By -NO AUTHOR-
WASHINGTON – Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort surrendered to federal authorities Monday on an indictment from a grand jury orchestrated by special counsel and longtime Washington insider Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into Russian meddling into the United States’ 2016 presidential election.
The indictment also swept up Manafort’s onetime business partner and protégé Rick Gates, but actually doesn’t make allegations about the 2016 election.
It alleges 12 counts including conspiracy against the U.S., conspiracy to launder money, being an unregistered foreign agent, misleading statements and failing to file reports of foreign bank accounts. The charges relate to overseas business operations the two allegedly had.
Watch Manafort walking into FBI headquarters with his attorney:
Mueller was appointed to look into claims about Russian interference that followed the Democrats’ disastrous collapse during the 2016 election, and even now some of the investigations prompted by those allegations have turned against Democrats.
Just one example is a congressional inquiry led by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., that now is focusing on how aides to Barack Obama had a practice of “unmasking” individuals caught up in government surveillance and the scandalous and largely fabricated “dossier” against Donald Trump that reportedly was funded by Hillary Clinton and Democrats.
Manafort has denied wrongdoing, as officials revealed a lot of the claims by Mueller date back as far as 2006.
Among the allegations is that Manafort moved $75 million to offshore accounts over that period without declaring the income for taxation purposes. He then alleged took $18 million of that to “fund a lavish lifestyle” in the United States, as the Daily Mail described it.
FBI agents had staged an early morning raid on Manafort’s home over last summer at the start of Mueller’s campaign against him, confiscating records from him.
According to the New York Times, Gate’s name appears on documents linked to companies that Manafort’s firm established in Cyprus in order to receive payments from his clients in Eastern Europe.
President Trump’s lawyer, Ty Cobb, assured reporters last week Manafort does not have damaging information about the president to offer prosecutors.
“The president has no concerns in terms of any impact, as to what happens to them, on his campaign or on the White House,” Cobbs said.
Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 and developed a strategy that convinced delegates not to break with Trump in favor of establishment candidates. Trump then promoted the veteran Republican strategist was to the chairman and chief strategist of his campaign.
Just months later, Trump learned Manafort received more than $12 million undisclosed payments from former Ukrainian president Victor F. Yanukovych, who he spent years working for as a political consultant, and fired him.
The case advanced when there were claims Russian president Vladmir Putin colluded with Trump campaign officials to rig the 2016 presidential election against now twice-failed Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton.
Then Mueller was appointed by the Justice Department in May to lead the investigation into Trump campaign officials’ relationships with Russian operatives. But the focus now actually may be turning to Clinton, and the Uranium One deal with Russia.
Russian officials engaged in a “racketeering scheme” to further their energy goals in the U.S. during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, The Hill recently confirmed.
President Trump has described as the “real Russia Story” the sale of 20 percent of U.S. uranium assets to a Russian company under her watch.
Observers also have pointed to Mueller’s own political allegiance to and friendship with fired FBI chief James Comey, and the fact that he stacked his team of investigators with lawyers who had openly supported Hillary Clinton in the election, as reasons to doubt the investigation’s neutrality. The Mail reported it was unclear if Mueller still has a strategy to “squeeze” Manafort” for information about the 2016 election “and Russian’s possible interference with it.”
The allegations concern actions that all predate the Trump campaign, and Trump’s name doesn’t appear in the 31-page series of claims by Mueller, who in the document does not make any allegations about collusion with Russia.
The case has been assigned to Judge Amy Jackson, a judiciary appointment made by Obama.
Source:: World Net Daily – World
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