Free Republic

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team are facing new complications in the final stretch of their investigation into Russian meddling and potential collusion with Trump campaign associates during the 2016 presidential election, as targets allegedly breach agreements and balk at plea deals. On Monday, the Mueller team claimed that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort violated his plea deal by lying to the FBI and Mueller’s office on a “variety of subject matters,” amid reports the cooperation agreement was not panning out how prosecutors had hoped. Conservative author Jerome Corsi also plans to reject a potential deal with Mueller...

An associate of the former Trump campaign adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. released documents on Tuesday showing that as the presidential campaign heated up in the summer of 2016, Mr. Stone tried to dispatch him to find out what information WikiLeaks had that could prove damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Mr. Corsi’s dealings with Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors have caused alarm among the president’s legal team, who were informed of developments by Mr. Corsi’s lawyer. President Trump’s lawyers were especially troubled by a draft statement of offense against Mr. Corsi that was passed on to them, according to people familiar with...

President Donald Trump continued criticizing the ongoing Russia investigation on Tuesday, insisting that special counsel Robert Mueller has “gone rogue.” “Wait until it comes out how horribly and viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Mueller is a conflicted prosecutor gone rogue.” Author Jerome Corsi rejected a plea deal that Mueller offered on Monday, accusing his team of “Gestapo” tactics. “They want me to say I willfully lied. I’m not going to agree that I lied. I did not. I will not lie to save my life,” Corsi said. “I’d rather...

Last night, Jerome Corsi explained to Tucker Carlson and his audience how the Mueller team was able to charge him with lying to them in order to pressure him to (in his view) to give false testimony implicating Paul Manafort. It is a harrowing tale as he tells it. If you believe him, he is a victim of a ruthless team that took possession of his computer, smart phone, and other records, and then spent hours grilling him over details of his communications years earlier. When he failed to remember that he forwarded one email, they had him on a...

Many media figures have swallowed whole, without evidence, a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump became president by treasonously colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election from its rightful owner, Hillary Clinton. The information operation that pushed this story turned out to have been secretly developed and funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, a fact uncovered only through the tenacious digging of Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the face of major opposition from the media and Democrats on the committee. The information operation has been fed to an increasingly compliant and credulous...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has informed a federal court that Paul Manafort violated his plea agreement by repeatedly lying to investigators. Prosecutors thus consider the agreement null and void and have asked the court to set a sentencing date immediately. The alleged breach was outlined in a brief submission to district judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, and reported by the New York Times Monday evening. The submission by Andrew Weissmann and other lawyers on Mueller’s team does not describe Manafort’s allegedly false statements, --snip-- Manafort and his lawyers are clearly preparing to argue that Manafort was honest but...

Embattled former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort says that he has never met privately with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and is threatening to sue the Guardian for reporting that he has. Citing a “well-placed source,” the Guardian reported Tuesday that Manafort met with Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2013, 2015, and again in the spring of 2016, soon after he became a senior member of the Trump campaign. The report further suggested that the alleged meeting will be of interest to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether any members of the Trump campaign helped to coordinate the...

While President Trump and FBI Director Christopher Wray aren’t happy with one another, Trump’s appointment of Wray has never been more personally valuable to the president. Why? By showing independence from the White House and resisting Trump's pressure on the FBI, Wray is confirming that Trump made a good and prudent decision in appointing him as director. *snip* Now that the individual the president chose to replace Comey is showing such independence from Trump, any Trump courtroom lawyer will have a pretty compelling line of defense for the president. Namely, he or she could tell a jury, “if my client...