{"id":36372,"date":"2019-06-20T18:12:46","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T22:12:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=36372"},"modified":"2019-06-20T18:12:46","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T22:12:46","slug":"when-the-roots-are-rotten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=36372","title":{"rendered":"When The Roots Are Rotten"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Solomon posted an article at The Hill<\/a> yesterday about some recent information dealing with the roots of the charges that candidate Donald Trump was colluding with the Russians.<\/p>\n

The article reports:<\/p>\n

And the behavior of FBI agents and federal prosecutors who\u00a0promoted that faulty evidence may disturb us more than we now know.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first, the Christopher Steele dossier<\/a>, has received enormous attention. And the more scrutiny it receives, the more its truthfulness wanes. Its credibility has declined so much that many now openly question how the FBI used it<\/a> to support a surveillance warrant against the Trump campaign in October 2016.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

At its best, the Steele dossier is an \u201cunverified and salacious\u201d political research memo funded by Trump\u2019s Democratic rivals. At worst, it may be Russian disinformation worthy of the \u201cgarbage<\/a>\u201d label given it by esteemed reporter Bob Woodward.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second document, known as the \u201cblack cash ledger,\u201d remarkably has escaped the same scrutiny, even though its emergence in Ukraine in the summer of 2016 forced Paul Manafort<\/a><\/span> to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman and eventually face U.S. indictment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In search warrant affidavits, the FBI portrayed the ledger as one reason it resurrected a criminal case against Manafort\u00a0that was dropped in 2014 and needed search warrants in 2017 for bank records to prove he worked for<\/a> the Russian-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s just one problem: The FBI\u2019s public reliance on the ledger came months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn\u2019t be trusted and likely was a fake, according to documents and more than a dozen interviews with knowledgeable sources.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The article explains the problem with the “black cash ledger”:<\/p>\n

For example, Ukraine\u2019s top anticorruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, told me he warned the U.S. State Department\u2019s law enforcement liaison and multiple FBI agents in late summer 2016 that Ukrainian authorities who recovered the ledger believed it likely was a fraud.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was not to be considered a document of Manafort. It was not authenticated. And at that time it should not be used in any way to bring accusations against anybody,\u201d Kholodnytsky said, recalling what he told FBI agents.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Likewise, Manafort\u2019s Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, a regular informer for the State Department, told the U.S. government almost immediately after The New York Times wrote about<\/a> the ledger in August 2016 that the document probably was fake.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Manafort \u201ccould not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement \u2014 payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation,\u201d Kilimnik wrote in an email<\/a> to a senior U.S. official on Aug. 22, 2016.<\/strong><\/p>\n

He added: \u201cI have some questions about this black cash stuff, because those published records do not make sense. The timeframe doesn\u2019t match anything related to payments made to Manafort. \u2026 It does not match my records. All fees Manafort got were wires, not cash.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Special counsel Robert Mueller<\/a><\/span>\u2019s team and the FBI were given copies of Kilimnik\u2019s warning, according to three sources familiar with the documents.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So why didn’t Mueller simply end the investigation because the roots of it were proven to be false?<\/p>\n

The article concludes:<\/p>\n

Rep. Mark Meadows<\/a><\/span>, a senior Republican on the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, told me Wednesday night he is asking the Justice Department inspector general to investigate the FBI and prosecutors’ handling of the Manafort warrants, including any media leaks and evidence that the government knew the black ledger was potentially unreliable or suspect evidence.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The question of whether the Mueller team should have used the ledger in search warrant affidavits before that is for the courts to decide.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But the public has a substantial interest in questioning whether, more broadly, the FBI should have sustained a Trump-Russia collusion investigation for more than two years based on the suspect Steele dossier and black ledger.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Understandably, there isn\u2019t much public sympathy for foreign lobbyists such as Manafort. But the FBI and prosecutors should be required to play by the rules and use solid evidence when making its cases.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

It does not appear to have been the prevailing practice in the Russia collusion investigation. And that should trouble us all.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is becoming very obvious that the Mueller investigation did not follow normal investigative rules or procedures. When he knew that both pieces of evidence were totally unreliable, Robert Mueller should have ended the investigation. I suspect that would have been long before the 2018 mid-term election. Somehow I think the clown show we are currently seeing in the House of Representatives as a result of the Democrats taking the majority is at least partially the result of continuing the Mueller investigation combined with reckless, baseless charges made against the President by some Washington insiders now working in the media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Solomon posted an article at The Hill yesterday about some recent information dealing with the roots of the charges that candidate Donald Trump was colluding with the Russians. The article reports: And the behavior of FBI agents and federal … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12184,10802,790,11003,451,1619,11768,12168,9137,10982,3035,2861,11437,9533,11114],"class_list":["post-36372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-black-cash-ledger","tag-christopher-steele","tag-fbi","tag-federal-prosecutor","tag-house-of-representatives","tag-inspector-general","tag-john-solomon","tag-konstantin-kilimnik","tag-mark-meadows","tag-paul-manafort","tag-robert-mueller","tag-state-department","tag-steele-dossier","tag-the-hill","tag-trump-campaign"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36372"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36376,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36372\/revisions\/36376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}