Kim Lamb/LVN A setting sun bathes the Stillwater Wildlife Refuge in the warm glow of days end.
Perhaps the most significant announcement on Oct. 30, 2017, was that George Papadopoulos was arrested on July 17, 2017. He entered a guilty plea to impeding the FBI’s Russia investigation by lying to the FBI. He is now cooperating with them in exchange for a recommendation of a reduced sentence. The official White House response was that “Papadopoulos was an unpaid volunteer to the Trump campaign and played no significant role.”
The President went a little further saying, “He was a liar whom nobody knew.” Actually he was a foreign policy adviser to candidate Trump who sat with a table of Trump’s foreign policy advisers. When candidate Trump was asked who was advising him on foreign policy, he specifically said George Papadopoulos, adding “ He’s a great guy.”
I guess he wasn’t a liar back then.
Don’t believe for one second that Papadopoulos, on his own, went to Russia to get dirt on Hillary Clinton and to see the promised e-mails the Russians had hacked into. Do you really think Trump didn’t know about this? Get real. Prosecutors are saying that Papadopoulos is a small piece in a much larger investigation.
On the same day former campaign manager for Trump, Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates, were arrested and taken to court after a Grand Jury, in a 31 page document, indicted them. Manafort is charged with 12 counts of criminal actions that include conspiracy against the United States.
Listen up. That’s conspiracy against his own country!
The charges include seven counts of failure to file reports on foreign bank accounts, failure to register as a foreign agent, money laundering, and lying to the FBI, among other things. The charges don’t preclude additional charges being brought later. Manafort’s support for the pro-Russian forces in the Ukraine is particularly disturbing.
The White House says this all happened a long time ago (evidently admitting it happened). Actually the charges range from the year 2000-2016. 2016 was just last year. Manafort’s charges are all based on documents seized by the FBI and will be difficult to defend.
There are those who say that Manafort’s indictments points to poor vetting by Trump. I don’t buy that at all. No one can convince me that Trump wasn’t totally aware of Manafort’s wrong doings. He thought his appointees would do as he wanted and look the other way. He didn’t count on Sessions recusing himself and the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel.
Trump’s predictable response was to say Hillary and Obama should be the target of Mueller because of their guilt. That’s absurd of course.
Someone needs to remind the President that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, even Manafort. Not a single ounce of Uranium has left the United States because of actions taken by an independent nine member board which Hillary had nothing to do with. Don’t believe the hyped up, absolutely ridiculous charges that 20 percent of our Uranium has been shipped to Russia. Total nonsense, says a high ranking former member of the Obama administration.
As for the funding of research on Trump, this type of research of an opponent has been going on since 1776 and is perfectly legit.
It seems every time a Republican is involved in some sort of scandal they say, yeah but look what the Democrats have done. Recently, New York Times reporter David Brooks did just that. He reports that since Watergate there have been 121 indictments with 89 convictions of members of Republican administrations. There have been three indictments with one conviction of members of Democratic administrations.
Here’s the breakdown: Richard Nixon, 76 indictments with 55 convictions, Gerald Ford one indictment with one conviction; Ronald Reagan, 26 indictments with 16 convictions; George H. W. Bush, one indictment and one conviction; George W. Bush, 16 indictments with 16 convictions. Jimmy Carter, one indictment with no convictions; Bill Clinton, two indictments with one conviction. The Obama administration is the only administration with zero indictments. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
So the first shoe has been dropped.
When the next shoe drops will it include indictments of the President’s son and son-in-law for seeking Russian help in providing dirt on Hillary?
By now everyone is aware of their meeting with Kremlin representatives in Trump Towers. They were not discussing adoptions!
And how about Michael Flynn, whose actions somewhat mirror those of Paul Manafort? I’m afraid many more shoes will drop before Mueller is finished. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see indictments for collusion, obstruction of justice, and misleading the FBI.
“Keep your shoes on Lucy don’t you know you’re in the City.”
Glen McAdoo, a Fallon Resident, can be contacted at glynn@pjhonewave.net. Keep it clean.