awy wrote:Clyde_Style wrote:awy wrote:The mueller group, particularly Weissmann and Mueller himself, has had some peculiar plea deal behavior in the past with Felix Sater, a central figure in the Trump situation. The basic situation is that Sater was granted an extremely extremely generous deal, including being allowed to keep illicit gains and continuing to engage in mob crime with full knowledge of the FBI. This is in exchange for some information in convicting a few side figures of the russian mob, nothing that reaches principal figures in the motherland or putting a stop to their continual operations.
one of the attorneys involved in fighting to unseal Sater documents that were sealed by Loretta Lynch in 2009 is skeptical of Mueller team's resolve in getting to the bottom of the situation but the recent convictions and pleas are certainly positive signs. However, given the level of information that is needed to convict a guy like Trump, it is still unlikely that the Mueller team got that goods in these plea deals. It may be about side characters.
I know about Sater. He is two-time informant which speaks more to the Trump Organization's blithe indifference to the character of their associates since they already knew Sater (and why they specifically wanted him) was a money laundering criminal, regardless of their awareness of his past informant activities.
If you think Sater did not provide massively valuable information that would not only indict Trump but also his children, then your mind is in a place I cannot understand.
Sater may end up being most valuable for NY State prosecutions.
But the other guy to get a sweetheart deal was also a known criminal and George Nader got full immunity. If you think he yield meh details you're just wrong. He attended the Seychelles meetings and has plenty of intel on the Middle East and was at Trump Tower at the time of the Rosneft transactions.
Mueller already has plenty to indict Trump. He is not dependent on one person at this point.
But to suggest Manafort would yield nothing of substance that would either add to the strength of indictments or even incur new ones, you're so way off-base. Just his testimony alone adds ballast to the already accumulated data. If you think it doesn't matter that Manafort attended the treasonous Trump Tower meeting that both Don Jr. and Kushner attended then I have no idea what you're talking about.
i was just talking about the 2008-9 Sater deal.
For this current situation Sater has cooperated, but I don't think he's provided conviction worthy evidence on Trump. Given his previous plea behavior it is far more likely that he'll provide information against lesser minions and not against the principals.
Manafort may be more useful and there's a lot more leverage over him due to state prosecution and superceding indictments arising from a multitude of criminal deals he's participated in over the years. I'm cautiously optimistic over that one but I was just relaying the opinion of an involved expert on the matter.
Keep parsing though. I've been able to keep a pretty strong throughline on this investigation by sifting through "expert" opinions, because of many reasons. Sometimes expertise is couched in terms of the minimal conclusions so the supposed expert doesn't go out on a limb out of professional decorum and/or protecting their reputation. And a lot of media coverage regurgitates unfounded assertions like the NY Times did repeatedly by stating as unqualified facts Giuliani's assertion Mueller had agreed to various terms of engagement when not only were they bold-faced lies, but the NY Times didn't provide any contextualization.
As Buzz and I previously discussed, oftentimes the most obvious conclusions are closet to the truth. Thus far, the criminality of Trump, his associates and their very clear and very long-term entanglement with Russian interests is both transparently clear and easy enough to connect.
Therefore, it is a good bet to assume the world's best enforcement officer can put those pieces together better than any expert or any of us. What that means by extension is Mueller has a giant map that explains everything in excrutiating detail and he is not dependent on one person flipping. They each add their own weight to the arguments for the prosecution.
Yet some flips are way bigger than others due to their unique positioning between different parties of interest. Sater, Nader and Manafort are particularly compelling because of how they slot between Trump and either Putin or the Middle Eastern players and why you can assume each has unique information no one else can provide.
And when it comes to what each plea deal provides, there is so much we haven't heard yet. We have not heard a pin drop about revelations of Trump's corruption with China which has been immense (Kushner's too). We don't even know what dirt Mueller will unload about his improprieties on business deals involving Chinese interests, but we already know they are huge deals with large implications for emoulements violations.
