Republicans have been accused of trying to discredit Trump-Russia investigator Robert Mueller by inventing a claim that his inquiry inappropriately gained access to emails from the president’s transition team.

The complaint from the Trump for America group comes a day after a warning from Adam Schiff, a senior Democrat, that top Republicans are manoeuvring to shut down the House intelligence committee’s Trump–Russia inquiry and weaken Mueller. Some reports suggest Donald Trump is considering firing Mueller, whom he appointed as special counsel to oversee the FBI and justice department investigation of contacts between the Russian government and Trump’s election campaign.

On Saturday it emerged that Mueller’s investigation has gained access to thousands of emails sent and received by officials on Donald Trump’s transition team, which operated between his election and swearing-in.

Kory Langhofer, general counsel for the transition group, has written to the Republican chairs of the House oversight committee and the Senate homeland security committee about what the transition contends was an “unauthorized” disclosure of its emails by the General Services Administration (GSA).

The GSA is a government agency that has supported presidential transitions in recent years and typically houses electronic transition records in its computer system. The transition team says the GSA did not get its permission to hand over the emails.

But Eric Swalwell, a Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said: “This is another attempt to discredit Mueller as his Trump–Russia probe tightens.

“‘Private documents’ on a US government, public email system? What are they afraid was found? Baloney.”

In a series of tweets, Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, said the Republicans were “playing politics – but this is a bad sign for them”.

“Of course Mueller obtained emails from a third party,” he said. “Prosecutors in most white collar criminal investigations do that. It’s not ‘inappropriate’ or even unusual. Anyone who claims otherwise has no idea what they’re talking about.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/17/republicans-accused-of-c...

NO CRIME HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED. It's only an enquiry. THIS IS NOT "A WHITE COLLAR CRIME INVESTIGATION". The republicans are correct. The government is entitled to the secrecy of its deliberations. Otherwise may as well open the Pandora box of "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" which everyone in the Bush administration would have had to know DID NOT EXIST. In the same breath, the investigation will not find one skerrick of evidence linking the Kremlin with La Woman's defeat. The Evangelicals had all to do with tilting the scales in favour of Trump. And this is the inconvenient truth...

At the end of this banner stock market year, you can bet that major business publications will be naming their investor of the year. You can stop now. I have the winner, and nobody is even close when it comes to his total return on investment: Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.

A recent report in The Washington Post, quoting intelligence sources, said Putin may have spent less than $500,000 to hack our last election and help (though Hillary helped much more) Donald Trump become president. And Putin’s payoff is Trump’s first year: a president who is simultaneously eroding some of our most basic norms, undermining some of our most cherished institutions and enacting a mammoth tax bill that will not make America great again.

If you assume, as I do, that Putin wants to see an America that is not an attractive model for his own people or others to emulate, and that he wants an America run by a chaos president who cannot lead the West, then Trump is his dream come true, whether or not there was any collusion between them.

So Vladimir Putin, come on up! You’re my Investor of the Year. You’re the Warren Buffett of geopolitics.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/opinion/merry-christmas-vladimir-your-friend-donald.html

The beauty of the "investment" in Trumpcoins here is that Putin did not have to invest. Not even participate in the idea. And he did not. The USA, themselves got their knickers in knots by believing Putin had invested and thus the USA is carrying on deluding themselves. Trump knows that all this is bullshit, but the US "liberal" media is still sore from having supported Hillary and getting egg on their faces. Instead of finding the real culprits, they want to blame Putin for it all. Let's be clear: THE RUSSIANS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH DONALD'S VICTORY. Investing in Trumpcoins would have been useless for Putin. He guess right what was coming, including a loony mad Donald, because he is a clever man.... He did not have to pay for anything. The USA would scuttle their own future and promote their own shit. Easy...

Fellow guest Max Blumenthal, a journalist who also attended the 2015 event, explained that Stein's motive for attending was to talk about peace initiatives.

"Jill had an agenda which was to talk about nuclear proliferation and de-escalation in Syria with any official she could meet with," Blumenthal said. "In the end she only wound up speaking briefly with an official in the Russian Duma… and they discussed her agenda, which she laid out on the Green Party's website."

The issue that triggered the Stein probe, Blumenthal speculates, was a photograph that showed Stein seated at the same table as Michael Flynn and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

— Ian Saint (@realiansaint) March 30, 2017

​"Problem was that after the banquet there was a photograph of Jill seated at a table… with a general who no one knew at the time… they referred to him dismissively as the ‘Obama general,'" Blumenthal said. "This is really the basis of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation."

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201712201060150536-senate-investigation...

WASHINGTON — George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, has hovered on the fringes of international diplomacy for three decades. He was a back-channel negotiator with Syria during the Clinton administration, reinvented himself as an adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, and last year was a frequent visitor to President Trump’s White House.

Mr. Nader is now a focus of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. In recent weeks, Mr. Mueller’s investigators have questioned Mr. Nader and have pressed witnesses for information about any possible attempts by the Emiratis to buy political influence by directing money to support Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

The investigators have also asked about Mr. Nader’s role in White House policymaking, those people said, suggesting that the special counsel investigation has broadened beyond Russian election meddling to include Emirati influence on the Trump administration. The focus on Mr. Nader could also prompt an examination of how money from multiple countries has flowed through and influenced Washington during the Trump era.

How much this line of inquiry is connected to Mr. Mueller’s original task of investigating contacts between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia is unclear. The examination of the U.A.E. comes amid a flurry of recent activity by Mr. Mueller.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/us/politics/george-nader-mueller-investigation-united-arab-emirates.html

Holly mackerel... Mueller might actually find something naughty... with the Clinton administration, the Bush Presidency and Obama's "Yeswecan" policies... But Mueller should stop his inquiry. Unfortunately, Mueller likes being paid for doing "his job" which amounts to finding old dried shits in a crapper and so far has netted ZERO evidence of... What is he looking for again?

Let's say that the UAE would not have a bar of the Russians under their tent.

Read from top...

"So this is about Emirati influence peddling — standard operating procedure in Washington. But it's about influence peddling from the United Arab Emirates during the Trump era, which is one year and one country. So if you're going to go down that road of how leaders of other countries and wealthy individuals get meetings in the White House, get to pitch their their positions to the president personally and to his team, well, you're going to have to have an investigation of all of Washington for the past 50 years,' Kavanagh observed.

"But no, it's about Emirati influence peddling during the Trump era, so it's kind of bizarre that anybody think this is anything but a fishing expedition trying to find dirt on Trump. Who's trying to peddle influence? This has been going on for decades," Kavanagh said.

Becker pointed to an informal January 2017 meeting by a Russian businessman with Erik Prince, the founder and former CEO of infamous private military contractor Blackwater (now known as Academi) who is now head of the investment management firm Frontier Resource Group. Prince was not directly involved in the Trump campaign, save a visit to the transition team offices in December 2016.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201803081062332494-george-nader-uae-spe...

As mueller is looking for more shit to pour on Trump, he looks older by the minute like a moribund ghost of himself. Whether he finds something or not is opened to the idiotic decision to investigate all US presidents since Washington, their spouses and their dicks, like that of Bill Clinton. It's something that will keep the wound of US festering for another few years until Mueller decides to call it quits, retires and dies exhausted.

Read from top...

Two US House of Representatives members, Mark Meadows (R-NC) and Jim Jordan (R-OH), announced Wednesday they had filed a resolution to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into alleged Russian meddling in the US election system.

Meadows announced the resolution filing via Twitter, saying "we have had enough."

​The resolution has nine co-sponsors.

ABC noted that since this is not a privileged resolution, it doesn't have to be acted on quickly.

US President Donald Trump has made no secret of his enmity toward Rosenstein, either.

​Interestingly, both Meadows and Jordan were "shadow banned" on Twitter earlier Wednesday, Sputnik News reported, a practice that Twitter denies engaging in but in which searching for certain accounts on the social media site via the drop-down menu becomes impossible. Vice News published an expose of shadow-banning in practice Wednesday.

In the press release distributed Wednesday night, the lawmakers said:

"The impeachment articles come as evidence continues to mount regarding the Department of Justice's problematic decision-making during the 2016 campaign and conduct surrounding the transition to President Trump's administration in 2017. The impeachment articles are the result of nearly 9 months of unsuccessful Congressional attempts to force the Department of Justice (DOJ) to comply with oversight requests.

The failures cited within the articles include intentionally withholding embarrassing documents and information, knowingly hiding material investigative information from Congress, various abuses of the FISA process, and failure to comply with Congressional subpoenas, among others."

​"Multiple times we've caught DOJ officials hiding information from Congress, withholding relevant documents, or even outright ignoring Congressional subpoenas — and now we have evidence that Mr. Rosenstein signed off on a document using unverified political opposition research as a cornerstone of a FISA application to spy on an American citizen working for the Trump campaign."

"This level of conduct, paired with the failure to even feign and interest in transparency, is reprehensible. And whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, this kind of obstruction is wrong — period."

"The stonewalling over this last year has been just as bad or worse than under the Obama administration," Meadows said in a statement released Wednesday evening. "For 9 months we've warned them consequences were coming, and for 9 months we've heard the same excuses backed up by unacceptable conduct. Time is up and the consequences are here. It's time to find a new Deputy Attorney General who is serious about accountability and transparency."

Despite its claim to be investigating supposed Russian meddling in the US electoral process and possible collusion with Trump's presidential campaign, Mueller's indictments of Trump's campaign officials have only targeted white collar crimes that happened before Trump even announced his candidacy. House lawmakers have pressed for the Mueller indictment to end and as Number 2 in the DOJ, Rosenstein is the person in charge of that process.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201807261066690853-US-Lawmakers-File-Impeachm...

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I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt