The Russia Investigations and other Trump-related cases

[River]

Yeah, this strategy as outlined seems kind of kamikaze. Exactly how far up sh*t creek do you have to be if leaking damning information about L'Affaire Playboy (I don't own that term, I just picked it up somewhere and I can't not use it) seems like a good way to save yourself further problems??

[Frelga]

Well, saying that they are even considering Americans to Russia in exchange for the indicted GRU operatives in response to a proposal that was clearly Russian for "when pigs fly."

[Frelga]

OK, that was a BC - before coffee - post and I should probably delete it. I meant, after the administration did not outright reject the idea of sending Americans to Russia, on an offhand remark by Putin, I can see why this is a much more favorable topic.

But also, Giuliani keeps making things worse every time he opens his mouth, so this is not necessarily a winning strategy.

In other news.

Ecuador will imminently withdraw asylum for @JulianAssange and hand him over to the UK. What comes next? https://t.co/UKx11G6I78 by @ggreenwald

https://twitter.com/theintercept/status ... 5033227265

I don't know The Intercept, are they reliable?

The UK has not recently been a safe heaven for anyone Putin doesn't want to talk.

[River]

So there's a hole in the L'Affair Playboy story and that is any recordings or documents ruled privileged can't by turned over by Cohen if he decides to flip. So the Trump team releasing privileged information to defang Cohen makes no sense. But if they want to incriminate themselves in campaign finance violations to distract from something else, it makes sense.

As for what they might want to distract from, well, the FBI, in response to a FOIA request, released a heavily redacted version of the request for a FISA warrant on Carter Page. It dropped today. Maybe they had some heads up? Anyway, looks like Page was suspected of being a Russian agent. Obviously the press is going to be going nuts in the hours to come, but if anyone wants to look at the actual redacted warrant and draw their own conclusions, it is downloadable here.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

We'll, that doesn't really make sense because the FOIA request was by Trump-ally Judicial Watch, and the reason they want it released is that in their (in my opinion bizarre) view it provides evidence that Page and the Teump campaign was unfairly targeted by the "deep state".

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[River]

We'll, that doesn't really make sense because the FOIA request was by Trump-ally Judicial Watch, and the reason they want it released is that in their (in my opinion bizarre) view it provides evidence that Page and the Teump campaign was unfairly targeted by the "deep state".

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Okay. Back to the most parsimonious explanation: the L'Affaire Playboy disclosure happened because Trump blathered about it to someone on the phone and they decided to clean up the mess by making it official. The FOIA request dropped tonight because it had come due.

tl;dr: the past 48s hours have been brought to you by idiots being idiots

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

Maybe we should ask for the birth certificates of the indicted Russians.

[River]

Actually, it's DNA tests that are in vogue now.

[RoseMorninStar]

They believe the tape exonerates Trump and makes Cohen look shady. In any case, Trump lied (shocking, I know).

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

If the indicted Russians don't provide long-form birth certificates, it proves collusion. Birther logic applies to this issue.

[River]

They believe the tape exonerates Trump and makes Cohen look shady.

So no one's claiming Cohen isn't shady. He got raided by the FBI ffs. The two biggest questions swirling around Cohen are what will he be charged with and will he flip? Why would anyone think they need to help Cohen look shady? And, given that Cohen knows where the bodies are and likely buried more than a few himself, what purpose would alienating him serve? Releasing information that the prosecutors would never be allowed to see doesn't torch Cohen as a potential source. And how does admitting to participating in a hush money scheme exonerate anyone for anything (unless there was no crime, in which case there's nothing to exonerate)?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The two biggest questions swirling around Cohen are what will he be charged with and will he flip? Why would anyone think they need to help Cohen look shady? And, given that Cohen knows where the bodies are and likely buried more than a few himself, what purpose would alienating him serve?

I think at this point the biggest question about Cohen is what he really knows. It seems pretty clear that Trump's team has concluded that he is going to flip and the best they can do is try to make him as uncredible as possible.

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[River]

Is their tactic going to work? And does it fall into the category of witness tampering?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I don't think it is witness-tampering, but I doubt the strategy will be very effective. I think it still comes down to what Cohen knows. And what really is on tape or otherwise recorded. And what else Mueller has that we still don't know about.

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[River]

And what else Mueller has that we still don't know about.

Yes. Mueller's team is pretty watertight. Pretty much anything that hits the press comes from court filings or defense teams. Or occasionally Congress.

I take a lot of the speculation with a grain of salt. Some of it has logic behind it, some of it doesn't, but the fact is the public as a whole is working with an incomplete data set and we're using assumptions to fill the gaps. Some of those assumptions may be better than others. The data itself is rather alarming, though.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Judge Ellis granted the Mueller team's motion to grant immunity to five witnesses so that they could testify in Manafort's trial which is currently slated to start on Wednesday. To the best of my knowledge, since Ellis made those critical comments about the special counsel office (prompting Trump to break with tradition to praise Ellis by name), he has sided with the prosecutors in every single dispute, including rejecting Manafort's motion to move the trial to a more Trump-friendly location. He still has not ruled, however, on Manafort's motion to continue this trial until after the other trial scheduled to start in September in D.C. Presumably he will rule on that motion this afternoon.

[Frelga]

I can't remember where I saw the idea that with Cohen signaling that he will flip, Manafort's ability to make a deal is in jeopardy. The reasoning, iirc, was that Manafort could hope for a deal in exchange for testifying against a "bigger fish" but Cohen knows more than he does.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I doubt that would be true, though we really don't know enough to know. Manafort and Cohen are likely to know different things, but Manafort was in the thick of the Trump campaign at the time that any so-called collusion might have taken place.

ETA: it's weird that the "subject" of your post is the title of the other "punch a Nazi" thread. I thought for a moment we were posting in the wrong thread when I saw that, but that you were responding to my post, but it isn't so.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile, apparently on Friday Avenatti walked into a New York restaurant and spotted Cohen having dessert with his son and proceeded to have a lengthy conversation with him. You just can't make this stuff up.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

And Ellis apparently has only granted a short continuance of the trial, to July 31 (so only six days).