343

UPDATE: Add this in

A forgetful guy. But historically sometimes the ‘don’t recall’ spiel works a la Reagan and Ollie North In Iran Contra-and the larger Reagan-Iran scandal Iran-Contra was just one episode in as we saw in Chapter A. Indeed, in some ways Reagan’s penchant for being a little bit of a space cadet in the best of times and the recurring suspicions that he was ‘losing it’-not just of his opponents either but even James Baker spied on him to make sure he was in his right mind before he agreed to replace Don Regan-might of given him some level of cover.

While I referred to Manafort in this book as Trump’s G. Gordon Liddy-in being willing to go to prison for the crimes he may have committed on his boss’ behalf, Poindexter really went to prison for Reagan-and stated that he did these illegal things and he left Reagan out of it so that he had plausible deniability.

At this point, Roger Stone’s co-conspirator-a co-conspirator potentially on a lot of things, on Wikileaks as is the topic of today’s latest bombshell about his coming perjury charge and of this chapter-but also on Comeygate on how Huma Abedin’s emails magically showed up on Weiner’s laptop discovered by all those anti Clinton NYPD agents like James Kallstrom-for more see (Chapter B)

Jerome Corsi claims to be ready to go to be Trump’s Liddy or Poindexter, prepared to do hard time to protect this illegitimate ‘President’ this illegitimate ‘man.’

A far-right conspiracy theorist who landed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s crosshairs over his friendship with the longtime Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone now says that Mueller has offered him a plea deal on one count of perjury related to his conversations with Stone in 2016—but he is not going to take the deal, he told me in an interview on Monday. “I will not sign a statement that says I willfully and knowingly lied, because I did not,” Jerome Corsi said.

Of course, as we see in (Chapter C) Corsi was warning for the last month that he was going to be indicted for perjury-so the fact that it now looks like he’s going to be indicted for perjury is not in itself a shocker. However, we are now learning what it is that he perjured himself for.

As we saw in (Chapter D) Corsi explained his Nostradamus imitation in predicting that Podesta was the subject of Wikileaks’ coming email dump he claimed it was just a lucky guess.

Now he claims to have just forgot sending Stone emails urging him to actually meet Assange. And this is a bombshell-at least for the public. It’s the latest evolution of Stone’s endless evolving explanation of his oft stated claim during the election to have communicated with Assange. Stone has been insisting Credico was his only back channel to Assange. While it’s true as we see in (Chapter E) that Credico is a pretty mysterious and suspicious character in his own right-here is someone who setup a Bernie Sanders supporters for Trump group and boasts of sending fake emails to Michael Isikoff-it’s clear that at least as far as who gave Stone the information about Podesta being Assange’s next target Corsi is central.

UPDATE: As noted in Chapter A and B there is the puzzle as to wether Stone ever met or spoke directly with Assange himself. It’s clear he got information from Corsi about Podesta’s emails in early August-but a Washington Post piece had him telling friends about Assange having Podesta’s emails back in April of 2016 and that he’d also claimed to have directly spoken to Assange.

“Corsi, who was working on opposition research with Stone throughout 2016, said he shared his “hunch” with Stone at the time, but has denied having any inside information from Assange. Instead, he says, he figured that Podesta “had to be next” if he was left out of the July 22, 2016, email dump of Democratic National Committee emails. “I had sources who had shown me how [the] Democratic Party had put their systems together, and gave me thousands of pages of information over the summer on how the DNC’s computers worked. So when Assange on July 22 dropped the Democratic National Committee emails, which included messages from Debbie Wasserman Schultz, I did a forensic analysis and determined that there were no Podesta emails in there,” Corsi said. It isn’t clear who Corsi’s “sources” were, or why he considered Podesta, who had no role at the DNC, to be conspicuously missing from a DNC email release. But Corsi claims that he simply “connected the dots and figured Podesta must be next. Mueller doesn’t want to believe that.”

As the writer notes it’s not clear why Corsi would presume there were any Podesta emails. ‘Forensic analysis’ reminds us of what he  did regarding Huma Abedin’s emails after Judicial Watch got its hands on them back in late August 2016-as noted in this book the collusion that has been totally missed is that between the Trump campaign and rogue anti Clinton pro Trump agents at the FBI.

OTOH it’s true that if you believe that WaPo piece, Stone knew about Podesta’s emails way back in April 2016.

“Stone, for his part, denies having had any such conversations about Podesta with Corsi. But he famously predicted in a tweet months before the election, around the time that he was “conducting research” with Corsi, that damaging information would soon emerge about Podesta. “It will soon [be] Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary,” he wrote on August 21, 2016. Corsi told me that he emailed Stone in 2016 (he didn’t specify what month) telling him to “go see Assange”—an email that prosecutors showed him earlier this year that Corsi apparently had not voluntarily produced. “I couldn’t remember any of my 2016 emails,” Corsi said. “I hadn’t looked at them. So they let me amend my testimony, but now they want to charge me for the initial day when I said I didn’t remember that email. I won’t plead guilty to it.” (Corsi did not specify whether the back-and-forth with prosecutors occurred during a closed-door interview or before the grand jury—but the fact that Corsi is referring to the charge as “perjury” suggests it is the latter.)

While many suspect that Matt Whittaker was appointed by Trump to if not fire Mueller directly, undermine the investigation in any way he can, Corsi for his part seems to think so too which is why he’s appealing directly to Whittaker to bail him out.

“Corsi has also added a new twist to the saga, claiming that he plans to file a complaint with Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker over Mueller’s team’s alleged recommendation that he keep his plea deal a secret from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (finra).“finra requires by law that I immediately report anything that might affect my ability to hold securities licenses,” Corsi explained. “So I asked the special counsel’s team how they expected me to fulfill my legal obligation to finra if they want me to keep the plea deal a secret. And they said, ‘You don’t have to tell finra because this will all be under seal.’ So I told them I was going to file criminal charges against them with Whitaker, because they just advised me to commit a crime.” The former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, who prosecuted white-collar crimes, including commodities and securities fraud, in the Northern District of Illinois, noted that finra is not a government agency—so failing to report a sealed plea deal is not a crime. The special counsel’s office declined to comment.”
UPDATE: As it turns out Coverup AG Barr has done what everyone thought Whittaker would do. Whittaker clearly wasn’t qualified for the job but while the Coverup General certainly had the requisite qualifications he is simply very biased. For those of us who had looked at his history there’s nothing very surprising about what Barr has done. All the institutionalist types were snowed by his resume but his record both as Bush Sr’s AG-the pardons of Iran-Contra co-conspirators-and what he had just recently said about Mueller-the investigation was ‘fatally conceived’ etc-made it clear this is what he would do with the job.

But just because he wasn’t incompetent like Whittaker the institutionalists assumed he’d be ethical-which is faulty thinking, competency is one thing ethics is another. Indeed, in some ways an incompetent may be less of a threat-to the extent that they don’t know how to obstruct properly.

As for Corsi he apparently ultimately achieved his goal-he was never indicted-the leak of his draft indictment was clearly meant to blow it up

End of UPDATE

“Mueller has not gone easy on witnesses who appear to have lied to federal agents—Corsi is the fourth witness caught up in the probe who could soon be facing charges for lying to investigators. Unlike the former national-security adviser Michael Flynn, the former Trump-campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos, or the lawyer Alex van der Zwaan, however, all of whom pleaded guilty and struck a deal with Mueller’s team, Corsi is apparently resisting any kind of cooperation. “They can put me in prison for the rest of my life, but I’m not going to lie” to finra, Corsi said.

Still at the end of the day this won’t save Stone and won’t change much other than Corsi and Stone may get to be prison roommates.

Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, told me in an email that Corsi’s pledge not to cooperate means either that he knows Mueller is bluffing and doesn’t have enough evidence to charge him, which is “unlikely,” or that Corsi now finds himself “on the wrong end of an indictment.” If Corsi had decided to cooperate, Honig explained, “it would have been Mueller announcing Corsi’s cooperation along with the indictment of Stone (and perhaps others). Now, it’ll be Mueller announcing an indictment of Stone and Corsi (and perhaps others) all together.”

As for Corsi’s grand talk of not going to lie-remember he is essentially the father of birtherism.

So what does this mean for Roger Stone?

“Roger Stone, meanwhile, should be taking note of Corsi’s ordeal, former federal prosecutors told me. Any inconsistencies between Stone’s testimony and what Mueller has learned could hypothetically lead to federal charges. While Stone has long denied that he discussed WikiLeaks’s plans with Bannon or any other campaign official in 2016, for example, emails from Stone made public last month belie that claim. On October 4, 2016, three days before the Podesta emails were published, Stone emailed Bannon predicting “a load” of new WikiLeaks disclosures “every week going forward.” (Stone told the Postthat he “was unaware of this email exchange until it was leaked,” adding that “we had not turned it up in our search.”)

The testimony refers to Stone’s Congressional testimony as he hasn’t spoken to Mueller-which is one more major clue that he’s Mueller’s subject if not a target.

Stone’s story on meeting the Russians, on Wikileaks, his conversations with Trump officials keeps changing-he’s already had to amend his House testimony three times. But he still is being far from candid and telling the full truth.

“Stone has also had to amend his House Intelligence Committee testimony three times since last November, as new reports have emerged about his contacts with Russian nationals, the extent of his interactions with WikiLeaks (he exchanged private Twitter messages with WikiLeaks in mid-October 2016), and his conversations with Trump-campaign officials. Despite those changes, the question of whether he perjured himself before the committee still stands—and is reportedly being examined by Mueller.”

“Roger Stone had a chance, under oath, to tell the House Intel Committee about his contacts with Russians and WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign,” Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell of California, who sits on the panel, told me last month. “He misled us and has repeatedly—three times now—amended his testimony to fit new press reporting.” Swalwell noted that the committee’s Democrats voted to send transcripts related to its Russia investigation to Mueller, but Republicans resisted. That’s likely to change when Democrats regain control over the panel in January. “The special counsel should see Stone’s transcripts and the accounts of all witnesses,” Swalwell said.

As noted in (Chapter F) Stone didn’t go to jail in the first Watergate but there’s something he wants more than even staying out of recognition as the greatest Nixonian GOP dirty trickster in all the land. This should do it.

UPDATE: Off topic but happy to see Congressman Swalwell has now advocated impeachment. As he’s on both the Intel and Judiciary committees this is potentially very important though you hope he’s talking to his good friend Nancy Pelosi about it. A real trouble with even those Democrats who support impeachment is an unwillingness to directly push the Speaker on it. It’s arguable that Nadler could begin an inquiry without going to a full floor vote-but while he has now twice made the case directly to her for impeachment-he seems not willing to be a rebel.

Regarding the politics of impeachment

 

 

 

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