Category: Politics

May 4 transcript from the USA v. Manafort hearing in front of Judge Ellis.

Source: TechnoFog

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Judge Ellis immediately lays out his understanding of the Manafort case: The criminal indictment relates back to 2005, 2007, etc., that the DOJ investigation of Manafort had been going on for years.

The Special Counsel (SC) concedes that fact.

Judge: When SC was appointed, did DOJ turn over their Manafort file to you?

Special Counsel: [Evades]

Judge: “I’m sorry. Answer my question.”

Judge Ellis:

“If I look at the indictment, none of that information has anything to do with links or coordination between the Russian gov’t and individuals associated with the campaign of Donald Trump.”

Judge Ellis recognizes what this is: an attempt by Mueller to squeeze Manafort. He likens the whole thing to a small-time drug dealer getting pinched.

“I think we out to be very clear about these facts and what is happening.”

The Judge lays out his correct observation that this case is all about leverage
against Manafort.

He asks the Special Counsel if that assessment is wrong.

The Special Counsel refuses to answer the question. Twice.

Judge: How does the 2005/2007 bank fraud have anything to do with coordination b/w the Russians and the Trump campaign?

Special Counse: [More evasion]

Judge: “You’re running away from my question again.”

Important exchange here.

SC explains to the Judge that the indictments are w/in the scope of the SC appointment: leads from the prior DOJ case eventually contributed to and led to the indictment.

The Judge isn’t convinced.

SC: If the investigation is valid, the crimes that arose from that investigation are w/in the SC’s authority to prosecute.

Judge: “Even though it didn’t arise from your investigation. It arose from a preexisting investigation.”

lol.

An amazingly arrogant sequence here by team Mueller.

The SC is basically telling the Judge that grants of authority to the Special Counsel cannot be challenged through the courts.

Not “judicially enforceable.”

That is what elicited Judge Ellis’s response that we don’t want “unfettered power.”

Judge Ellis continues, saying he’s not going to be persuaded that Mueller has “unlimited powers to do anything” Mueller wants.

Here, Judge Ellis is requesting the full August 2 Rosenstein memo.

Important Q: What if the memo proves right Judge Ellis’s suspicions about the SC being a means to impeachment?

Eventually the SC sits down and it’s Manafort’s lawyer’s turn.

Judge Ellis to Manafort’s lawyer: Does the 8/2 memo remedy any issue with Mueller’s jurisdiction?

Manafort’s lawyer: No. It can’t retroactively be remedied.

Judge: Isn’t the right result to give the case back to the EDVA USAO?

Manafort lawyer: No – Mueller had no authority to conduct a grand jury investigation, to get search warrants, to get the indictment.

[Personal note: I just don’t see the judge going that far.]

It’s time to start punching back: Manafort’s lawyer almost accuses the SC of lying to the court about whether the indictment “arose from” the SC investigation.

The SC’s arguments are “absolutely erroneous.”

This statement by the SC proves that Rosenstein has hid the true scope of the Mueller probe – and how it has expanded/shifted – from the public.

And here we go: Judge Ellis gets after the SC for trying to have it both ways.

The result – “Come on, man”

Important. Judge Ellis explains the Mueller’s end game:

“You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment or whatever. That’s what you’re really interested in.”

After going through all that, they get back to the real issue: Are the Rosenstein memos from May 2017 and August 2017 sufficient to confer jurisdiction to the Special Counsel?

Judge Ellis contemplating why the Manafort case couldn’t be sent to the EDVA USAO office by referencing the Michael Cohen case:

“Wasn’t there a matter in NY recently that the special counsel returned to the Southern District of New York?”

Judge Ellis poses a question (a Q to which he will later provided an answer), asking why the Cohen was referred to the SDNY.

Special Counsel “not at liberty” to answer that question….

However, the Judge has his own theory:

Did the SC farm out the Cohen case because it wasn’t within the SC’s jurisidction, or….

Did it have SDNY handle the Cohen case because they “can’t use this to further [the Special Counsel’s] core effort, which is to get to Trump”

The SC’s explanation as to why the Cohen case is different from the Manafort case isn’t convincing.

Judge Ellis then tells the SC that the indictment does not mention:

(1) Russian individuals
(2) Russian banks
(3) Russian money
(4) Russian payments to Manafort

The SC concedes that fact.

The hearing closed with a request from Manafort’s lawyer that internal DOJ memos regarding the appointment and scope of the Special Counsel’s authority/jurisdiction be produced.

Apparently, rat-faced Rosenstein loves memos.

The judge took that under advisement.

President Trump is angry and for good reasons.
Following is his response to FBI raids on the office and home of his personal attorney Michael Cohen. As well, he expressed again disappointment in Attorney General Jeff Session for authorizing the ongoing action.

TRANSCRIPT via Citizen Free Press
So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys — a good man. And it’s a disgraceful situation. It’s a total witch hunt. I’ve been saying it for a long time. I’ve wanted to keep it down. We’ve given, I believe, over a million pages’ worth of documents to the Special Counsel.

They continue to just go forward. And here we are talking about Syria and we’re talking about a lot of serious things. We’re the greatest fighting force ever. And I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now — and actually, much more than that. You could say it was right after I won the nomination, it started.

And it’s a disgrace. It’s, frankly, a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.
So when I saw this and when I heard it — I heard it like you did — I said, that is really now on a whole new level of unfairness.

So this has been going on — I saw one of the reporters, who is not necessarily a fan of mine, not necessarily very good to me. He said, in effect, that this is ridiculous; this is now getting ridiculous. They found no collusion whatsoever with Russia. The reason they found it is there was no collusion at all. No collusion. This is the most biased group of people. These people have the biggest conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen.

Democrats all — or just about all — either Democrats or a couple of Republicans that worked for President Obama, they’re not looking at the other side; they’re not looking at the Hillary Clinton — the horrible things that she did and all of the crimes that were committed. They’re not looking at all of the things that happened that everybody is very angry about, I can tell you, from the Republican side, and I think even the independent side. They only keep looking at us.

So they find no collusion, and then they go from there and they say, “Well, let’s keep going.” And they raid an office of a personal attorney early in the morning. And I think it’s a disgrace.

So we’ll be talking about it more. But this is the most conflicted group of people I’ve ever seen. The Attorney General made a terrible mistake when he did this, and when he recused himself. Or he should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself, and we would have used a — put a different Attorney General in. So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country. But you’ll figure that out.

All I can say is, after looking for a long period of time — and even before the Special Counsel — because it really started just about from the time I won the nomination. And you look at what took place and what happened, and it’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace.

I’ve been President now for what seems like a lengthy period of time. We’ve done a fantastic job. We’ve beaten ISIS. We have just about 100 percent of the caliphate or the land. Our economy is incredible. The stock market dropped a lot today as soon as they heard the noise of this nonsense that’s going on. It dropped a lot. It was up — way up, and then it dropped quite a bit at the end. A lot.

But that we have to go through that — we’ve had that hanging over us now from the very, very beginning. And yet the other side, they don’t even bother looking. And the other side is where there are crimes, and those crimes are obvious. Lies, under oath, all over the place. Emails that are knocked out, that are acid-washed and deleted. Nobody has ever seen — 33,000 emails are deleted after getting a subpoena for Congress, and nobody bothers looking at that. And many, many other things.

So I just think it’s a disgrace that a thing like this can happen. With all of that being said, we are here to discuss Syria tonight. We’re the greatest fighting force anywhere in the world. These gentlemen and ladies are incredible people, incredible talent, and we’re making a decision as to what we do with respect to the horrible attack that was made near Damascus. And it will be met, and it will be met forcefully. And when, I will not say, because I don’t like talking about the timing.

But we are developing the greatest force that we’ve ever had. We had $700 billion just approved, which was the reason I went along with that budget because we had to fix our military. General Mattis would tell you that above anybody. We had to fix our military. And right now, we’re in a big process of doing that. Seven-hundred billion and then $716 billion next year.
So we’re going to make a decision tonight, or very shortly thereafter. And you’ll be hearing the decision. But we can’t let atrocities like we all witnessed — and you can see that and it’s horrible — we can’t let that happen. In our world, we can’t let that happen, especially when we’re able to — because of the power of the United States, because of the power of our country — we’re able to stop it.

I want to thank Ambassador John Bolton for joining us. I think he’s going to be a fantastic representative of our team. He’s highly respected by everybody in this room. And, John, I want to thank you very much. This is going to be a lot of work. Interesting day. He picked today as his first day. So, Generals, I think he picked the right day. But certainly, you’re going to find it very exciting. But you are going to do a fantastic job and I appreciate you joining.

AMBASSADOR BOLTON: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Thank you all very much.
Q Are you concerned about what the FBI might find, Mr. President? Do you have any concern?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I’m not.
Q Why don’t you just fire Mueller?
THE PRESIDENT: Why don’t I just fire Mueller?
Q Yeah, just fire the guy.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think it’s a disgrace what’s going on. We’ll see what happens. But I think it’s really a sad situation when you look at what happened. And many people have said, “You should fire him.” Again, they found nothing. And in finding nothing, that’s a big statement. If you know the person who’s in charge of the investigation, you know about that. Deputy Rosenstein — Rod Rosenstein — he wrote the letter, very critical, of Comey.
One of the things they said: “I fired Comey.” Well, I turned out to do the right thing, because if you look at all of the things that he’s done and the lies, and you look at what’s gone on at the FBI with the insurance policy and all of the things that happened — turned out I did the right thing.
But he signed — as you know, he also signed the FISA warrant. So Rod Rosenstein, who’s in charge of this, signed a FISA warrant, and he also signed a letter that was essentially saying to fire James Comey. And he was right about that. He was absolutely right.
So we’ll see what happens. I think it’s disgraceful, and so does a lot of other people. This is a pure and simple witch hunt.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank all very much.

Q Any more clarity on who was responsible, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: Say it?
Q Any more clarity on who was responsible for the chemical weapons attack?
THE PRESIDENT: We are getting clarity on that — who was responsible for the weapons attack. We are getting some very good clarity, actually. We have some pretty good answers.
Q What are your options?
THE PRESIDENT: We have a lot of options, militarily. And we’ll be letting you know pretty soon. Probably after the fact.
Thank you all very much.

According to Breitbart

‘A caravan of more than 1,500 families including men, women, and children are making their way from Central America through Mexico and are expected to arrive at the US-Mexico Border in the coming days to request refugee status.

Known as the Viacrucis Migrante 2018, the caravan began on March 25 in the state of Chiapas and is expected to reach Tijuana within a month where the members of the group are expected to request refugee status from the U.S. government. The caravan is organized by the immigrant rights group Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People without borders) who have been posting updates about the caravan’s journey through Mexico. 

The group is reportedly made up of familes from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras who are fleeing extreme poverty and gang violence. The group has been demanding a stop to the violence.

While the group is made up primarily of individuals who could be considered undocumented by Mexican authorities, officials have stepped aside, Mexico’s El Universal reported. Additionally, the group has been thankful to the local governments in various rural communities in southern Mexico for helping the caravan by providing transportation, food, and other aid.’

Thoughts on this:
– Media plays down the real number of people by hiding it behind the ‘family’ word. So, there are 1500 families coming over. How many people are in each family? 4-5? This would bring the number of people at minimum 6000.
– It looks like Europe 2.0, only with Latin population vs Muslims
– In Europe they blamed it on Western powers military interventions in Syria, Afghanistan, and other shit holes , or on ex European colonies that were ‘exploited’ by the same Western powers and now we have to basically pay retribution.
– Here and now, these guys allegedly fled poverty and gang violence. Is it to be blamed on whom this time?
– This march sets a dangerous precedent. If a Communist organization like People without borders manages to organize and finish successfully such a movement, more are to come. That is 100% sure. See Europe again.
– Contrary to some hope that people with guns will act, it is not possible for a Militia type group to stop this wave of invaders, because the optics of gunning down women and children are abhorrent to most people.
– Make no mistake, the same type of propaganda used in Europe some years ago will follow shortly. They are going to be depicted like desperate people who just ‘want a better life’. Pictures taken by zealous journalists will be plastered all over.
– Is President Trump ready to declare some type of emergency and use military intervention at the borders?
– This operation is well funded, scripted and organized by the usual suspects I assume (Soros?).

Final tought belongs to President Trump:

Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release. Getting more dangerous. “Caravans” coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2018

Sun Tzu: “Appear weak when you are strong”.

As a matter of National Security I've signed the Omnibus Spending Bill. I say to Congress: I will NEVER sign another bill like this again. To prevent this omnibus situation from ever happening again, I'm calling on Congress to give me a line-item veto for all govt spending bills! https://t.co/kYwMk5AE5k

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2018

After one last attempt to play the tough one

I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2018

President Trump delivered a hard slap in the face of his supporters and signed the over 2200 pages, 1.3 trillion Omnibus spending bill.

The UniParty won; the Democrats are ecstatic and for sure RINO celebrate.
The little guy probably lost big time.

As Canadians one may think that we did not have a dog in this fight; however, we have been emotionally involved in this presidency, even more considering the fiasco we have at home. For some of us, President Trump was the ray of sunshine, the light at the end of the tunnel that was not the train.
Instead of that we realized once again that you can’t fight the globalists. They are way too strong, too organized and mostly, too rich to be defeated.

This twitter is what most of us feel right now
“You did have a choice. There’s always a choice. You betrayed us with what you did. We have fought for you. We have lost friends/family for you. We have become targets for you. Yes, you did have a choice. Fix this.”

Except is nothing to be fixed. It is a done deal.

I was trying to think logically and understand what was going on behind the scenes.
I get it that President Trump needed money to fix the military problems created by ex President 44.
The Democrats, smart as they are, in cooperation with the traitors Republicans put two and two together and in exchange for money for the military they asked and allocated lots of money for their favourite causes: Planned Parenthood, sanctuary cities, Obamacare, Chuck Schumer’s tunnel, etc.
President Trump got the money for the military but lost the support of the people who elected him.
Did it paved the way to an eventual impeachment?

Some people still believe that he knows what he is doing because he sees the big plan, he plays 30D chess, that he would not have signed this piece of huge crap without a good reason.

To me, he looked defeated.
The Swamp won, it remains in power, protected and with fresh new votes that would ensure their majority in November.

And we go full circle back to the impeachment I mentioned before.

Now for the ‘the glass is half full’ analysis:
– President Trump signed the Omnibus bill to get $700 billion for the military as it was his #1 priority
– That will rebuild the military morale destroyed by Obama and eventually make the United States strong against the enemies like Iran and North Korea.
– Omnibus is not a budget, just a temporary stop gap spending measure; it has ‘instructions’ to how the money will be spend; however, President Trump may decide otherwise
– Ex P44 did the same thing and never had a budget during his 8 years of presidency
– The Cabal signed their own death certificate as now the Military is fully funded and ready to drain the swamp.

South Africa aka Zimbabwe 2.0 made the worst nightmare of minority white population become a sad and scary reality.

Twenty-four years ago, the Whites accepted to end the apartheid system under a clear and explicit guarantee, written in the Constitution, that their land would never be stolen.

That was then and this is now: on Tuesday, February 27, 2018, the South African parliament voted to move forward and amend the Constitution to allow for confiscation of land from the white minority without compensation.

According to News.com.au “The motion was brought by Julius Malema, leader of the radical Marxist opposition party the Economic Freedom Fighters, and passed overwhelmingly by 241 votes to 83 against. The only parties who did not support the motion were the Democratic Alliance, Freedom Front Plus, Cope and the African Christian Democratic Party.

It was amended but supported by the ruling African National Congress and new president Cyril Ramaphosa, who made land expropriation a key pillar of his policy platform after taking over from ousted PM Jacob Zuma earlier this month.

“The time for reconciliation is over. Now is the time for justice,” Mr Malema was quoted by News24 as telling parliament. “We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land.”

Whites own the land because they colonized it and built it from nothing starting in the 1600’s. They literally “drained the swamps” covering many parts of South Africa and built giant farms in their place.

We know how ‘well’ that went for Zimbabwe when President Mugabe did the same thing.In 2000 Robert Mugabe shocked the world when he made dramatic changes to land ownership laws in Zimbabwe which resulted in thousands of white Zimbabwean farmers being forced to give up their farms and many to leave the country.
Those white farmers owned 70% of the most arable land in the country which they had inherited from a colonial past built on racial hierarchy.
A few years later, the reality sinked in.
According to The Guardian‘During the election campaign in March, the president said he was disappointed that only 44% of the land seized from whites was being cultivated and that the remainder was lying fallow.

He has also had to admit that Zimbabwe, once called “the breadbasket of Africa”, needs to import food to feed its population. For months he had boasted that the country had a bumper harvest and would “choke” if it was forced to take international food aid’

Part of the white farmes moved to Zambia, bringing with them the know- how and the desire to succeed. Now, under the new President Mnangagwa, the land reform seems to be ‘inevitable’ considering that land management is key to economic recovery.
Earlier this month, deputy finance minister Terence Mukupe travelled to neighbouring Zambia to engage former white Zimbabwean farmers who have settled there.

One would think that South Africa would learn from their neighbour’s mistakes. Instead of that, they would go the same way while expecting different results.