Latest in The Russia Connection
A mea culpa on the witness tampering case against Paul Manafort and the merits of Rod Rosenstein's memo in support of James Comey.
A grand jury has returned a superseding indictment against Paul Manafort and his colleague Konstantin Kilimnick. The indictment adds new counts to the previous charges against Manafort and indicts Kilimnick for the first time on charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
The document is available here and in full below.
There’s more to be said for the letter the president’s lawyers sent to Robert Mueller than some commentators have acknowledged.
The office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed a motion with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia stating that there is "probable cause to believe that [Paul] Manafort has violated 18 U.S.C. § 1512(b) by attempting to tamper with potential witnesses while on pretrial release and, accordingly, has violated the conditions of his release." The document is available in full below.
The document is most interesting not as a legal work but for what it says about the president’s lawyers’ understanding of the special counsel’s investigation of obstruction.
The kind of presidency that Hamilton and others feared has arrived.
Apart from its primary claim of unreviewable power over criminal investigations, the January 2018 letter from the president's lawyers to Special Counsel Robert Mueller makes a number of remarkable, and sometimes very questionable, assertions.
The New York Times has obtained letters sent to the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller by the president's legal team, one in January 2018 and one in June 2017. The correspondence makes an aggressive case as to the scope of President Trump's Article II power.
At its heart, intelligence collection is a simple—yet fragile—process. And President Trump's recent actions will make it much more difficult for U.S. intelligence officers to develop and recruit new sources in the future.
What happens when the outing of intelligence sources is the province not of rogue insiders but of senior officials in two branches of this country’s government?