FBI raids office of Michael Cohen, personal attorney to Donald Trump

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Trump's personal attorney who was engaged in representing him in various dealings during his campaign is not any where close to "anything goes". Its intellectually dishonest to suggest as such.

I did not suggest that. I am trying to get you and the others to define the limits of Mueller's mandate. So far you haven't offered anything other than "I know it when I see it." That standard doesn't cut it in a nation based on the rule of law.

Specifically when the thing he is most known for is a payoff to prevent dirt from coming out that would have hurt Trump's campaign

A lot of things could have hurt Trump's campaign. If Trump had a poorly tailored suit during one of his campaign events, that would have hurt his campaign. Is Trump's tailor a valid target under Mueller's purview?
 
I did not suggest that. I am trying to get you and the others to define the limits of Mueller's mandate. So far you haven't offered anything other than "I know it when I see it." That standard doesn't cut it in a nation based on the rule of law.



A lot of things could have hurt Trump's campaign. If Trump had a poorly tailored suit during one of his campaign events, that would have hurt his campaign. Is Trump's tailor a valid target under Mueller's purview?

This is Mueller's mandate

"
(i) any links andor coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and
(ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly fom the investigation; and
(iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a)."

Why do you believe that Trump's personal attorney falls outside that scope when Cohen was routinely performing duties both related to and in furtherance of that campaign?
 
This is Mueller's mandate

"
(i) any links andor coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and
(ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly fom the investigation; and
(iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a)."

Why do you believe that Trump's personal attorney falls outside that scope when Cohen was routinely performing duties both related to and in furtherance of that campaign?
I don't. I want to know where the boundaries are.
 
You've been given an example of the boundaries, as Mueller is not pursuing the current matters relating to Cohen himself.

Do you believe Mueller should have not passed on information relating to illegal acts outside the scope of his mandate?
 
Would a secretary at the Trump Organization be a valid target for Mueller's probe? How about a janitor?

The "Trump campaign" requires a strict definition. Our nation is supposed to be one of limited government. The blood-thirsty partisans in this thread want Mueller to be able to look everywhere for every reason. Sounds like China or Russia to me.

If you can't understand the difference between a janitor, a secretary and a campaign finance director who has admitted paying money for a non disclosure agreement, there is no use trying to explain it to you.
 
You've been given an example of the boundaries, as Mueller is not pursuing the current matters relating to Cohen himself.
He's not pursuing them, but he looked into them. What are the limits on what he is allowed to look into? Rosenstein's order mentions links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Nominally, Cohen was not a member of the Trump campaign. So how are you defining "Trump campaign"? Give me a straight answer: would a janitor or secretary of the Trump Organization be fair game?

Do you believe Mueller should have not passed on information relating to illegal acts outside the scope of his mandate?
No. In this regard, Mueller did the right thing.
 
If you can't understand the difference between a janitor, a secretary and a campaign finance director

Obviously I can understand the difference. You appear to be strawmanning me because you have no effective counter-argument.
 
This is Mueller's mandate

"
(i) any links andor coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and
(ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly fom the investigation; and
(iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a)."

Why do you believe that Trump's personal attorney falls outside that scope when Cohen was routinely performing duties both related to and in furtherance of that campaign?

Does Robert Mueller have any conflicts of interest in being appointed special prosecutor having formally been the head of the FBI?

Specifically, does Mueller have any ties to Fetullah Gulen?
 
I'm not. You, however, might hold the un-American view that the power of special counsel is unlimited.

I do not. I remember Ken Starr well enough. Which is why I can tell that all these criticisms of Mueller are ridiculous because I have seen how an actual partisan hack with unlimited power and acting in bad faith looks like.

Define "that level". That was the point from the beginning.

Anyone advising Trump and the leaders of the campaign.

Anyone who served as back channel contact between the campaign and any third party.

Anyone involved with the strategy and decision making process of the campaign, regardless of their formal position of lack thereof in its structure.

Anyone the Trumps are likely to have employed directly as bag-man for any shady dealings, because they were not officially affiliated with the campaign.

That sort of thing.
 
He's not pursuing them, but he looked into them. What are the limits on what he is allowed to look into? Rosenstein's order mentions links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Nominally, Cohen was not a member of the Trump campaign. So how are you defining "Trump campaign"? Give me a straight answer: would a janitor or secretary of the Trump Organization be fair game?

If they did any work for the Trump campaign, then YES.

ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY!

If Trump couldn't be bothered to keep a proper separation between his political campaign and his business dealings, then he has no right to complain when Mueller takes a look into the areas where the two overlap.
 
That's a nice story.

It might be correct, or not.




The goal of the Mueller probe is to find illicit links between the Russian government and Donald Trump or his high-level associates. So far the investigation hasn't found any such links---people will quibble about Manafort but he had been under FBI investigation since at least 2014.

I'm just as confident as before that Donald Trump did not offer favors to the Russian government in exchange for Russian efforts to sway the election in Trump's favor. The main reason I'm confident is that it's a big stretch to think that Russia would be able to meaningfully impact the election results, and Trump wouldn't be so stupid as to stick his neck out for such little benefit.

Remember, water gate took years before indictments came, Same will happen here. You can't say they haven't found any links, Mueller is running a tight ship here.
 
Does Robert Mueller have any conflicts of interest in being appointed special prosecutor having formally been the head of the FBI?

No.

The FBI is not the subject of the investigation.

Specifically, does Mueller have any ties to Fetullah Gulen?

What the fuck does that guy have to do with anything?!
 
I think Trump has been a sleazy guy throughout his life. If you look hard enough, you'll find something illegal that he or his associates were involved in. But it strains credulity to think that he traded something to get Russia to hack the DNC or release the results of that hacking.

The anti-Trump partisans are being rational here. Most of them know that "Russian collusion" is a farce, but they believe that Mueller will find unrelated dirt that might take Trump down. That's all fine until the same overreach burns their favorite candidate. All of this is evidence of Dershowitz's position being correct.

It strains credulity to think that Russia wouldn't ask for and get something for the hack, actually. Especially since it was someone that had a kind of dependent relationship on them before the campaign even started.

And where have you been? It's always the case that Democratic candidates get investigated if they get too close to real power. The result--that only clean candidates get anywhere in the party--is very much acceptable to me. YMMV.
 
No.

The FBI is not the subject of the investigation.



What the fuck does that guy have to do with anything?!

Shielding the Radical Cleric Gulen: Special Counsel Robert Mueller MUST Step Down
SIBEL EDMONDS | OCTOBER 24, 2017
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General Michael Flynn, Former National Security Advisor to President Trump, is being investigated by Special Counsel for accepting legitimate payments from Turkish companies for researching and exposing Wanted Terrorist and Radical Islamist Fethullah Gulen and his $25+ Billion criminal network in the United States.

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is Special Counsel in charge of the case. He is the same Robert Mueller who used his position as Director of the FBI to shield and cover up Gulen’s criminal-terrorist network and operations, and take drastic measures to quash a whistleblower’s Gulen-related reports. These previous connections and actions by Mr. Mueller create a direct conflict of interest with his current position as Special Counsel in Flynn’s case, and require that he must immediately step down from the case.

………………………………………..

In May 2017 the Justice Department appointed Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, as special counsel to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.

Not long after being appointed Mr. Mueller began targeting former national security adviser Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, expanded the investigation beyond the Russia-Gate probe, and began a furious pursuit of Mr. Flynn’s Turkish connections and his vocal stand on the wanted radical Islamic Cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Mr. Mueller’s inquiries went from Russia-connections to Flynn’s outing of Gulen’s twenty five-billion-dollar sleeper terror cell in the United States. Not finding any substantial evidence against Flynn within the Russia-Gate scope, the Special Counsel team switched gears and started a Turkey-Gate. During the past several months Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors have used multiple grand juries to issue subpoenas for documents related to Mr. Flynn. All this despite President Trump’s demand that:

Mr. Mueller should confine his investigation to the narrow issue of Russia’s attempts to disrupt last year’s presidential campaign, not conduct an expansive inquiry into the finances of Mr. Trump or his associates.

Mr. Mueller’s prosecution team and F.B.I. agents have spent hours going over the details of Mr. Flynn’s perfectly legitimate business dealings with a Turkish-American businessman who worked with Mr. Flynn’s consulting business, the Flynn Intel Group. Why? Because the business arrangements included research for and exposure of the world’s largest radical Islamist network, operating in the United States for over two decades- the Gulen Network.

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The targeting of Mr. Flynn through consolidated Obama Whitehouse leaks and one-sided media attacks began six months prior to the Special Counsel appointment. It started with an editorial penned by Mr. Flynn on November 8, 2016, when he became the first public official to unabashedly expose the radical cleric long protected by multiple government agencies- the CIA, State Department and FBI, starting under President Bill Clinton’s administration:

The primary bone of contention between the U.S. and Turkey is Fethullah Gülen, a shady Islamic mullah residing in Pennsylvania whom former President Clinton once called his “friend” in a well circulated video.

Gülen portrays himself as a moderate, but he is in fact a radical Islamist. He has publicly boasted about his “soldiers” waiting for his orders to do whatever he directs them to do. If he were in reality a moderate, he would not be in exile, nor would he excite the animus of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government.



To professionals in the intelligence community, the stamp of terror is all over Mullah Gülen’s statements in the tradition of Qutb and al Bana. Gülen’s vast global network has all the right markings to fit the description of a dangerous sleeper terror network. From Turkey’s point of view, Washington is harboring Turkey’s Osama bin Laden.



However, funding seems to be no problem for Gülen’s network. Hired attorneys work to keep the lucrative government source of income for Gülen and his network going. Influential charities such as Cosmos Foundation continue their support for Gulen’s charter schools. Incidentally, Cosmos Foundation is a major donor to Clinton Foundation. No wonder Bill Clinton calls Mullah Gülen “his friend.”

By writing and publishing this strong commentary Lt. General Flynn not only took on the enormously powerful Gulen’s terrorist network, but also the wrath of the CIA and the FBI, the Intelligence and law enforcement agencies tasked with bringing Gulen into the United States in 1998, his grooming, and his ongoing protection for over two decades.

FBI Director Mueller & the Gulen Case Cover-Up

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Former FBI Director Robert Mueller was directly involved in quashing and covering up Gulen and Gulen Network related cases within the FBI’s Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and White-Collar Crime divisions. The dossiers and mountains of criminal and espionage evidences on Gulen’s network resided in multiple FBI field offices, with the FBI’s Washington D.C., Chicago, and New Jersey Field Offices being the three most important investigative centers on the case.

Mr. Mueller was the primary official responsible for the invocation of the State Secrets Privilege, gag orders and retroactive classification of congressional records in my case, the Sibel Edmonds Case, a large part of which pertained to criminal, terrorism and espionage related operations conducted by Fethullah Gulen and his Networks in the United States.

Gulen’s money laundering and terrorism-related operations have been known to the FBI for two decades. It was only after the attempted coup in Turkey that some of these facts began surfacing in the mainstream media:

Over the past two decades, Gulen’s Turkish followers have opened up taxpayer-funded charter schools in the U.S. Some parents have expressed concern about the connection to the Gulen movement, while others don’t seem to mind. But CBS News has learned the FBI is investigating whether Gulen’s followers have skimmed money from those schools in order to fund his movement in Turkey. A senior State Department official believes Gulen-linked charities and educational institutions in the U.S. look “a lot like the ways in which organized crime sets itself up... to hide money for money laundering.”



Based on information provided by Emanet, federal investigators believe former officials at his Ohio school illegally paid themselves about $5 million in federal contracts and then sent those U.S. tax dollars to Bank Asya, a bank in Turkey linked to Gulen’s followers.

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In March of 2016 the following report erased any doubts about Gulen’s terrorist and criminal activities in the US - spanning over two decades:

Living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, with a net worth of around $25 billion, Turkish Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen has catalyzed a global movement of charter schools from Africa to Latin America into the United States. Building private schools in over 180 countries around the world, the global Gülen movement has paved the way for the largest U.S. charter school network with more than 140 schools in some 26 states.

What lies underneath this charter-school network, however, is a possible undercurrent of white-collar crime and corruption. Known in Turkey as the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization or FETÖ this growing network is being investigated by the FBI for everything from fraud and malpractice, to misuse of public funds. One spokeswoman for the bureau said that an investigation is ongoing and FBI agents carried out raids at 19 Gülen-affiliated charter schools in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio in 2014.



Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks demonstrate a concern by U.S. officials that these Turkish teachers and businesses “might be using the reputation of the school as a cover to get to the U.S.” These cables state that the H1B visa applications were “not convincing” and that Gülen’s more moderate message “cloaks a more sinister and radical agenda.”



Receiving approximately $150 million a year in tax breaks and subsidies, government officials are increasingly concerned that taxpayer dollars are being used to fund a close-knit network of Turkish teachers and businesses using charter schools as a Trojan horse for embedding into the U.S. education system.

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In March 2016, Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark went on record and stated that the United States has become a part of Turkey's problems for letting Fethullah Gülen, who is wanted in Turkey, stay in the U.S. Clark went on adding that he found it strange how Gulen has been allowed to remain and operate in the United States:

We are even part of that. One of the most wanted people in Turkey is a man named Gülen, a former ally of President Erdoğan, who is in the United States, running a network of charter schools subsidized by the United States. Very strange," he added.

Documents from Wikileaks has shown that American officials have been worried Gülen could be targeting children across the U.S. through running over 125 Gülen charter schools in 25 states:

In 2005, one U.S. embassy worker expressed concern about the schools: “We have multiple reliable reports that the Gülenists use their school network (including dozens of schools in the U.S.) to cherry pick students they think are susceptible to being molded as proselytizers,” U.S. Embassy officials in Ankara said in a 2005 report. And we have steadily heard reports about how the schools indoctrinate boarding students,” they said.”

Despite the publication of mounting criminal evidence against Gulen’s operations, to this date the FBI has continued shielding this terrorist:

The Chicago Sun-Times reports on Concept Schools, a charter school network in the Midwest funded by the Gülen movement. Though an ongoing FBI investigation has found the schools divert Illinois taxpayer dollars to Gülen-affiliated contractors, the Concept network continues to receive government funds:

Days after federal agents swept into the headquarters of Concept Schools and a charter school it operates in Rogers Park in June 2014, top Chicago Public Schools officials took notice of the raids on the taxpayer-funded charter operator but decided to steer clear.

More than two years since the FBI raids brought the still-ongoing federal investigation involving Concept to light, the charter operator has continued to do business with contractors identified in court documents as allegedly having been involved in defrauding a government grant program, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.





As the longest serving FBI Director, Mr. Mueller was in charge of the FBI’s investigations and pursuit of Gulen and his network for eleven years. During his tenure he not only continued the same policy and practices of his predecessors in shielding and protecting Gulen’s criminal network, he went even further by quashing and covering up reports and cases involving Gulen’s terrorist-criminal-espionage operations through retaliations, invocation of the State Secrets Privilege, and hindering Congressional oversight and investigations through retroactive classification.

Mr. Mueller, due to his direct involvement as former FBI Director and his role in covering up and protecting Gulen Networks’ criminal operations within the United States, by shutting down pertinent FBI investigative operations and by transferring certain terrorism related Gulen files to the counterintelligence division, has a major conflict of interest as Special Counsel targeting Flynn’s case as it pertains to exposing the Gulen network and his relationship with Turkish entities sharing the same interest in exposing and extraditing Fethullah Gulen. Thus, Mr. Mueller must step down from his position as Special Counsel in this case- a case targeting and probing Lt. General Michael Flynn.

https://www.newsbud.com/2017/10/24/...pecial-counsel-robert-mueller-must-step-down/
 
I think Trump has been a sleazy guy throughout his life. If you look hard enough, you'll find something illegal that he or his associates were involved in. But it strains credulity to think that he traded something to get Russia to hack the DNC or release the results of that hacking.

The anti-Trump partisans are being rational here. Most of them know that "Russian collusion" is a farce, but they believe that Mueller will find unrelated dirt that might take Trump down. That's all fine until the same overreach burns their favorite candidate. All of this is evidence of Dershowitz's position being correct.
It's already happened, remember Ken Starr?
 
It strains credulity to think that Russia wouldn't ask for and get something for the hack, actually. Especially since it was someone that had a kind of dependent relationship on them before the campaign even started.

And where have you been? It's always the case that Democratic candidates get investigated if they get too close to real power. The result--that only clean candidates get anywhere in the party--is very much acceptable to me. YMMV.
There's not much to say in response. I will note that if the Starr investigation had uncovered some illegal payments made by Clinton's attorney to a mistress, I would probably be yelling about overreach all the same. I'm all for investigating public officials, but mandates and their limits should be clearly stated.
 
Would a secretary at the Trump Organization be a valid target for Mueller's probe? How about a janitor?

The "Trump campaign" requires a strict definition. Our nation is supposed to be one of limited government. The blood-thirsty partisans in this thread want Mueller to be able to look everywhere for every reason. Sounds like China or Russia to me.

Lol you think investigators would be able to investigate Putin or Xi? Well, your head is up your ass if that's the case. Do you know who would have free reign to investigate the leader of their country? The federal investigators of every first world nation. Because that's democracy.

You are trying to shut down investigations of Trump as though he were Putin in Russia or Xi on China and you're too dumb to even know it.
 
@VivaRevolution that was an insightful post.

However,

You must realize Meuller has become the messiah of the left, they will bend over backwards to defend anything he has ever or will ever do, in hopes that somehow he’ll dig up some dirt on Trump.


My advice is to sit back and drink of their delicious tears.
 
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