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Special counsel Robert Mueller has filed a superseding criminal information against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, indicating a forthcoming guilty plea on charges related to his work lobbying for pro Russian forces in Ukraine. The filing was made in federal court on Friday, ahead of a pretrial conference at 11 a.m. The pretrial conference was changed to an arraignment and plea agreement hearing before Judge Amy Berman Jackson, according to a notice Friday morning from the court. A criminal information typically precedes a guilty plea. Officials told The Washington Post that Manafort had agreed to plead guilty to federal...

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has reached a "tentative" plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller, ABC News reported Thursday. The deal is expected to be announced in a court hearing on Friday. It was previously reported that Manafort was seeking a plea deal that would keep him from having to cooperate with prosecutors. A plea deal would allow Manafort to avoid his upcoming trial in Washington, D.C. Manafort was convicted on multiple criminal financial charges last month in a separate trial in Virginia. DEVELOPING

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is considering an agreement with prosecutors that would involve him pleading guilty on some charges in exchange for avoiding a second trial set to begin this month in Washington, D.C. A source close to Manafort's negotiations told Bloomberg News that the former Trump associate's lawyers have been discussing the number of charges Manafort may admit to and the length of a sentence to be recommended by prosecutors. He is charged in Washington, D.C. court of conspiracy to launder money made in Ukraine while serving as a lobbyist for pro-Russia political parties, and is accused...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The federal judge overseeing the second trial of Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s one-time campaign chairman, ruled on Wednesday that a federal investigation of possible collusion between the campaign and Russia cannot be discussed during the trial.

Michael Cohen's decision to plead guilty for making hush-money payments on Donald Trump's behalf has raised the prospect that if Democrats take control of Congress, they might try to impeach the president over a matter completely unrelated to a perceived criminal conspiracy with Russia. Good luck with that: Even if Democrats win back both the House and Senate, there is zero chance a two-thirds majority of senators will convict President Trump for paying off an adult-film star. It would be the height of hypocrisy if Democrats tried to remove the president over allegations of illegality relating to extramarital affairs. During...

Link only due to copyright issues: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/08/30/donald-trump-impeachment-indicting-manafort-verdict-cohen-plea-column/1084474002/

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.

A banker for Paul Manafort was robbed overnight of an iPad, a briefcase, and some sneakers at his Manhattan penthouse, according to a report. David Fallarino, who works at Citizens Bank, told authorities he left his terrace door open before he went to sleep Monday, NBC affiliate News 4 reported. He heard a noise around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday and found a crow bar on the terrace. Fallarino said his wine cabinet had been opened, and there was a bottle of wine on the floor. No other items were reported missing. Fallarino did not testify at Manafort’s trial earlier this month....

President Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort sought to make a deal with authorities ahead of his second trial in Washington, D.C., but the talks fell apart, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. Manafort's defense team reportedly held plea discussions with prosecutors last week, but the talks stalled over objections raised by special counsel Robert Mueller. The Journal could not identify what those objections were, and representatives for Manafort and Mueller declined to comment for the report. Manafort is facing a second set of charges in D.C. related to his work for a Russia-backed political party...

After a week that saw President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman convicted on eight counts of fraud and his former lawyer plead guilty to felony campaign finance charges, the president's job approval rating remains virtually unchanged, new polling from NBC News and The Wall Street Journal shows. But the stability in Trump's approval rating also comes as more than half of voters say he has not been honest and truthful regarding the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. And fewer than three-in-ten voters are convinced that Trump himself is not implicated in the wrongdoing of the six of his...

What do you do when your party has no viable policies acceptable to voters and no candidate to credibly lead them? I wanted to find out, so I wandered over to the Café California, where Democrats never leave. I'm old enough that with a bit of padding and an ugly large hat, I could look like a Bella Abzug wannabe, and I sat in the middle of the room, turning my hearing aids up to full blast. I couldn't stare at the speakers and don't know most of them, so I can't give you their names, but this is what...

President Donald Trump’s lawyers and a cadre of informal White House advisers claim they’ve convinced him not to pardon Paul Manafort — but White House officials expect the president to do it anyway. The president’s characterization of his former campaign chairman as a victim and “brave man” is being read by aides as a signal that Trump wants to use his unilateral authority to issue pardons to absolve Manafort, according to eight current and former administration officials and outside advisers. “Trump is setting it up. He’s referring to the investigation as a ‘witch hunt’ and saying this never would have...

On 'The Jimmy Dore Show' Ron Placone, Stef Zamorano, and Jimmy Dore discuss an NBC News article which gleefully reported that the conviction of Paul Manafort for tax fraud was the first successful "public test" of Robert Mueller's investigation. "The problem with this is, you can't charge the sitting president with a crime, and Trump will never be impeached," Dore said. "Get that out of your head, that will never happen. Well, maybe if they found collusion, like if there was evidence of him being a Manchurian candidate to help Russia at the expense of the U.S., then maybe, maybe,...

OK I have a question for our legal eagles. If Trump paying off women using his own money is not illegal, then no crime has been committed. How then can Paul Manafort plead guilty to something that was not illegal?

Dan Rather warned Wednesday night that if you think Tuesday was a shock with the Cohen guilty plea and Manafort's conviction, then "stay tuned." The former news anchor said other things Mueller is working on will "make yesterday pale by comparison." "Always keeping in mind that Mueller knows so much more than he has shown," Rather said in an interview with CNN's Don Lemon. "If you think [Cohen guilty plea, Manafort conviction] was a shock to our democratic system, just stay tuned. Because the other things Mueller is working on, and sooner or later we'll find out what they are,...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

A day after President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager was found guilty on eight counts of tax and bank fraud, and Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen plead guilty to charges that included illegal campaign contributions allegedly orchestrated by Mr. Trump, there was no rush to the exits by Republicans in the Congress, and no expectation on Capitol Hill that GOP lawmakers were ready to abandon the President. snip But if Democrats were looking for Republicans to suddenly stand and demand that Mr. Trump leave the White House in the wake of the Manafort and Cohen developments – there...

MOSCOW — Paul Manafort’s consulting clients before he joined the Trump campaign in 2016 — the leaders of Ukraine’s pro-Russian government — were overthrown in a popular uprising in 2014. Their problems continued this week. Mr. Manafort’s ... trial was “like a fairy tale where all the secrets are revealed,” Mustafa Nayyem, a former investigative journalist and member of Parliament, said in an interview on Wednesday. On Tuesday, shortly before a jury convicted Mr. Manafort, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, opened a criminal investigation into Mr. Manafort’s former sponsors in Ukraine. By paying Mr. Manafort while simultaneously serving in government...

On Wednesday night, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News remained aboard the proverbial liberal media party bus pushing Congress to impeach President Trump and delay or thwart Brett Kavanaugh from reaching the Supreme Court following Tuesday’s bad Trump headlines involving Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort. NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt told viewers amidst their extensive Trump coverage that just because “the Special Counsel has yet to” prove Trump-Russia collusion “does not mean prosecutors exposed criminality in the President’s universe” and quipped that White House correspondent Kristen Welker had a look at “a look at all the President's...

News that two former Trump advisers are facing prison time may have provoked a media firestorm in the nation's capital. But to the president's core supporters it's just a distraction from the good work he's doing. "This is the sort of stuff that should be in People magazine," says James Montfort III, when I call him to ask what he makes of the legal turmoil surrounding Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. "It's more important to get North Korea to give up their nuclear arms, it's more important to make sure Mexico is playing fair on trade - than it is...