We are familiar with the pattern. Leak details about fake documents like the Steele dossier to the media, then use the media reports as a second source “corroborating” the unverified report when using it to justify your illegal actions.
More evidence of the deceitful and arguably illegal actions by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller has popped up, this time regarding Paul Manafort’s “black cash ledger” allegedly documenting criminal financial moves on his part and it parallels the criminality of the use of the Steele Dossier by the FBI to lie to the FISA court to authorize the surveillance of Team Trump and help launch Mueller’s failed Russia collusion probe.
Robert Mueller has not been honest with the American people either about the alleged Manafort ledger, mentioned in his final report, and used to justify military-style pre-dawn raid on Manafort’s home and offices with more force than was used at Benghazi. The Hill’s John Solomon reports that Mueller knew the ledger was a fake yet after its existence was leaked to the media used those media reports to justify his actions;
The ledger, which was reported in 2016 and resulted in Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign, purported to show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Manafort from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s political party between 2007 and 2012.
The FBI relied on this ledger to obtain search warrant affidavits “months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn’t be trusted and was likely a fake,” according to Solomon, who cites documents and over a dozen interviews.
Once again we have a phony document laundered though media reports to justify persecution and prosecution of the incoming Trump administration by deep state operatives who had been determined to keep Hillary Clinton out of jail and Donald Trump out of the White House. As Solomon reports:
In search warrant affidavits, the FBI portrayed the ledger as one reason it resurrected a criminal case against Manafort that was dropped in 2014 and needed search warrants in 2017 for bank records to prove he worked for the Russian-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine.
There’s just one problem: The FBI’s public reliance on the ledger came months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn’t be trusted and likely was a fake, according to documents and more than a dozen interviews with knowledgeable sources.
For example, Ukraine’s top anticorruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, told me he warned the U.S. State Department’s law enforcement liaison and multiple FBI agents in late summer 2016 that Ukrainian authorities who recovered the ledger believed it likely was a fraud…
Likewise, Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, a regular informer for the State Department, told the U.S. government almost immediately after The New York Times wrote about the ledger in August 2016 that the document probably was fake…
Special counsel Robert Mueller ’s team and the FBI were given copies of Kilimnik’s warning, according to three sources familiar with the documents.
As with the Steele dossier, the deep state conspirators knew early on there was no collusion with Russia, except on the Democratic side, but as was shown earlier in his career, the truth does not matter to Mueller and his associates such as “pit bull” Andrew Weismann. To derail Trump, fraud and fake evidence were a more than justified means to the end of framing and derailing Donald J. Trump.
Robert Mueller knew there was no collusion between Trump and Russia and knew that the reopened case against Manafort was itself a crime. As Solomon observes:
Submitting knowingly false or suspect evidence — whether historical or to support probable cause — in a federal court proceeding violates FBI rules and can be a crime under certain circumstances. “To establish probable cause, the affiant must demonstrate a basis for knowledge and belief that the facts are true,” the FBI operating manual states.
But with Manafort, the FBI and Mueller’s office did not cite the actual ledger — which would require agents to discuss their assessment of the evidence — and instead cited media reports about it. The feds assisted on one of those stories as sources.
For example, agents mentioned the ledger in an affidavit supporting a July 2017 search warrant for Manafort’s house, citing it as one of the reasons the FBI resurrected the criminal case against Manafort.
Mueller lied about the aforementioned Konstantin Kiliminik, citing him as being a Russian operative in his report while he was actually a State Department informant. Again, John Solomon reports in the Hill:
In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort , is tied to Russian intelligence
But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.
The incomplete portrayal of Kilimnik is so important to Mueller’s overall narrative that it is raised in the opening of his report. “The FBI assesses” Kilimnik “to have ties to Russian intelligence,” Mueller’s team wrote on Page 6, putting a sinister light on every contact Kilimnik had with Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman.
What it doesn’t state is that Kilimnik was a “sensitive” intelligence source for State going back to at least 2013 while he was still working for Manafort, according to FBI and State Department memos I reviewed.
Robert Mueller appears to have edited a voicemail transcript of a conversation between Trump attorney John Dowd and Michael Flynn attorney Robert Kelner to make it look as if Trump was trying to interfere with the Mueller witch hunt. As Professor Alan Dershowitz comments:
The report says attorney John Dowd reached out to Robert Kelner, a lawyer for Michael Flynn, after Flynn withdrew from a joint defense agreement with the Trump legal team and asked Kelner to give him a heads up. The report characterized the voicemail as an attempt by an attorney of the president to obstruct the cooperation of Flynn with the Mueller investigation, and that is also how much of the press covered it…
The edited version released by the special counsel omits the following important words: “I’m sympathetic… I understand that you can’t join the joint defense, so that’s one thing. If, on the other hand… we’ve got a national security issue… some issue we’ve got to deal with, not only for the president, but for the country… without you having to give up any… confidential information.” The Justice Department claims that the full transcript of the voicemail is consistent with the overall incident. Dowd disagrees, pointing out that by “taking out half my words, they changed the tenor and the contents” of his conversation with Kelner. He notes the irony of Mueller “who kept indicting and prosecuting people for process crimes” but then later “committed a false statement in his own report.”…
The request by Dowd was not only entirely proper for an attorney of the president but certainly obligatory for any defense attorney seeking critical information necessary to build his defense. By editing the transcript to fit their narrative, the special counsel team distorted the facts. If a lawyer were to provide a quotation in a court submission that omitted key words that undercut his argument, he would be subject to discipline.
Perhaps we need a special counsel to investigate the special counsel. As for Robert Mueller, follow the black cash and lock him up.
Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
