...and he isn't happy. Looks like he is trying to limit discovery since he may not like what they find. What's that old saw? Never ask a question you don't know the answer to. Well, never take someone to trial that may not fold, like you first thought. Mueller is Trying to Hide Evidence from Defendants in Russian Trolls Case Special counsel Robert Mueller and his deputy Rush Atkinson filed a 14-page motion Tuesday arguing that the government shouldn’t have to release certain evidence to indicted Russian company Concord Management and Consulting LLC due to ongoing “interference operations” against the United States. https://lawandcrime.com/opinion/mue...dence-from-defendants-in-russian-trolls-case/
Panic time at Camp Mueller By Wesley Pruden - The Washington Times - Thursday, June 7, 2018 ANALYSIS/OPINION: If this is June, it must be time to indict Paul Manafort again. The clock is ticking, and the tic-tocs are getting louder. Robert Mueller is clearly feeling the hot breath of public impatience on the back of his neck. He was the great black-and-white hope for bringing down Donald Trump, and a year later the president is still not in prison stripes. Mr. Mueller has indicted Paul Manafort twice, and threatens now to jail him for tampering with a witness. If he tampered with a witness while out on bail, and Mr. Mueller can prove it, jail is where he belongs. But bringing down a witness-tamperer is not what the special counsel/prosecutor was commissioned to do. Mr. Mueller was commissioned to bring in the head of Donald Trump. Not by any means necessary, as Mr. Mueller and his team of thousand dollar-an-hour Blackstones seem to think, but by legitimate means, with evidence that would stand up in a court. They might not have the evidence they need to nail the president’s scalp on the court house wall, so the Manafort scalp might have to do, hence the multiple indictments and now the threat of prosecution for witness-tampering. That might not work, either. Some lawyers who have followed Mr. Mueller’s meandering pursuit of the president understand what he’s trying to do but are puzzled about how he’s going about it. Paul Rosenzweig who teaches law at George Mason and Northwestern universities, and takes pains to say that he “yields to no one in my disdain for President Trump,” nevertheless reckons Mr. Mueller’s allegations of witness-tampering are “rather thin.” He says, in an article on the website “Lawfare,” that the FBI declaration in support of a witness-tampering charge is long on detail and short on information. “Drill down into the exhibits and you will see that only one, Exhibit N, is evidence of communications between Manafort and the witnesses he is alleged to have contacted in a tampering effort.” Drill deeper and it gets even thinner. Study that exhibit and you will see that Mr. Manafort was successful in speaking to one witness, identified as Person D1, for only a minute and 24 seconds. He attempted to connect on three other calls, but did not succeed. Another witness said Mr. Manafort wanted to give Person D1 a link to a newspaper account about his indictment, and another tweet saying “we should talk.” Direct evidence of witness-tampering against Mr. Manafort, in Prof. Rosenzweig’s telling, is mostly vapor. “Saying ‘we should talk’ is hardly the stuff that true witness-tampering charges are made of. More to the point, if the entire conversation in which Manafort participated lasted for less than a minute and a half, he would have to be a very, very fast talker to have accomplished anything.” If Mr. Mueller is the lawyer that his friends and sometime colleagues say he is, why would he be showing such a weak hand, dealing with evidence thin enough to read a newspaper through, at such a critical juncture in the attempt to get a scalp? Prof. Rosenzweig thinks he has an answer for that. “This is a sign that they are feeling pressure. Possibly from Trump. Possibly from Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein. Possibly just from their reading of the public tea leaves. Whatever the source of the pressure, they have an increased sense of urgency, they have an increased sense of urgency to move quickly.” Mr. Mueller has been very skilled at keeping his investigation free of leaks. So far none of his lawyers have written op-eds for The New York Times or The Washington Post, telling of the fiesta to come. The New York Times, having given up all pretense of objectivity, as if to reassure the mob that the day of reckoning is coming, wants to buck up Mr. Mueller’s spirits. This is no time to panic. Panic is never a picnic, and it’s true, Mr. Mueller may have the evidence already to send Mr. Trump up the river for good and all. He may even now be holding the smoking gun retrieved from his raids deep into Trump country. He may even be hiding the evidence in a pumpkin on a farm on the Eastern Shore, where pumpkins grow big enough to accommodate everything Congress, or a jury of plain folks, wants or needs. But Mr. Mueller can’t blame the rest of us for wanting to know what he’s got. Indicting Paul Manafort again, or even sending him to jail to sweat out the needed evidence, won’t satisfy. The reason he’s having so much trouble finding evidence of collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians to cook the 2016 election may be because there isn’t any. • Wesley Pruden is editor in chief emeritus of The Times. https://www.washingtontimes.com/new...c&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork
Yup, you are right into the core of the area that has gotten Mueller into trouble over the years and cost him many wins that were later reversed on appeal. Not only does he like to try to limit discovery, he hides exculpatory evidence that he has already found through his own investigations when he is required by law to make it known to the defendants. He has had big, big, big problems with that over the years. Note that when the newer judge took over Flynn's case she was well aware of his history and ordered him to turn over all exculpatory evidence to Flynn. She (I think it is a woman) did that on day one, basically letting it be known that he is on notice to not pull that shiite on her. It also highlights what was talked about here months ago. ie. the swamp FBI may fail to investigate/reveal certain things but the more people mueller indicts, or if -eg.- McCabe and other fbi are indicted- then the more defendants who will be doing the real investigative work through their right to discovery. You know, the Intel Committee fights endlessly with the DOJ about releasing info but that is not going to happen in court. Cough it up or the judge may dismiss the case. We have already seen that in one of Mannaforts cases. The judge has ordered the prosecution to produce Mueller's appointment documents even though Rosenstein will not give them to Congress.
It’s hard to believe there are so many Russian sympathizers in America now that Trump is president. Mueller has every right to not disclose evidence deemed important to national security, which is what is going on here.
I think the term is 'malicious prosecution'. There should be a law that allows counter-suits based on evidence of malicious prosecution. Meanwhile, the prosecutor should be required to bond up, in case he has to pay for malicious prosecution. That bond should be funded by the interested parties, such as the DNC, not all taxpayers. At some point the funding for ongoing prosecution should be relieved from taxpayers, and assigned to a private consortium of interested parties, such as foreign agents like exGOPer.
He has a right to assert that right- but the court decides. The government has had many, many cases either dismissed or they chose not to proceed where the government would not produce evidence as requested. Big shocker here, but I have to let you know that the government is often big on aggressively pursuing evidence that is incriminating for the defendant, but often/usually has a bullshit reason- usually some high and mighty national security bullshit story- why evidence that makes them look bad should be exposed. Refer to Rod Rosenstein for more on this. That is about all he does these days. Oh, and yes, the Intel Committee- after months of wrangling got a section of a redacted report unredacted that was being protected for national security reasons. Turns out that having the public find out that McCabe and the FBI paid 70K for a conference table was a national security risk.