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United States News Title: The circular firing squad: Mueller targets turn on each other Rudy Giuliani sent an unmistakable message Wednesday night: Its everyone for themselves. During a CNN interview, President Donald Trumps personal lawyer blurted out that the only person he knows about who didnt collude with Russia was Trump himself. Although Giuliani tried to walk back his comments on Thursday, the remarks put the sprawling web of people caught up in special counsel Robert Muellers probe on notice: no one is coming to save you. Ya think!!! one former Trump campaign official wrote to POLITICO when asked if Giuliani was trying to protect the president at the expense of everyone who worked for him. The Team Trump infighting has been a prosecutors dream for Mueller, opening up an ever-widening window into the behind-the-scenes workings of a rookie politician whose campaign has been under investigation for years. The special counsel and federal prosecutors have already benefited from the internal sniping, flipping Trumps former lawyer, national security adviser and campaign chairman. Bickering and backstabbing were Trump world trade marks long before the former businessman launched his White House bid, from the real estate moguls decades of private business dealings to his years as a reality television star. But the attitude has taken on a completely new life as Muellers 20-month-old probe creeps increasingly closer to the president. Now the sniping can have long-term legal consequences, and the president and his former aides have used press interviews, social media posts and court filings to take shots at each other in the interest of protecting themselves and their reputations. Nobody is really on the same team anymore when youve worked with Donald Trump, said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump 2016 campaign aide who has been questioned multiple times by Mueller and congressional investigators. Trump puts everyone against each other when you work for him, he added. While he demands loyalty, he doesnt return it. Loyalty is not a two-way street, especially when youve got special counsel involved in it. Michael Zeldin, a former Mueller DOJ aide, likened the current divisions inside Trump world to the mafia. Even Whitey Bulger gets beaten to death for having squealed. That always made it hard for prosecutors because it was very hard to break someone out of the organization, Zeldin said, referencing the famous Boston mobster. Here, everyone is saying, I can cooperate. Whether they are fully truthful, they all seem to be available. The latest example is Michael Cohen, the former Trump personal lawyer who appears to be sparing few in his bid to shorten his prison sentence and resurrect his image after being swept up in multiple investigations. Cohen turned publicly against Trump last summer and even urged voters headed into the 2018 midterms to elect Democrats so that Congress could rein in his former bosss presidency. Next month, Cohen is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee in a high-profile hearing expected to draw gavel-to-gavel media coverage. Hes already spent months blaming the president for any suspect behavior during the campaign, saying his weakness was a blind loyalty to Trump. Hush payments that Cohen made to women alleging affairs with Trump? Made at Trumps direction, Cohen said. Paying people a bag of cash to rig online polls in Trumps favor? Done because Trump made the request and it was a check, not a bag Cohen claimed. In the courtroom, Cohens legal team has also indirectly swiped at others in Trumps orbit. Last month, Cohen attorney Guy Petrillo argued in court that his clients cooperation with prosecutors should substantially mitigate his sentence, and his action stands in profound contrast to the decision of some others not to cooperate and allegedly to double deal while pretending to cooperate. While Petrillo didnt mention former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort by name, the reference was almost unmistakable. A source with knowledge of Cohens case confirmed that the passage was meant to invoke Manaforts behavior. The missives from Cohen and his legal team havent gone unnoticed. Trump himself struck back at his former fixer on Saturday night during a Fox News interview with a perplexing call for investigators to investigate Cohens father-in-laws finances. I guess he didnt want to talk about his father-in-law. Hes trying to get his sentence reduced, the president said. Several other ex-Trump aides have turned on their former colleagues. Rick Gates, who served under Manafort as deputy campaign chairman and then played a prominent role organizing Trumps inauguration, has been cooperating with Mueller since pleading guilty last February. He served as a star witness against Manafort during his former bosss trial in Alexandria, Va., where the longtime GOP operative was convicted on several charges of bank and tax fraud. Gates is still spilling his ex-colleagues secrets to the special counsel. In a court filing earlier this week, an FBI agent recounted how Gates snitched on Manaforts clandestine effort to get people appointed to Trumps new administration in January 2017. Attorneys for Michael Flynn have taken a more subtle approach. His lawyers tried to compare the former Trump national security adviser favorably to other Mueller targets when making the argument that Flynn didnt deserve jail time for lying to the FBI. In doing so, they essentially called out two people: former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and Dutch attorney Alex Van Der Zwaan. In a court filing, Flynns lawyers insinuated that Papadopoulos, who served a 14-day sentence last year for also lying to the FBI, was more mendacious than Flynn because he had been specifically notified of the seriousness of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The FBI also warned Papadopoulos that lying to investigators was a federal offense, it said. Flynn had received neither warnings, the filing pointedly noted. As for Van Der Zwaan, who spent 30 days in prison before being deported, Flynns attorneys argued that he was a trained attorney who was represented by counsel during his FBI interview again, unlike Flynn. For now, Flynns fate remains in the air. His sentencing has been postponed so he can continue cooperating in the Mueller probe. The feuding among Trump associates isnt just happening among people who have already been charged. Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone a Mueller target because of suspicions he had privileged knowledge that WikiLeaks was sitting on a stolen cache of Hillary Clinton campaign emails has been on a PR blitz to tarnish several former friends as liars. Stone has repeatedly derided New York-based liberal talk show host Randy Credico, placing the blame for any WikiLeaks backchannel communication on his ex-pal. Similarly, Stone has lobbed effusive insults at Jerome Corsi, the right-wing author and conspiracy theorist who has also drawn Muellers interest because of possible links to WikiLeaks. In an Instagram post last month, Stone accused Corsi of working with Mueller to sandbag me on a fabricated perjury charge. They all have good reason to point the finger at each other. Stone has long said he expects to be indicted for lying to Mueller a charge he denies. And Corsis lawyers have circulated a draft court document showing Mueller wanted their client to plead guilty to a false statement charge they say is bunk. Open warfare in Trumps orbit has produced its share of schadenfreude, as well. Justice was well served today, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said in an NPR interview last August after Cohen pleaded guilty and Manafort was convicted on the same day. Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House senior strategist, was ousted from Trumps circle after he almost gleefully predicted trouble for the presidents son, Donald Trump Jr., who is in Muellers crosshairs for an election-year meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Clinton. Theyre going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV, he said in Michael Wolffs book Fire and Fury. Annemarie McAvoy, a defense attorney and media consultant who previously represented Gates, said she wasnt surprised by all of the discord. It starts with the president and trickles down to all the people who have worked for him, she said. Of course every attorney is going to try to represent his or her client as zealously as possible and make them look the best and make everyone around them, who might say anything bad about them, look worse, McAvoy said. Typically in cases dealing with a large number of people from the same side of an organization, co-defendants will demonstrate some collegiality with each other. But, McAvoy said, theres a different dynamic at play when none of the people who have been caught in the Mueller probe are on the same team anymore. All of these people have to try to, assuming theyre not going to jail, to make a living, deal with their neighbors, try to have some sort of normal life after this, she said. To Democrats, the infighting has occasionally prompted new legal concerns. Several House chairmen issued a warning to the president on Sunday after he went after Cohens father-in-law, saying Trump appeared to be obstructing Congresss oversight functions. Organized crime and international money laundering are a dirty business, former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told POLITICO. It doesnt surprise me in the slightest as the ship is sinking the rats are jumping out.
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#1. To: Willie Green, Javankas boys (#0)
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Ruby is a NYC rotten egg career criminal grifter gone senile, a Trump clone. They're making a fortune on grift from Israel/APIC/MBS/Sheldon Adelson, not Russia. Being an Iranian Student Leader pays well.
WhaTever iT Takes For The libs To Self desTrucT Hallelujah If you ... don't use exclamation points --- you should't be typeing ! Commas - semicolons - question marks are for girlie boys !
So how big does this window have to get before Mueller can actually do anything with it?
Mueller has already gotten guilty pleas from Papadopoulos, Manafort, Gates, Flynn, Cohen, Pinedo, and van der Zwaan... not to mention a boatload of indictments against people like NRA Russian bimbo Maria Butina, Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi and others too numerous to keep track of... He's playing his cards close to his vest before going after bigger fish like Kushner & Trump Jr... But I'm guessing that bomb will drop sometime within the next month or so...
Within the next month or so? Well, let's call it 5 weeks. That's Feb 23. The clock is ticking.
Let's make it the Ides of March... just because it seems a little more foreboding...
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