Mueller’s Friday Filings Threaten New Public Details That Have The White House In A Frenzy
Special Counsel Robert Mueller will file court documents by 5:00 p.m. ET today involving the cooperation (or lack thereof) of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former attorney, and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, according to CNBC. Ahead of today’s highly anticipated filing, President Trump has gone on the offensive against Mueller and the investigation, launching a series of tweets decrying the investigation and promising that his legal team is ready to counter any accusations made by the Mueller investigation, according to The Hill.
Cohen will have two sentencing recommendations filed today, with Mueller filing in federal court while federal prosecutors will file in New York in their separate case against Cohen. Cohen pled guilty to charges of perjury relating to his testimony before Congress regarding a Trump Tower development project in Moscow during the 2016 campaign. U.S. attorneys in New York also won guilty pleas from Cohen on eight criminal counts regarding various financial crimes, including illegal campaign contributions.
Mueller will also make a second filing today regarding the sentencing for Manafort, who investigators have alleged violated the terms of his plea agreement by continually lying “on a variety of subject matters” about his role in possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Manafort is facing eight criminal counts mostly related to his work with a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. Manafort has been imprisoned since June after a federal judge revoked his bail following charges from Mueller that Manafort had attempted to tamper with potential witnesses.
The three filings and their respective public disclosures regarding the various cases come three days after Mueller’s filing of his sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
President Trump, following a story in The Atlantic that suggested his legal team is not adequately prepared for the accusations that may be alleged in the final Mueller report. Giuliani had told The Atlantic that he had difficulty drafting a counter-report to Mueller’s findings and that the written answers to Mueller’s questions submitted by President Trump “was a nightmare” that “took him about three weeks to do what would normally take two days”.
“It has been incorrectly reported that Rudy Giuliani and others will not be doing a counter to the Mueller Report. That is Fake News. Already 87 pages done, but obviously cannot complete until we see the final Witch Hunt Report,” Trump tweeted earlier today.
That was just one of a number of tweets by the President this morning. The President also railed about perceived conflicts of interest in the Mueller investigation:
Robert Mueller and Leakin’ Lyin’ James Comey are Best Friends, just one of many Mueller Conflicts of Interest. And bye the way, wasn’t the woman in charge of prosecuting Jerome Corsi (who I do not know) in charge of “legal” at the corrupt Clinton Foundation? A total Witch Hunt…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018
The woman in the President’s tweet is likely Jeannie Rhee, a federal prosecutor on Mueller’s team who worked with Mueller at WilmerHale and represented The Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton in various lawsuits brought against them by conservative groups.
President Trump wasn’t done, as he unleashed a series of tweets attacking Andrew Weissman, the prosecutor in the Manafort trial, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller as the Special Counsel to the Russia investigation, and Bruce Ohr, a key player in the controversial “anti-Trump dossier”, according to Fox News.
President Trump this morning also nominated William Barr, a critic of the Clintons and the Mueller investigation, to replace Matthew Whittaker, the Acting Attorney General. As the Attorney General, Barr would have oversight over Mueller’s investigation.
