The slowly written Mueller report that's been hiding in plain sight

[pnwmom]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/22/slowly-written-mueller-report-thats-sitting-plain-sight/?utm_term=.d5f88f496e55

President Trump has benefited enormously from the frog-in-hot-water nature of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into his campaign and possible overlap with Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.

Imagine if, instead of Mueller releasing new public indictments as he went along, leveraging criminal charges to obtain more information from the targets of his probe, he instead had kept his information private. Imagine if he and his lawyers had been working in quiet for 20 months, submitting expenses to the Department of Justice and suffering the president’s tweeted ferocity.

And then, after all of that, they suddenly produced a dozen indictments and plea deals running into hundreds of pages, detailing former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s illegal and questionable financial dealings, those of his deputy Rick Gates, full details of Russia’s alleged efforts to influence social media and to steal electronic information from Democratic targets and detailed a half-dozen people who admitted to lying to federal investigators.

Imagine if that had landed with a thud on the attorney general’s desk.

SNIP

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/07/mueller-has-already-issued-most-his-report-one-indictment-time/?utm_term=.23afcf4216a7

Even these more conventional indictments wove in details of how Trump and his associates interacted with the attackers. The February indictment of the Putin-linked Internet Research Agency, for example, described three unnamed Trump campaign officials in Florida interacting with Russian trolls who were setting up real-world events. The GRU indictment described how Russian hackers seemingly responded to Trump’s July 2016 statement, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing,” by launching a new assault on targets close to his opponent.

Far more unusual were the almost 40 pages of exhibits Mueller released when Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, entered into his ill-fated plea agreement in September. The records were ostensibly presented as proof that Manafort had lied in 2016 and 2017 when he said he had no documents relating to the work he did for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

But the documents serve just as well as a prequel to the story Mueller will eventually tell about Manafort’s work for Trump in 2016.

SNIP

Mueller’s filings also show how, while lobbying for Ukraine, Manafort made a concerted effort to argue that sanctions for human rights abuses would backfire. Questions surrounding a June 9, 2016, meeting at which Russians asked Donald Trump Jr. to end similar sanctions on Russia remain a central focus of Mueller’s investigation. Finally, documents seized from Manafort’s home describe how, in 2010 and 2012, he made elaborate advance preparations to claim electoral irregularities to discredit adverse election results. Trump and longtime Manafort associate Roger Stone made similar efforts to “Stop the Steal ” in 2016, which paralleled Russian-backed warnings of supposed “election rigging” by Democrats.

SNIP