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The trial of a former White House counsel in the Obama administration was postponed suddenly on Tuesday amid concerns about the jury selection process. Politico first reported that U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is overseeing the case, announced she may have violated Gregory Craig's right to a public trial by limiting public access to jury selection. Proceedings in the trial began Monday, with opening statements expected to take place Tuesday morning. Politico reported that Jackson thought the trial might have to be postponed to November to find another group to lead jury selection. Politico noted that the process...

Breakthrough – Things Making Sense Now… Lots of things going on in/around the two legal cases involving Michael Flynn today. The origination of the DOJ shift in position involves the indirect case (EDVA) where Flynn is/was a witness in the FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act) case against Bijan Rafiekian and the Flynn Intel Group. Hat Tip to Techno-Fog for a litany of legal filings assembled today [132 pages here]. This is somewhat complex to explain. The direct case against Flynn (Judge Sullivan court – Washington DC), where Flynn copped a guilty plea for lying to FBI investigators, has a sentencing...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday, May 13, 2019 Court Finds RM Broadcasting Must Register as a Foreign Agent U.S. District Court Judge Robin L. Rosenberg has ruled that a Florida-based company, RM Broadcasting LLC (RM Broadcasting), was acting as an agent of a foreign principal and must register as such under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA).The Department of Justice contended in a civil counterclaim that RM Broadcasting has been acting as an agent of the the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency (Rossiya Segodnya), a Russian state-owned...

......"These foreign governments/factions don't just pay bribes to our politicians for favorable policy; they give money to media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post - and those are only the print media. Also networks take this $. Here's why President Trump is so confidently predicting most of the Fake News media is going to be out of business in just six years: When ad revenues dropped and subscriptions dropped back in the mid 2000's, they discovered a lucrative new revenue stream. Many top Fake News outlets are now very, very dependent on the cash they...

While special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, some of the key people in creating the Russia-collusion narrative themselves have ties to a foreign nation. Both the Democratic National Committee as well as Fusion GPS—the company hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to research the Trump campaign—were using Ukrainian sources in their efforts to discredit Trump. Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, was a common thread involved in Democratic opposition research efforts into former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Leshchenko, along with Artem Sytnyk, the...

President Obama's former White House counsel Gregory Craig was indicted on Thursday for concealing information and making false statements to federal authorities in an investigation stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into the 2016 election. Details: Craig, who also served in the President Bill Clinton’s administration, is facing up to 5 years in prison for allegedly lying about his work with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort for the Russia-aligned government of Ukraine. The investigation of Craig is part of a larger crack down on foreign lobbying by the Department of Justice's Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) unit.

The dramatic Tuesday hearing for former national security adviser Mike Flynn didn’t produce a sentence. Instead, Judge Emmet Sullivan gave Mr. Flynn a delay to reconsider his options. I was in the courtroom, and my reading of Judge Sullivan’s treatment of Mr. Flynn (with whom I co-wrote a 2016 book) was rather different from what most reporters have said and written. Judge Sullivan repeatedly invited Mr. Flynn to reconsider his guilty plea on a charge of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Judge Sullivan stressed that he had not presided over earlier proceedings in the case and that he...

Prosecutors from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team can use evidence from a 1980s Department of Justice review of Paul Manafort’s lobbying activities in the former Trump campaign chairman’s upcoming Washington, D.C., trial, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. The same federal judge also pushed back Manafort’s trial date to Sept. 24. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson approved the use of the roughly 30-year-old report, which prosecutors argued is proof that Manafort was long aware of the disclosure requirements under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He is charged with failing to register as a foreign agent under the FARA.

Federal prosecutors are investigating former lobbyist Tony Podesta, former Rep. Vin Weber, R-Minn., and former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig, NBC News confirmed, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter. CNN first reported the existence of the investigation. Prosecutors for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York opened the investigation following a referral from the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, the sources told NBC. NBC previously reported that Mueller had been looking into Podesta and his Democratic-leaning lobbying firm as part of its broader investigation into the finances of former Trump campaign chairman Paul...

Special counsel Robert Mueller has referred a collection of cases to New York federal prosecutors concerning whether several high-profile American lobbyists and operatives failed to register their work as foreign agents, according to people familiar with the matter. The transfer of the inquiries marks an escalation of Mueller's referrals to the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York in the period since he turned over a case involving President Donald Trump's former personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Since the spring, Mueller has referred matters to SDNY involving longtime Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta and his work for his former...

According to news reports, during the 2016 presidential election, “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump” and did so by “disseminating documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter…” Ukrainian officials also reportedly “helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.” At the center of this plan was Alexandra Chalupa, described by reports as a Ukrainian-American operative “who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee” and reportedly met with Ukrainian officials during the presidential election for the express purpose of exposing alleged ties between then-candidate Donald...

Tony Podesta’s lobbying firm, the Podesta Group, represented the Russian-owned company Uranium One during former President Barack Obama’s administration and did not register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, The Daily Caller News Foundation has determined. Podesta collected lobbying fees of $180,000 from Uranium One, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, that discloses lobbying documents filed with Congress. The uranium company states on its web site it is a “wholly owned subsidiary” of RUSANO, the Russian State Corporation for Nuclear Energy. Special Counsel Robert Mueller already is scrutinizing Podesta and his firm for allegedly failing to register as...

Graham: You believe that Fusion GPS should of registered under FARA, because they were acting on the behalf of the Russians? Browder: That’s correct. Graham: So, I just want to absorb that for a moment. The group that did the dossier on President Trump hired this British spy, wound up getting it to the FBI. You believe they were working for the Russians? Browder: And in the Spring and Summer of 2016 they were receiving money indirectly from a senior Russian government official. Graham: Okay. So, these are the people that were trying to undermine Donald Trump by showing the...

At a hearing today, witnesses will testify that Fusion GPS, an organization behind an infamous dossier pumping the Russia-Trump collusion story, is a highly paid smear-for-hire operation in violation of international laws. At a hearing this morning, Senate Judiciary members will receive testimony that Fusion GPS helped advocate the interests of corrupt Russian and Venezuelan officials while hiding its foreign work from federal authorities. Many in the media have focused on whether Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort would testify publicly at the hearing. Less well covered has been anything to do with Fusion GPS, the...

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has paid Trump International Hotel nearly $270,000 through its Washington, D.C. lobbying firm over the past several months, new foreign lobbying disclosure filings show. The payments, from Qorvis MSLGroup, were made for hotel rooms and catering services for dozens of U.S. veterans who the lobbying firm recruited as part of an influence campaign aimed at watering down legislation that could put Saudi Arabia on the hook financially for the 9/11 attacks. Disclosures filed with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act show that Qorvis MSLGroup paid $190,272 to Trump International for lodging expenses,...

What exactly is the FBI investigating? Why was it kept secret from other intelligence chiefs, if that's what happened? That matters, if we're trying to gauge what happened last week. Is it a FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act) case involving former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn or a lower-level knucklehead like Carter Page? Since FARA is violated more or less daily in Washington and largely ignored by authorities unless it involves someone without political connections (an awful lot of important people in Washington who appear to be making fortunes lobbying for foreign countries are merely engaged in "litigation support," if...

WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is asking whether a suspected former Russian intelligence officer-turned U.S. lobbyist and the firm behind the unsubstantiated anti-Trump dossier should have registered as foreign agents for their efforts to bring down a U.S. law on behalf of the Kremlin. According to a complaint filed with the Justice Department, Fusion GPS, which was also involved in the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, was involved in the pro-Russia campaign to kill the Global Magnitsky Act around the same time. In 2012, President Obama signed into...

Tony Podesta's firm failed to file legally required disclosures after emails with his WH adviser brother A high-dollar lobbyist and fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign failed to file legally required disclosures for his advocacy on behalf of a foreign government in discussions with Clinton’s future campaign chairman, according to a political law expert. High-powered Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta emailed his brother John, a top White House adviser who would later chair the Clinton campaign, in January 2015. Tony wondered if John would attend a meeting with the Indian ambassador to the United States. “I’m at Camp David Friday,” John...

Re: Foreign registered agents From:jpalmieri@hillaryclinton.com To: re47@hillaryclinton.com Date: 2015-04-17 01:38 Subject: Re: Foreign registered agents Take the money!! Sent from my iPhone On Apr 16, 2015, at 9:44 PM, Robby Mook wrote: Marc made a convincing case to me this am that these sorts of restrictions don't really get you anything...that Obama actually got judged MORE harshly as a result. He convinced me. So...in a complete U-turn, I'm ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks. Are you guys ok with that? ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dennis Cheng Date: Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 6:13 PM Subject:...

"Paramjit Singh Ajrawat, 60, owned and operated a Greenbelt pain clinic with his wife, also a doctor. Prosecutors say the couple defrauded federal health benefit programs...."