Tag: Trump campaign

Businessman who testified in Mueller probe indicted on child pornography charges

A wealthy Lebanese-American businessman and Middle East expert who was a witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation has been indicted on charges of importing child pornography and traveling with a minor to engage in illegal sexual activity.

George Nader, 60, entered a not guilty plea through his attorney Friday morning in federal court in Alexandria, Va., during a brief arraignment on the new indictment, which was returned July 3 and unsealed Friday.

Nader was involved in various meetings and discussions related to the Trump presidential transition that drew the attention of Mueller investigators, including a meeting that Erik Prince, the founder of private military contractor Blackwater, held with a Russian ally of President Vladimir Putin in the Seychelles in January 2017.

View the complete July 19 article by Josh Gerstein on the Politico website here.

Trump 2020: Loathing and Fear of Losing

The president is setting up his reelection run to be about socialism, ‘the squad’ and scaring voters about the Democratic Party.

THE ONLY SURPRISING aspect to President Donald Trump’s racially charged tirade this week is that some seemed surprised by it.

“Yet again this president finds a new low,” said Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota, a home state colleague to Rep. Ilhan Omar, the prime target of Trump’s invective.

But for a president who has shattered nearly every conventional rule of politics and endured a cascade of uproars – from his birther campaign to insulting a national war hero to the “Access Hollywood” tape to the two-year wide-reaching investigation into his curious relationship with Russia – Trump has been taught that survival requires brazen, line-crossing, double-fisted pugilism.

View the complete July 19 article by David Catanese on The U.S. News and World Report website here.

Judge Slaps Roger Stone With Social Media Restriction For Violating Order

Roger Stone has repeatedly risked his pre-trial freedom as he awaits the court battle over the charges brought against him by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. And once again on Tuesday, he skirted free of ending up in jail even as Judge Amy Berman Jackson found that he had violated her court order limiting his public comments about the case against him.

Instead of revoking his bail, Judge Jackson banned him from posting on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook while his trial is pending.

“The clarity of my order is undisputed,” said Jackson. “It didn’t take a week before the defendant was emailing BuzzFeed, calling a witness in this investigation a liar.”

View the complete July 16 article by Cody Fenwick from AlterNet on the National Memo website here.

Mueller testimony likely to be delayed for one week

The Hill logoFormer special counsel Robert Mueller’s public testimony before Congress is likely to be postponed until July 24, multiple sources familiar with the matter told The Hill. 

The House Judiciary Committee is negotiating for lawmakers to have more time to question Mueller about his investigation into Russian interference and potential obstruction of justice by President Trump, the sources said. They cautioned that the situation is fluid and is pending a final agreement by the Democrats on his appearance.

Mueller was initially scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees on Wednesday. The initial agreement was for Mueller to testify at two consecutive hearings before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, with his testimony limited to about two hours before each committee. Under the agreement, 22 lawmakers would be able to ask questions.  

View the complete July 12 article by Olivia Beavers and Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Trump Campaign Creates Fake ‘Supporters’ With Stock Images On Facebook

The Trump campaign is spending millions on Facebook ads for his 2020 reelection bid. But embarrassingly, according to a report from NBC News, the images of Trump supporters in those ads aren’t real Trump supporters — they’re images purchased from a stock photo service.Some of the images come from overseas. One of the stock models featured in Trump’s Facebook ads is identified as “Tracey in Florida” — but her video clips come from a French company that filed her stock video clips under “Young woman smiling and walking on the beach,” according to NBC News.

Another fake supporter, identified as “Thomas from Washington,” comes from stock video footage from a Turkish company that filed the clip under “bearded and tattooed hipster coffee shop owner posing,” NBC News reported.

View the complete July 7 article by Emily Singer on the National Memo website here.

Trump and R.N.C. Raised $105 Million in 2nd Quarter, a Sign He Will Have Far More Money Than in 2016

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — President Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee said on Tuesday they had raised $105 million in the second quarter of this year, outraising President Barack Obama in the equivalent period during his 2012 re-election campaign and signaling that Mr. Trump will have far more resources than he did in 2016.

The campaign and the committee said that they had a combined $100 million in cash on hand, and that they had raised more money online in the second quarter than in the first half of 2018. Mr. Trump and his committees raised $54 million, they said, and the Republican National Committee raised $51 million, money that can be plowed into television and digital advertising, get-out-the-vote efforts and other activities related to the 2020 election.

While Mr. Trump may be trailing the Democratic front-runners in the polls, his second-quarter numbers were a reminder that as an incumbent, he has advantages that were unavailable to him as an untraditional, first-time candidate in 2016.

View the complete July 2 article by Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman on The New York Times website here.

New study shows Russian propaganda may really have helped Trump

The study does not prove Russian interference swung the election to Trump. But it did find Trump’s poll numbers improved when Russian trolls were active.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and his allies have long insisted that Russian’s 2016 propaganda campaign on social media had no impact on the presidential election.

A new statistical analysis says it may well have.

The study, by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, does not prove that Russian interference swung the election to Trump. But it demonstrates that Trump’s gains in popularity during the 2016 campaign correlated closely with high levels of social media activity by the Russian trolls and bots of the Internet Research Agency, a key weapon in the Russian attack.

View the complete July 1 article by Ken Dilanian on the NBC News website here.

‘The enigma of the entire Mueller probe’: Focus on origins of Russian investigation puts spotlight on Maltese professor

Washington Post logoShortly after Joseph Mifsud’s efforts to help connect a Trump adviser with the Kremlin were detailed in court filings, an Italian reporter found him at a university in Rome, where he was serving as a visiting professor.

“I never got any money from the Russians: my conscience is clear,” Mifsud told La Repubblica. “I am not a secret agent.”

Then Mifsud disappeared.

View the complete June 30 article by Rosalind S. Helderman, Shane Harris and Ellen Nakashima on The Washington Post website here.

Paul Manafort’s legal problems keep going from bad to worse

AlterNet logoThe legal problems of Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, have been going from bad to worse. The 70-year-old Manafort is already serving seven and one-half years in federal prison, but when he appeared in a courtroom in New York City on Thursday, June 27, he was fighting separate accusations and entered a “not guilty” plea to mortgage fraud charges. And if he is ultimately convicted, there is a possibility that Manafort could end up with even more prison time.

The mortgage fraud charges Manafort pled “not guilty” to were not federal charges, but rather, charges in New York State and were part of an indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. And the fact that Vance is prosecuting Manafort at the state level is important.

In 2018, Manafort’s federal prosecution and trial in Alexandria, Virginia were a result of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Manafort was never accused of criminally conspiracy with Russian government officials, and when Mueller wrapped up his investigation earlier this year, he concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians — although questionable — never reached the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy. But Mueller’s team found a mountain of evidence of tax and bank crimes on Manafort’s part, and he was convicted on multiple counts last year.

View the complete June 28 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.