that the POTUS needs to release, that wouldn't need to even be declassified is the Hush Money list from Congress, where Tax money was paid to silence complaints of sexual misconduct. He should be able to get his hands on it I would think, and it's an expenditure of federal funds that should be public anyway. Redact the victim's names and put it out to the public.

RoscoePColtrane said:

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The first document that the POTUS needs to release, that wouldn't need to even be declassified is the Hush Money list from Congress, where Tax money was paid to silence complaints of sexual misconduct. He should be able to get his hands on it I would think, and it's an expenditure of federal funds that should be public anyway. Redact the victim's names and put it out to the public.

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Yup, I like this idea. If that's the game they want to play, time to go scorched earth. Do it!

I want to see the media members paid by fusion for stories.

Cepe said:

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I want to see the media members paid by fusion for stories.

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This. Talk about being able to make the final case on the media.

Mornin' all!

A couple of things stood out to me in my perusal of the inter-webs this morning.

First, this is an older Sara Carter piece about texts between Steele and Bruce Ohr.

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March, 2017, two days before former FBI Director James Comey testified to lawmakers that the bureau had an open counterintelligence investigation into President Trump's campaign, former British spy Christopher Steele sent an urgent message to Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr hoping that "important firewalls will hold" when Comey testified.

The text message from Steele, who compiled the infamous unverified dossier on Trump, was sent on March 18, 2017, to Ohr and obtained by SaraACarter.com from a government source, familiar with the ongoing investigation.

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We're a bit apprehensive given scheduled appearance at Congress on Monday. Hoping that important firewalls will hold.

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Ohr writes back later that day, saying "Sorry, no new news. I believe my earlier information is still accurate. I will let you know immediately if there is any change."

It is not certain, based on the limited communications obtained by Congress between the pair, what Ohr was referring to when he discussed "earlier information" that he delivered to Steele.

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Interesting but this really caught my eye:

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Months before Comey's testimony, on Nov. 21, 2016, the handwritten document by Ohr lists a possible meeting with Strzok, Page and Special Agent Joe Pientka (who along with Strzok interviewed former National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn). The document is one of several hundred documents obtained by lawmakers after long battles with the DOJ.

In the handwritten note, Ohr jots down, "no prosecution yet, pushing ahead on M case," in reference to Paul Manafort, who is now facing years old charges on financial crimes and money laundering.
Ohr also wrote on the same memo, "may go back to Chris," in reference to Christopher Steele.

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LINK

Let's unpack these two. Steele was fired from the FBI in November 2016 yet he still knows there is a "firewall" in place in March 2017? This is a few months after Buzzfeed had published the dossier and made Steele a household name. Nevertheless, Steele is obviously concerned there is much more to be contained and he isn't talking about some national security, nor sources and methods crap. Hopefully Ohr will be questioned closely on just what that "firewall" was/is.

Then there is the hand-written note during a meeting purportedly with Strzok, Page and Pientka not even two weeks after Trump has won the election. Ohr wasn't in counter-intel at DOJ. He would have little to no reason to meet with them other than to act as the conduit to Steele. Nevertheless, he receives info from Strzok/Page there is no prosecution case made yet on Manafort but they are apparently still looking.

Next, Ohr is obviously requested to go back to Steele for some more information. Was that related to Manafort? I think so. Steele is connected to Oleg Deripaska who was connected to Manafort during his time in the Ukraine. Deripaska knows how much he paid Manafort and likely knew where some of those overseas accounts were located. Again, hopefully Ohr won't have a failure of memory and can explain what he meant when he took those notes.

Moving on to the always thoughtful Andy McCarthy who has unpacked the Cohen plea deal and the Pecker/AMI immunity agreement. He makes the point that although the immunity agreement was first reported on the heels on the Cohen announcement, it likely was in the works since shortly after the raid on Cohen's home and office. Why?

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In reality, there is almost certainly much less here than meets the eye. In short, while we are just now learning that Pecker and his subordinate, Dylan Howard, were granted immunity, this appears to have happened many weeks ago to be precise, shortly after search warrants were executed in April on the office and residences of Cohen, President Trump's former lawyer. Back then, prosecutors did not know whether Cohen would fight them or plead guilty. They needed Pecker and Howard in order to tighten up the case against Cohen, not necessarily to make a case on the president.

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First, a word about those charges. It has become common to refer collectively to Counts 7 and 8 as the "campaign finance offenses," as if they were indistinguishable from one another. We need to be more precise. This is not a situation in which the same statutory crime has simply been charged twice because there are deals with two different women. Counts 7 and 8 are saliently different, invoking distinct provisions of the campaign finance laws and proceeding on divergent theories of liability.

Specifically, Count 7 charges Cohen not with making an illegal donation, but with "Causing an Unlawful Corporate Contribution" (emphasis added). By contrast, Count 8 alleges that Cohen himself made an "Excessive Campaign Contribution" (emphasis added).

Let's focus first on Count 7. Federal campaign finance law makes it illegal for a corporation to make direct ("hard money") contributions to candidates. Count 7 alleges that Cohen induced AMI (through its executives, Pecker and Howard) to use the "catch and kill" strategy i.e., to pay $150,000 for the exclusive rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal's story about an affair with Donald Trump, but to bury it rather than publish it.

Much has been made about Cohen's admission in court that the payments to the two women involved Ms. McDougal and Stephanie Clifford, the porn star known as "Stormy Daniels" were made "in coordination with and at the direction of" candidate Trump. Yet Cohen (and, derivatively, Trump) made no payment at all to McDougal; AMI paid the $150,000.

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That was not the way it was supposed to go. The plan was for Cohen (backed by Trump) to reimburse most of the costs by paying AMI $125,000 to transfer the rights to McDougal's story to a dummy corporation ("Resolution Consultants LLC") set up by Cohen. At the last minute, however, Pecker balked at this arrangement (which was memorialized in a signed agreement seized through the Cohen search warrants). Pecker was evidently following the advice of counsel: If AMI sold the rights to Trump, it would manifestly have bought the story to help his campaign, not for journalistic reasons.

These facts created a proof problem for prosecutors: How to charge Cohen with an illegal contribution when he didn't pay any money? They solved this problem by accusing him of causing the corporation to make the illegal contribution. But to pull that off, they needed Pecker and Howard as witnesses. That, I believe, is why they gave the AMI executives immunity.

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That's a neat trick, eh? Remember that snippet of a tape between Cohen and Trump was about this transaction, the one that never happened.

But wait, it gets more bizarre. Enter Stormy.

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Let's compare Count 8. It alleges that Cohen himself made an excessive contribution. This is the much more straightforward Stormy Daniels payoff: Through another dummy corporation ("Essential Consultants LLC"), Cohen paid her $130,000, far in excess of the $2,700 limit for individuals.

There is an ironic twist to this transaction. It was the AMI executives who alerted Cohen that Ms. Clifford was shopping her story. Cohen ended up cutting a deal with Clifford's lawyer (Michael Avenatti) to buy her silence just days after publication of the infamous "Access Hollywood" video (in which Trump is heard bragging about groping women). The temporal proximity of the video's surfacing and the hush-money agreement is a key fact relied on by prosecutors to allege that the payoff was election-related (i.e., an in-kind campaign contribution), not just hush money to avoid personal embarrassment.

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So the timing between the release of the Access Hollywood tape was the sole motivating factor? Not quite. Also, I don't think Avenatti was Stormy's lawyer during this phase. Some guy named Davidson was and there were some questionable prior dealings between Cohen and Davidson. So where is Davidson in the charges?

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Upon making the agreement, though, Cohen failed to pay the money. After three weeks of this foot-dragging, Clifford got impatient and threatened to go public. AMI's Howard got wind of this and warned Cohen in a text. Howard and Pecker followed up with an encrypted phone call, after which Cohen forked over the $130,000.

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Stormy herself was driving that bus as the election loomed and her story would become less valuable after a Hillary win as everyone expected. Yet nowhere in this mess is Trump. Indeed, Andy points that out.

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Consequently, the script flips: Just as it was said in Count 7 that Cohen caused AMI to make an unlawful corporate contribution, it could also be said in Count 8 that Pecker, Howard, and AMI caused Cohen to make an excessive campaign contribution. Of course, the immunity agreement protected the two executives on this score, and the corporation has not been charged.

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Normally legal sleights of hand are fascinating to me. But when they get too attenuated to the law, squeezing some inconvenient square facts into a legal round hole, as was done here, I have to wonder if the allegations would survive the harsh light of a courtroom and appellate review.

Of course, with a guilty plea we'll never know the answer to that question.

Sorry for the long post but just some things that made me go, "Hhhhmmm."