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Paul Manafort pleads guilty and agrees to cooperate with Mueller investigation

By Katelyn Polantz, CNN

Updated 1:01 PM ET, Fri September 14, 2018
Manafort pleads guilty, cooperates with DOJ


Washington (CNN)Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department, including in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Manafort pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy against the US and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice due to attempts to tamper with witnesses, according to a court filing Friday.
Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told the judge Manafort's plea agreement is a "cooperation agreement," and other charges will be dropped at sentencing at "or at the agreement of successful cooperation."
Manafort had proffered information to the government already, Weissmann said in a federal court in a Washington, DC.....

In response to:
Donald Trump's failing grade on ethics
Chris Cillizza

Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large

Washington (CNN)
President Donald Trump loves to tout the fact that there has never been another president like him. When it comes to his ratings on ethics, he's right.
Gallup recently asked people to rate the ethical standards of Trump as compared to the seven men who held the office prior to him -- so, all the way back to Richard Nixon.
The results were stark:
Trump was rated as less ethical than each of his predecessors, often by overwhelming amounts.

Of the seven, Trump was judged by more than 50% of respondents to have lower ethical standards than six. The one outlier was, of course, Nixon, who was chased from office after the Watergate scandal was revealed. In spite of that, 43% said that Nixon had higher ethical standards than Trump, while 37% said Trump's ethics were higher than Tricky d*ck's. So the current President is seen by the public as less ethical than the guy who resigned the presidency just ahead of a near-certain impeachment.

And ethical standards don't appear to be a purely partisan judgment. Nearly seven in 10 people said Ronald Reagan had higher ethical standards than Trump while almost six in 10 said the same of Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter.

The question -- and this is always the question with Trump -- is whether any of this means anything. While there's no "ethics" question on the 2016 exit poll, there is one on whether a candidate is honest and trustworthy. Just one in three voters said Trump was. And yet, he is President.

Ethics and trustworthiness are not the exact same thing. And what people said when they voted for candidate Trump versus how they feel about President Trump may well be two very different things.

The Point: Under the traditional rules of politics, a president who is regarded as unethical (particularly one who made a campaign promise to "drain the swamp" of Washington corruption) would pay a price for it.
Or is this yet another example of how political gravity impacts -- or doesn't impact -- Trump?

In response to:

On June 14, 2016, the Washington Post reported that Russian hackers had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s files and gained access to its research on Donald Trump. A political world already numbed by Trump’s astonishing rise barely took notice. News reports quoted experts who suggested the Russians merely wanted more information about Trump to inform their foreign-policy dealings. By that point, Russia was already broadcasting its strong preference for Trump through the media. Yet when news of the hacking broke, nobody raised the faintest suspicions that Russia wished to alter the outcome of the election, let alone that Trump or anybody connected with him might have been in cahoots with a foreign power.
It was a third-rate cyberburglary. Nothing to see here.

The unfolding of the Russia scandal has been like walking into a dark cavern. Every step reveals that the cave runs deeper than we thought, and after each one, as we wonder how far it goes, our imaginations are circumscribed by the steps we have already taken. The cavern might go just a little farther, we presume, but probably not much farther. And since trying to discern the size and shape of the scandal is an exercise in uncertainty, we focus our attention on the most likely outcome, which is that the story goes a little deeper than what we have already discovered. Say, that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort told their candidate about the meeting they held at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer after they were promised dirt on Hillary Clinton; and that Trump and Kushner have some shady Russian investments; and that some of Trump’s advisers made some promises about lifting sanctions.

But what if that’s wrong? What if we’re still standing closer to the mouth of the cave than the end?

The media has treated the notion that Russia has personally compromised the president of the United States as something close to a kook theory. A minority of analysts, mostly but not exclusively on the right, have promoted aggressively exculpatory interpretations of the known facts, in which every suspicious piece of evidence turns out to have a surprisingly innocent explanation. And it is possible, though unlikely, that every trail between Trump Tower and the Kremlin extends no farther than its point of current visibility.

What is missing from our imagination is the unlikely but possible outcome on the other end: that this is all much worse than we suspect. After all, treating a small probability as if it were nonexistent is the very error much of the news media made in covering the presidential horse race. And while the body of publicly available information about the Russia scandal is already extensive, the way it has been delivered — scoop after scoop of discrete nuggets of information — has been disorienting and difficult to follow. What would it look like if it were reassembled into a single narrative, one that distinguished between fact and speculation but didn’t myopically focus on the most certain conclusions ?................

In response to:
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh now faces accusations of s*xual misconduct from a second woman.

Related
Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels Attorney, Claims He Has Third Kavanaugh Accuser

In a New Yorker report from Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, Deborah Ramirez, a classmate of Kavanaugh at Yale, said Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a college dormitory party. The story dates to the 1983-1984 years, which would have been Kavanaugh’s freshman year at the university.

The report adds to the mounting pressure on Kavanaugh, who will be confronted at a Senate hearing on Thursday by Christine Blasey Ford, a high school classmate, with allegations that he attempted to sexually assault her at a party in the early 1980s.

This latest account claims Kavanaugh exposed himself at a college party where he and Ramirez were both drinking. Kavanaugh allegedly “thrust his p*nis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.”

Four Democrat Senators were alerted to the allegation by a civil rights attorney. Ramirez claims that she consulted with an attorney and carefully reviewed her memories before coming forward on the alleged incident. She, too, is asking for an FBI investigation, as Blasey Ford has done.

Ramirez, age 53, studied sociology and psychology at Yale and later worked for an organization that supports victims of domestic violence. Ramirez was allegedly reluctant to talk, according to the New Yorker story, because her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident. She was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the incident with certainty, the New Yorker said, but then felt confident after reviewing her thoughts.

In a statement to the New Yorker, Kavanaugh wrote, “This alleged event from 35 years ago did not happen. The people who knew me then know that this did not happen, and have said so. This is a smear, plain and simple. I look forward to testifying on Thursday about the truth, and defending my good name — and the reputation for character and integrity I have spent a lifetime building — against these last-minute allegations.”

The story quotes Ramirez as stating, “I wasn’t going to touch a p*nis until I was married. I was embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated.” She claimed Kavanaugh laughed at her.
“I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.”

The New Yorker has not confirmed with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present at the party.

In response to:

Michael Avenatti, who represents porn star Stormy Daniels in her legal entanglements with President Donald Trump, claims he is also representing a woman with “credible information regarding Judge Kavanaugh” and his high school friend, Mark Judge.

“We will be demanding the opportunity to present testimony to the (Senate) committee and will likewise be demanding that Judge and others be subpoenaed to testify,” Avenatti said in a Twitter post on Sunday. “The nomination must be withdrawn,” he said.

Avenatti had hinted with an earlier tweet that he had information on Kavanaugh.

“What happens at Georgetown Prep does not stay at Georgetown Prep,” he tweeted.

In response to:

Satire from The Borowitz Report

Republican Party Declares Moral Bankruptcy

By Andy Borowitz

September 25, 2018

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The Republican Party officially filed for moral bankruptcy on Tuesday morning, a move that many in the nation considered long overdue.

In filing for moral bankruptcy, the Republicans will formally attest that they have no morals, standards, or ethics on their balance sheet, and will agree to cease all activity as a political party in exchange for indemnity from any and all legal actions.

Harland Dorrinson, a Washington attorney who specializes in moral bankruptcies, said that, by making its moral vacuum official, the G.O.P. could theoretically break itself up and sell off the parts, but, he warned, “There are no buyers.”

“From Lindsey Graham to Ted Cruz to Mitch McConnell to Chuck Grassley, all of the Republican Party’s assets could only be described as toxic,” he said. “Their breakup value is zero.”

Further complicating such a sale, Dorrinson said, is the fact that the lion’s share of the Republican Party is already owned by the National Rifle Association, Koch Industries, and the Russian government.

“All of those entities are going to take a major loss on their investment,” he warned. “The Kochs have been trying to sell Paul Ryan for months, and they can’t give him away.”

While bemoaning the demise of a once legitimate political party, Dorrinson did see one silver lining. “The bankruptcy of the Republican Party will be presided over by Donald Trump, and no one has more experience in this area,” he said.


Andy Borowitz is the New York Times best-selling author of “The 50 Funniest American Writers,”
and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998.
He writes the Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news, for newyorker.com.

In response to:

Julie Swetnick Accuses Brett Kavanaugh Of s*xual Misconduct, Alleges He Was Present During 'Gang Rape'
HuffPost Nick Visser,HuffPost 2 hours 5 minutes ago
.
(Joshua Roberts / Reuters)

Michael Avenatti said Wednesday that Julie Swetnick is his client accusing Brett Kavanaugh of s*xual misconduct, marking the third woman to come forward with claims against the Supreme Court nominee in just over a week.

In a sworn declaration, Swetnick — a Washington, D.C., resident — said she was a “victim of one of these ‘gang’ or ‘train’ rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present” at a party in D.C. in approximately 1982.

“During the incident, I was incapacitated without my consent and unable to fight off the boys raping me,” she wrote, noting that she shared what happened with “at least two other people” shortly after the incident. “I believe I was drugged using Quaaludes or something similar placed in what I was drinking.”

Swetnick said she first met Kavanaugh and Judge, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s who came to the nominee’s defense, around 1980 or 1981. She described the two as “extremely close friends” who were “joined at the hip.”

She said she attended “well over ten house parties” from 1981 to 1983. Between 1981 and 1982, she said at these parties she began to notice Judge, Kavanaugh and others would attempt to “‘spike’ the ‘punch’ at house parties I attended with drugs and/or grain alcohol so as to cause girls to lose their inhibitions and their ability to say ‘No.’”

Kavanaugh and Judge, she said, would “‘target’ particular girls … it was usually a girl that was especially vulnerable because she was alone at the party or shy.” She said she has a “firm recollection” of seeing boys ? including Judge and Kavanaugh ? “lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room.”