{"id":36665,"date":"2019-07-25T12:42:14","date_gmt":"2019-07-25T16:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=36665"},"modified":"2019-07-25T12:42:14","modified_gmt":"2019-07-25T16:42:14","slug":"the-plot-thickens-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=36665","title":{"rendered":"The Plot Thickens"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Monday, John Solomon posted an article at The Hill<\/a> stating that in early June 2017 prosecutor Andrew Weissmann<\/a> quietly reached out to the American lawyers for Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash<\/a> with a tempting offer: Give us some dirt on Donald Trump<\/a><\/span> in the Russia case, and Team Mueller might make his 2014\u00a0U.S. criminal charges<\/a> go away. Wow.<\/p>\n

The article further reports:<\/p>\n

The DOJ, Mueller\u2019s office and Weissmann did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment on Monday.<\/strong><\/p>\n

At first blush, one might ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s the big deal?\u201d It\u2019s not unusual for federal prosecutors to steal a page from Monty Hall\u2019s \u201cLet\u2019s Make a Deal\u201d script during plea negotiations.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

But Weissmann\u2019s overture was wrapped with complexity and intrigue far beyond the normal federal case, my sources indicate.<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the time, pressure was building inside the DOJ and the FBI to find smoking-gun evidence against Trump in the Russia case because the\u00a0Steele dossier<\/a> \u2014 upon which the early surveillance warrants were based \u2014 was turning out to be an uncorroborated mess. (\u201cThere\u2019s no big there there,\u201d lead FBI agent\u00a0Pete Strzok texted<\/a> a few days before Weissmann\u2019s overture.)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Likewise, key evidence that the DOJ used to indict Firtash on corruption charges in 2014 was falling apart. Two central witnesses were in the process of recanting testimony, and a document the FBI portrayed as bribery evidence inside Firtash\u2019s company was exposed as a hypothetical slide from an American consultant\u2019s PowerPoint presentation, according to court records I reviewed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

In other words, the DOJ faced potential embarrassment in two high-profile cases when Weissmann made an unsolicited approach on June 4, 2017, that surprised even Firtash\u2019s U.S. legal team.<\/strong><\/p>\n

To some, the offer smacked of being desperately premature. Mueller\u00a0was appointed<\/a> just two weeks earlier, did not even have a full staff selected, and was still getting up to speed on the details of the investigation. So why rush to make a deal when the prosecution team still was being selected, some wondered.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Please follow the link to read the entire article.<\/p>\n

The article concludes:<\/p>\n

Weissmann long has been a favorite target of conservatives, in part because his earlier work as a\u00a0prosecutor in the Enron case<\/a> was overturned unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court because of overly aggressive prosecutorial tactics. Former DOJ official Sidney Powell strongly condemned Weissmann\u2019s past work as a prosecutor in \u201cLicensed to Lie<\/a>,\u201d a book critical of DOJ\u2019s pressure tactics.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is now clear that Weissmann\u2019s overture to a Ukrainian oligarch in the summer of 2017 is about to take on new significance in Washington, where Mueller is about to testify, and in Austria, where Firtash\u2019s extradition fight has taken a new twist.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is reminiscent of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, head of Stalin’s secret police. He told Stalin, “Show<\/b> me<\/b> the<\/b> man<\/b> and<\/b> I’ll<\/b> find you the crime<\/b>.”.\u00a0 It seems as if that was the approach of the Mueller investigation of President Trump, regardless of who was actually leading the investigation.<\/p>\n

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On Monday, John Solomon posted an article at The Hill stating that in early June 2017 prosecutor Andrew Weissmann quietly reached out to the American lawyers for Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash with a tempting offer: Give us some dirt on … 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":[12238,12237,11768,11979,12089,4674,10589,1083,11978,11437,9533],"class_list":["post-36665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-andrews-weissmann","tag-dmitry-firtash","tag-john-solomon","tag-licensed-to-lie","tag-mueller-investigation","tag-negotiation","tag-president-trump","tag-russia","tag-sidney-powell","tag-steele-dossier","tag-the-hill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36665","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=36665"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36667,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36665\/revisions\/36667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}