Paul Manafort Sues Mueller and Asks a Judge to Narrow the Russia Investigation
January 4, 2018 by admin
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Mr. Manafort argued in the lawsuit that Mr. Mueller had gone too far. He sued both Mr. Mueller and Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who appointed Mr. Mueller. The lawsuit said Mr. Rosenstein had improperly given Mr. Mueller the authority to investigate “anything he stumbles across while investigating, no matter how remote.”
Mr. Manafort asked a federal judge to reject Mr. Mueller’s appointment as overly broad and to dismiss the indictment against him. He also asked for a court order prohibiting Mr. Mueller from investigating anything beyond Russian meddling in the election.
A spokesman for Mr. Mueller had no comment on the lawsuit.
The case faces an uphill climb because Mr. Rosenstein has said publicly that he has specifically approved every significant step that Mr. Mueller has taken in the investigation.
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Read Paul Manafort’s Lawsuit Against Mueller
Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, sued the Department of Justice; the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein; and the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, on Wednesday over the investigation into possible connections between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russian election interference.
But Mr. Manafort’s strategy is a clever legal maneuver that attempts to force prosecutors to reveal details about the scope of the investigation. By filing a separate lawsuit, Mr. Manafort’s lawyer, Kevin Downing, also creates the possibility of a protracted fight over Mr. Mueller’s authority.
“If the ultimate objective is to continue to try to undermine the credibility of Mueller and his prosecutors, it could have some value,” said Jimmy Gurulé, a Notre Dame law professor who was a senior Justice Department official in the administration of the first President George Bush. “But in terms of a legal strategy, it’s highly unlikely to prevail.”
Worse for the White House, the lawsuit also invites Mr. Mueller to give a “devastating response” that spells out all the ways Mr. Manafort is relevant to Mr. Trump and the Russia investigation, said Peter Zeidenberg, a former prosecutor who worked on a special counsel investigation during the George W. Bush administration. “If I’m the government, I’m licking my chops to file this response. He’s going to tie a bow on this,” he said of Mr. Mueller.
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Even if Mr. Manafort succeeds at every turn, his problems are not over. He could still face charges if new prosecutors decided to bring them. But any court ruling that narrowed Mr. Mueller’s authority would give him less leeway to use unrelated charges as leverage against people close to the president.
Mr. Mueller won the cooperation of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, for instance, after investigating him for unregistered foreign lobbying and lying to the F.B.I. on matters unrelated to the election.
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The lawsuit provides fodder for Republicans who are trying to discredit Mr. Mueller’s investigation. As evidence that Mr. Mueller is biased, critics have pointed to Democratic donations by members of his team and anti-Trump text messages sent by an F.B.I. agent whom Mr. Mueller removed from the investigation.
The accusations in the charges against Mr. Manafort date back years, well before he began working for Mr. Trump. His lawyers argue that Mr. Mueller should be allowed to investigate only matters that directly arise from the Russia investigation. That theory echoes comments made by Mr. Trump, who has said that Mr. Mueller cannot investigate his family’s finances.
Mr. Mueller served as F.B.I. director under the younger Mr. Bush and Barack Obama. He is credited with refocusing the F.B.I. on counterterrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And he was widely praised by members of both parties when he was put in charge of the Russia investigation.
Mr. Trump has said he has no plans to fire Mr. Mueller, but he and his allies have repeatedly tried to disparage his investigation. Those efforts evoke the scandals of President Bill Clinton’s administration and his White House’s attempt to portray the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, as a partisan who had run amok.
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Trump Breaks With Bannon, Saying He Has ‘Lost His Mind’
January 4, 2018 by admin
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The president was responding to comments attributed to Mr. Bannon in a new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff. The forthcoming book was obtained by The Guardian, which first reported Mr. Bannon’s jolting remarks.
In the book, Mr. Bannon was quoted suggesting that Donald Trump Jr., the future president’s son; Jared Kushner, his son-in-law; and Paul J. Manafort, then the campaign chairman, had been “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” for meeting with Russians offering incriminating information on Hillary Clinton during a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower.
“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers,” Mr. Bannon said after The New York Times revealed the meeting in July 2017, according to Mr. Wolff’s book.
“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the F.B.I. immediately,” Mr. Bannon continued, according to the book.
According to Mr. Wolff, Mr. Bannon also predicted that a special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and any coordination with Trump aides would ultimately center on money laundering, an assessment that could lend credibility to an investigation the president has repeatedly called a witch hunt. “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Mr. Bannon was quoted as saying.
Donald Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But he jabbed at Mr. Bannon on Twitter on Wednesday when he reposted a message noting that Alabama now had a Democratic senator. “Thanks Steve,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote. “Keep up the great work.”
Read Trump’s Reaction to Steve Bannon’s Comments
Mr. Bannon helped propel Roy Moore to the Republican nomination in Alabama and then stuck by him after the candidate was accused of sexual misconduct with several young women as young as age 14. At Mr. Bannon’s urging, Mr. Trump decided to endorse Mr. Moore even after the allegations surfaced, only to be embarrassed when the Democrat, Doug Jones, won the election last year in a heavily Republican state that had not sent a Democrat to the Senate in a quarter-century.
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Mr. Bannon, the architect of Mr. Trump’s nationalist and populist agenda, left the White House in August to return to the far-right Breitbart News. Mr. Bannon had said he planned to back a slew of candidates in Republican primaries this year to take down establishment incumbents he saw as insufficiently conservative, even if it clashed with Mr. Trump’s endorsements.
That did not seem to bother Mr. Trump and indeed struck many as a way for the president to keep Mr. Bannon as an outside hammer pressuring Republican lawmakers to stay in line. But Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon have grown increasingly estranged, especially since the Alabama defeat. Mr. Trump grew even more upset with Mr. Bannon about an interview with Vanity Fair late last year that painted a poor picture of Mr. Kushner, criticizing his meetings with Russians during the presidential transition.
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During his Christmas break at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Mr. Trump stewed over what to say about Mr. Bannon’s comments to Vanity Fair. The president consulted with several advisers and family members about whether he should respond at all, according to three advisers familiar with the discussions. Ultimately, the president decided not to say anything publicly, as aides cautioned that it would draw more attention to Mr. Bannon’s remarks.
But accusing the president’s eldest son of treason crossed the line, even for an inner circle of aides who regularly fought and privately disparaged each other.
An excerpt from Mr. Wolff’s book, published in New York magazine on Wednesday, cites derogatory comments about Mr. Trump from some of the president’s closest allies.
At least one person named in the book pushed back against it on Wednesday. Thomas J. Barrack, a friend and adviser to Mr. Trump, was quoted telling a friend that the president is “not only crazy, he’s stupid.”
Reached by telephone on Wednesday, Mr. Barrack said this account was “totally false.” Mr. Barrack added, “It’s clear to anyone who knows me that those aren’t my words and inconsistent with anything I’ve ever said.” He said that Mr. Wolff never ran that quotation by him to ask if it was accurate.
Mr. Wolff was frequently seen in Mr. Bannon’s office while the Breitbart chairman was working in the White House. According to two advisers to Mr. Trump, Mr. Wolff spoke with the president once, for about 15 minutes, in the first month of the administration, when Mr. Trump called Mr. Wolff to thank him for his criticism of a Times article that the president did not like.
The White House on Wednesday attacked not just Mr. Bannon but the book as a whole, hoping to diminish its reporting. “This book is filled with false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence with the White House,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary. “Participating in a book that can only be described as trashy tabloid fiction exposes their sad desperate attempts at relevancy.”
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The book presents Mr. Trump as an ill-informed and thoroughly unserious candidate and president, engaged mainly in satisfying his own ego. It reports that early in the campaign, one aide, Sam Nunberg, was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” it quoted Mr. Nunberg as saying, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
According to the book, neither Mr. Trump nor his wife, Melania Trump, nor many of his aides actually expected to win the election in November 2016 and indeed did not really want to. It describes a distraught Mrs. Trump as being in tears on election night, not out of joy, and said the new president and first lady were fighting on Inauguration Day.
Mrs. Trump authorized her office to rebut the book on Wednesday. “The book is clearly going to be sold in the bargain fiction section,” said Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s communications director. “Mrs. Trump supported her husband’s decision to run for president and in fact encouraged him to do so. She was confident he would win and was very happy when he did.”
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