It’s gonna turn up the heat on Flynn too, because it increases the chances that Manafort flips.
It’s unlikely that they’ll give TWO of those guys immunity, because either of them probably have enough dirt to bring everything down… whoever flips first is gonna get the get out of jail card. And the other guy gets to go to ass pounding prison.
When you get berated for this we can cross-post to the liberal stupidity thread, which is on fire right now.
Given that the real target is Russia, i think it likely that Trump would be forced to resign, but with a deal which doesn’t impact him or his family much,but which seizes a lot of Russian money and assets to penalize the interference.
It’s just a slight misquote ;-).
There can be more than one real target. If it is true that someone who has been substantially enriched by illegal deals got himself elected president, then that seems a perfectly valid real target.
Maybe, like Whitewater, the financial side will all turn out to be nothing much. Maybe.
What makes you think Flynn hasn’t already made a deal?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-trump-worried-about-the-manafort-raid
According to Fox News, Dowd said this: “These failures by Special Counsel to exhaust less intrusive methods is a fatal flaw in the warrant process and would call for a Motion to Suppress the fruits of the search…”
This seems highly irregular on a few fronts, both legally and politically. To state the obvious, Paul Manafort is not Dowd’s client. Dowd is Donald Trump’s lawyer. So it’s not even clear to me he would have standing to make a motion to suppress this evidence, let alone an interest in doing so that the President would want to be admitting publicly. He might have standing if the evidence ended up being used against Dowd’s client, Donald Trump. But is that true? And is it something Dowd wants to be admitting?
If it’s not true, why does Dowd care about the Manafort raid at all? His job is to defend his client, not Paul Manafort.
Edited to add the third tweet, which clarifies who (probably) dumped whom.
Nothing new in Politico’s reporting of the lawyer change.
A boutique firm? Do they make nice flower arrangements for their clients?
Firms are either boutique (specialist) or general practice. You’ll usually here “litigation boutique” or “patent boutique”.
Boutique firms specialize in a small number of practice areas. Sometimes the word is loosely and incorrectly used, which may be the case with this firm given the number of practice areas listed on their website. Edit: beat by stepsongrapes!
That is an absolutely top-flight tax law firm, among the best in the country. “Boutique” means small, specialized and very expensive.
In the industry, boutique doesn’t really denote expensive or not. Just the specialized bit. They tend to be small because of the specialist nature, but there are some medium sized boutiques.
Maybe it is like a weapons boutique:
According to sources close to the president, many on Team Trump blame Manafort for special counsel Robert Mueller’s divergence from election interference and foray into the private finances of the president’s family, and political and business associates.
Though Trump himself has engaged in a number of opaque foreign business deals, his aides believe it was Manafort’s work in Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere that set off the special counsel’s alarm bells—and got him digging into issues only tangentially related to alleged Russian election shenanigans.
The terms “shady” and “sketchy” come up most frequently when senior veterans of Trump’s campaign discuss the earlier work done by Manafort, the campaign’s former chairman. (This is the kind of work that has in decades past included Manafort’s lobbying for some of the worst human rights abusers, killers, and dictators of the Cold War era—work Manafort did with longtime Trump consigliere Roger Stone at their well-connected K Street lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly.)
What they don’t know is whether Mueller has “turned” Manafort or simply obtained information during his investigation that has led to pertinent election-meddling developments, and what—if anything—Manafort would have to offer or interest Mueller and his team.
[…]
“There is no trust between the president and Paul [Manafort],” another West Wing official said. “There never really was any to begin with, to tell you the truth.”On Thursday, Manafort and the powerhouse law firm WilmerHale parted ways. (Ironically, Mueller and many of his colleagues in the Russia probe practiced law there until recently.) Manafort brought on a new lawyer, one with more tax law expertise, suggesting that a federal probe into alleged Russian election interference is drilling down on his finances.
[…]
Multiple sources close to the president have said that there was a growing resentment from Team Trump toward Manafort because he tried to profit off of the access and influence that he claimed to still have on the Trump administration. Specifically, top Trump officials were especially annoyed when stories began appearing online starting in April about how Manafort had reportedly told Chinese interests that he could convince the Trump administration to go along with deals related to U.S. construction contracts.“That really pissed people off,” a White House adviser told The Daily Beast.
[…]
According to two senior officials, White House suspicions toward Manafort were turned up to eleven after the news broke last month of a Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. Manafort was present at the now-infamous confab, as was President Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Trump’s advisers spent a good chunk of the month of July wondering and wildly speculating who could have leaked such damaging information—and Manafort’s name was a recurring theme.Maloni, the Manafort spokesman, stressed to The Daily Beast that Manafort had voluntarily disclosed the Trump Jr. meeting to Senate investigators (as had been previously reported) before Mueller or his team ever asked about it.
The lawsuit centers around what Tymoshenko called politically motivated prosecutions against her. Tymoshenko, who served as the first female Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, faced criminal charges for alleged involvement with a gas import contract signed with Russia. She was ultimately released from prison in 2014 after a revision of the Ukranian criminal code that decriminalized the actions for which she was convicted. At around the same time, Yanukovych was ousted from power. She has long held that the prosecutions against her were unjust, corrupt and were motivated purely by politics.
In 2011, Tymoshenko filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York against Ukranian industrialist Dmytro Firtash, and others for allegedly running a U.S. based racketeering enterprise which stood to benefit financially from her prosecution. One of the named defendants in the lawsuit is none of other than Paul Manafort.
As part of the lawsuit, Tymoshenko alleged that Firtash, who runs a natural gas company called RoUkrEnrgo, “skimmed” money from a natural gas contract between Russia and Ukraine. She accused him (and the other defendants including Manafort) of laundering the money through bogus New York real estate transactions.
The complaint, specifically alleged, that Manafort “played a key role in the defendants’ conspiracy and racketeering enterprise.” The complaint says that money was laundered through various New York based bank accounts and that the business activities were primarily conducted at Manafort’s offices.
Heh, it’s like Trump’s team wants to throw Manafort under the bus, and then throw another bus on top of it.
Boutique sounds kind of cosmopolitan to me.
I wish to complain about this barrister, which I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique!