“The foreign-linked mystery company fighting to avoid handing over records demanded by special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have incurred a fine of $2.25 million as it presses its legal fight,” Politico reports.
“The $50,000-a-day penalty a federal judge imposed on the foreign-government-owned firm continues to grow and might be boosted to accrue at a higher rate in the future, one court order made public indicates.”
Michael Cohen will tell Congress that President Trump knew his longtime adviser Roger Stone was communicating with WikiLeaks about publishing stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, the Washington Post reports.
“In the prepared remarks, Cohen calls Trump a ‘racist,’ a ‘conman’ and a ‘cheat’ and also levels accusations that the president personally signed a check to cover ‘hush money payments’ to keep quiet an affair with adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. Cohen says Trump never directly told him to lie to Congress about his business dealings in Moscow, but claims the president implicitly encouraged him to do so.”
New York Times: “The testimony underscores many of the unsavory themes and stories that have recurred in public reporting about Mr. Trump — he inflates his wealth, makes racist remarks, threatens his enemies and tries to bend the law to his favor — but puts them on the record, under oath, in the voice of a man who was one of Mr. Trump’s closest aides.”
Playbook: “Republicans are going to do their best to remind the public that his testimony reeks of opportunism as the man is on the brink of prison. But so few people have made it into Trump’s inner circle, and Cohen was in it for a decade. That’s why this is incredibly compelling. Now he’s going to prison with little else to lose, and a man with nothing to lose in a circumstance like this seems like he will have a lot to say.”
Marcy Wheeler notes that redacted court filings suggest that Paul Manafort gave Konstantin Kilimnik — whom Special Counsel Robert Mueller has alleged is a Russian spy — 75 pages of recent polling data.
The data was referenced in an email with Manafort’s associate, Rick Gates, and in emails sent by Kilimnik.
“A staffer on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign says he kissed her without her consent at a small gathering of supporters before a Florida rally, an interaction that she alleges in a new lawsuit still causes her anguish,” the Washington Post reports.
“In interviews with The Washington Post, and in the lawsuit, Alva Johnson said Trump grabbed her hand and leaned in to kiss her on the lips as he exited an RV outside the rally in Tampa on Aug. 24, 2016. Johnson said she turned her head and the unwanted kiss landed on the side of her mouth, which she called ‘super-creepy and inappropriate.'”
Said Johnson: “I immediately felt violated because I wasn’t expecting it or wanting it. I can still see his lips coming straight for my face.”
Ronan Farrow notes the lawsuit is the latest challenge to Trump’s insistence on having staffers sign non-disclosure agreements.
Philip Bump: “President Trump has benefited enormously from the frog-in-hot-water nature of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into his campaign and possible overlap with Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.”
“America has been waiting for Mueller to present a document that ties all of this together — eager, in part, for evidence proving the president’s guilt, or exonerating him, on charges that he and his campaign worked with the Russians. As people have awaited the outcome, the slow accretion of malfeasance that Mueller has already uncovered has faded into background noise. It has allowed Trump to lump every new revelation into a big snowball labeled ‘no collusion,’ parroting the same refrain as the snowball grows. Meanwhile his opponents, waiting for a smoking gun, are happy to keep looking forward as well.”
“I think that our decisions at the end of the Clinton email investigation, particularly the decision to make that announcement in October to Congress about the re-opening of the case as a result of the emails on the Anthony Weiner laptop, I think its undeniable that those actions at an impact on the election.”
— Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, in an interview on MSNBC.
Nate Silver: “So as Sanders launches his 2020 campaign as a candidate with both formidable strengths and serious challenges, his biggest problem might seem to be that there’s more competition for his base this time around, with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others also competing for the leftmost part of the Democratic electorate. An equally big problem for Sanders, however, is that voters this time around have more alternatives to Hillary Clinton — left, right and center — to choose from.”
“Roughly one-quarter of Sanders’s support in Democratic primaries and caucuses in 2016 came from #NeverHillary voters: people who didn’t vote for Clinton in the 2016 general election and who had no intention of doing so.”
Neil Katyal: “The report is unlikely to be a dictionary-thick tome, which will disappoint some observers. But such brevity is not necessarily good news for the president. In fact, quite the opposite.”
“For months, the president’s lawyers have tried to discredit Mr. Mueller and this report, but their efforts may have backfired. A concise Mueller report might act as a ‘road map’ to investigation for the Democratic House of Representatives — and it might also lead to further criminal investigation by other prosecutors. A short Mueller report would mark the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end.”
Marcy Wheeler: “I’m fairly certain the concerns about Barr coming in and forcing Mueller to finish this are misplaced. I say that, in part, because Mueller seemed to be preparing for this timing. I say it, too, because Barr is too close to Mueller to do that to him.”
“That says that Mueller is choosing this timing (and choosing not to wait for the appeals to be done). Whatever reason dictates this timing, by doing it in this window, Mueller can ensure the legitimacy of what happens, both legally (because Barr will be in place) and politically (because it will be clear Rosenstein presided over it).”
“So whatever comes next week, people on both sides should accept that it is the outcome of the investigation that Mueller deemed appropriate.”
Garrett Graff: “The media and bloggers have regularly tracked the abnormally large number of sealed indictments filed over the last year in DC federal court, the jurisdiction where Mueller has been worked, including 14 added between August and November—a period where Mueller was theoretically ‘quiet’ around the midterm election—and four recent sealed indictment that seemed to parallel the Stone indictment.”
“Whether any relatee to Mueller remains to be seen, but in some ways the idea of piling up sealed indictments would have been the smartest way for Mueller to ensure that if he was fired, his case lived on.”
Garrett Graff: “While the seven scenarios above capture the broad outlines of what the end of his probe might look like, the truth is that he could choose some of one and a bit of another, meaning that there are almost infinite variations of how the case could unfold from him in the days ahead.”
“Yet it’s also worth noting that the Mueller probe—however it ends—represents a shrinking percentage of Trump’s potential legal troubles, as a total of at least 18 investigations surround Trump’s world, led by at least seven different prosecutors and investigators… Even a complete and total clean exoneration by Mueller on the Russia question would represent only a tiny ray of legal sunshine for the president.”
“And yet there’s good reason to believe that Trump won’t get that total exoneration, as Mueller’s conspicuous silences in court filings on the collusion question seem to indicate he’s building toward something. Indeed, there have only been two immutable truths thus far in the Mueller probe: First, every move has surprised us, both in timing and content; second, every court filing has been more informed, detailed, and insightful than anyone imagined, and shown us that what we knew publicly was only the tip of the iceberg. There’s no reason to think that Mueller’s denouement will be anything different.”
“A director of the controversial data company Cambridge Analytica, who appeared with Arron Banks at the launch of the Leave.EU campaign, has been subpoenaed by the US investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government,” the Guardian reports.
Special counsel prosecutors said for the first time that they have evidence of Roger Stone communicating with WikiLeaks, CNN reports.
During its investigation of the Russian hack of the Democrats, “the government obtained and executed dozens of search warrants on various accounts used to facilitate the transfer of stolen documents for release, as well as to discuss the timing and promotion of their release.”
The Washington Post details a meeting between Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chairman, Rick Gates, his deputy, and a former business partner of Manafort’s named Konstantin Kilimnik.
“The Aug. 2, 2016, encounter between the senior Trump campaign officials and Kilimnik, who prosecutors allege has ties to Russian intelligence, has emerged in recent days as a potential fulcrum in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. It was at that meeting that prosecutors believe Manafort and Kilimnik may have exchanged key information relevant to Russia and Trump’s presidential bid.”
The meeting ended “with the three men leaving through separate doors” so they wouldn’t be seen together.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, rejected Republican Chairman Richard Burr’s (R-NC) recent statements that the committee has not found evidence of collusion, saying the investigation is still ongoing and the committee still had to interview key witnesses, CNN reports.
Said Warner: “Respectfully, I disagree. I’m not going to get into any conclusions I’ve reached because my basis of this has been that I’m not going to reach any conclusion until we finish the investigation. And we still have a number of the key witnesses to come back.”
“Warner’s comments represented a rare public split for the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been the only congressional panel that has kept its investigation into Russia’s 2016 election meddling on a bipartisan track.”
Hillary Clinton responded to a tweet from President Trump in which he appeared to copy her 2016 campaign slogan, “Stronger Together.”
Said Clinton: “Now copy my plan on health care, a fairer tax system, and voting rights.”
USA Today: “Some time soon, federal authorities will begin selling off what’s left of Paul Manafort’s life, a small fortune amassed through a decade of illicit lobbying work. When they do, the investigation into Russian election interference stands to breach an unusual milestone: bringing in more money than it has cost.”
“After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016 election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia,” NBC News reports.
“But investigators disagree along party lines when it comes to the implications of a pattern of contacts they have documented between Trump associates and Russians — contacts that occurred before, during and after Russian intelligence operatives were seeking to help Trump by leaking hacked Democratic emails and attacking his opponent on social media.”
Said Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC): “If we write a report based upon the facts that we have, then we don’t have anything that would suggest there was collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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