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发帖数: 1 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Military 讨论区 】
发信人: sgrastar (人马座A星), 信区: Military
标 题: 疮破新代号“Individual 1”
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Thu Nov 29 21:28:47 2018, 美东)
1号在竞选期间具体指挥了和普京高层的接触。
1号在2016年亲自参与勾结俄国情报部门偷窃民主党电邮，干涉美国大选。
死定了。
In two major developments this week, President Trump has been labeled in the
parlance of criminal investigations as a major subject of interest,
complete with an opaque legal code name: “Individual 1.”
New evidence from two separate fronts of special counsel Robert S. Mueller
III’s investigation casts fresh doubts on Trump’s version of key events
involving Russia, signaling potential political and legal peril for the
president. Investigators have now publicly cast Trump as a central figure of
their probe into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with the Russian
government during the 2016 campaign.
Together, the documents show investigators have evidence that Trump was in
close contact with his lieutenants as they made outreach to both Russia and
WikiLeaks — and that they tried to conceal the extent of their activities.
On Thursday, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty
to lying to Congress when he insisted that Trump was not pursuing plans to
build a Trump Tower in Moscow after January 2016, casting Trump’s repeated
claims that he had no business interests in Russia in a new light. A draft
special counsel document revealed Tuesday also indicates that prosecutors
are closely scrutinizing Trump’s interactions with a longtime adviser,
Roger Stone, as he was seeking information about WikiLeaks’ plans to
release hacked Democratic emails.
Legal experts said it’s still unclear how much peril the president might
face as a result of the new evidence Mueller has gathered about the Moscow
project and WikiLeaks, but his prominence in the prosecutors’ papers puts
the president in an awkward starring role.
“It’s deeply troubling. It’s not a place that anybody wants to be, or
where you would want your friends or family to be,” former federal
prosecutor Glen Kopp said. “And it’s certainly not a place that you would
want your president to be.”
Michael Cohen pleads guilty to lying to Congress about Moscow project
President Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty on
Nov. 29 to lying to Congress about a Trump Organization real estate project
in Russia. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
Trump, identified as “Individual 1” in Cohen’s guilty plea, was said to
have received direct updates from Cohen as he pursued a Moscow Trump Tower
project with the Kremlin, up until June 14, 2016. The president also appears
in the draft charging document for Trump ally Jerome Corsi, who allegedly
told Stone about WikiLeaks’ plans to release damaging Democratic emails in
October of that year because he knew Stone was in “regular contact” with
Trump. The Washington Post reported this week that Trump spoke with Stone
the day after he got the alert from Corsi.
In the draft documents, prosecutors sought to have Corsi plead guilty to
lying when he said he didn’t know about WikiLeaks’ plans and urging others
to visit WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to obtain emails damaging to
Democrats.
Trump has given slightly differing accounts of his Moscow business ties over
time. In July 2016, he tweeted: “For the record, I have ZERO investments
in Russia.” A day later he claimed, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”
In January 2017, he told a reporter: “I have no deals that could happen in
Russia, because we’ve stayed away.”
Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said Thursday that the
president’s written answers to Mueller about the Moscow project, which he
submitted just before Thanksgiving, conform with Cohen’s version of events.
They discussed a project, starting in 2015, continuing into 2016, and it
went nowhere, he said.
President Trump stops to talk with reporters Thursday about his former
personal attorney Michael Cohen as he walks to Marine One from the White
House to depart for the Group of 20 summit in Argentina. (Jabin Botsford/The
Washington Post)
“The president, as far as he knows, he remembers there was such a proposal
for a hotel,” Giuliani said. “He talked it over with Cohen as Cohen said.
There was a nonbinding letter of intent that was sent. As far as he knows it
never came to fruition. That was kind of the end of it.”
Alan Dershowitz, a Trump ally and constitutional lawyer, said Cohen’s
confessions don’t suggest Trump committed any crime but could suggest that
Trump wasn’t telling the public the whole truth about the Moscow deal.
“This is politically damaging, but I’m not sure how legally damaging it is
,” Dershowitz said. “This is all about questionable political behavior. It
’s a good reason for people voting against Trump. But I don’t see a crime
yet.”
But Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer and frequent critic, said the
developments pose significant new challenges for the president.
“This is part of the fact pattern that gets to the heart of whether there
was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the campaign
,” O’Brien said. “I think the unforgiving grinding force of the U.S.
justice system, which he has tried to undermine since he became president,
is encircling him. I don’t think we know where he will land. But he is
certainly mired in something that he is ill-equipped, legally and personally
, to handle.”
Some legal experts argued Mueller appears to be drawing a picture of a
candidate who was beholden to the Kremlin. Emails released in the Cohen plea
show Trump seeking a financial endorsement from the Russian government on a
private project while Russian President Vladi-mir Putin was offering to say
flattering things about Trump.
“It creates the potential for Trump to feel an obligation to pay back
President Putin, or Russia in general that . . . do not put the
best interests of American forward.” Kopp said. “You are creating a
potential vulnerability for a future leader of America.”
Trump privately stewed as he followed news coverage of Cohen’s plea early
Thursday morning, a White House official said.
A Justice official called the White House Counsel’s Office on Wednesday
evening to let personnel know that Cohen would be pleading guilty in a case
the following day, according to one person with direct knowledge of the
notice. They were not told the details, however, which they learned about
shortly before Cohen’s plea Thursday morning.
Giuliani said the president believed the news development was a gratuitous
slap from the Mueller team just as he was about to depart the White House
for a trip to the Group of 20 summit in Argentina.
In public, Trump was defiant, telling reporters that Cohen was a liar and a
“weak person” who would do anything to save himself from fraud charges he
faces related to his taxi business. Speaking before he stepped onto the
Marine One helicopter for his trip, he also denigrated Cohen’s intelligence
, calling him “not very smart.”
“He was convicted of various things unrelated to us,” Trump said. “He’s
a weak person, and what he’s trying to do is get a reduced sentence. So he
’s lying about a project that everybody knew about. I mean, we were very
open with it.”
He questioned the scrutiny of the Moscow project.
“There would have been nothing wrong if I did do it,” Trump said. “When I
’m running for president, that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to do
business.”
Trump often grows aggrieved seeing Cohen on TV, aides say. Among White House
advisers, -Cohen is seen as an existential threat — as much or more so
than the Mueller investigation itself because of his longtime role as Trump
’s fixer. Trump’s legal team did not learn until Thursday that Cohen had
sat for dozens of hours of interviews with Mueller’s office, according to a
senior administration official.
Trump was infuriated earlier this year when Cohen released tapes of him, and
asked his lawyers and advisers if anything could be done to stop him from
releasing any more.
The Trump legal team cast Cohen as a flawed character whose word is
meaningless, as it had when he pleaded guilty in August to eight felony
counts, including paying women for their silence about alleged affairs with
Trump.
Legal experts said prosecutors were not likely to build a guilty plea — a
brick in the overall case — on the word of one person. The prosecutors’
filings show they have corroborated and buttressed Cohen’s account with
contemporaneous emails, and people familiar with the probe say they have
also obtained corroborating testimony from other witnesses.
“This is obviously a significant plea and statement. It means that when the
president was representing during the campaign that he had no business
interests in Russia, that that wasn’t true,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (
Calif.), the ranking Democrat in line to become chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee. “If the president and his associates were being
untruthful in real time as they were pursuing this deal, what does it mean
now about how much we can rely on what the president is saying about any
continuing Russian financial interest?”
Giuliani said the president and his business have not tried to hide his
pursuit of a Moscow tower project, and voluntarily disclosed some of the
documents Mueller’s team used in its probe of Cohen for lying to Congress.
According to a person familiar with the investigation, Cohen and the Trump
Organization could not produce some of the key records upon which Mueller
relies. Other witnesses provided copies of those communications.
In the White House, two aides said Trump had complained more in recent days
about Mueller’s prosecutors and has kept close tabs on the comments of
Corsi and Stone. Trump has praised his former campaign chairman Paul
Manafort extensively for fighting Mueller’s team, which accused Manafort
this week of breaching a plea agreement by lying repeatedly to prosecutors
as part of his pledged cooperation in the Russia probe. Cohen had not been
on the front of Trump’s mind, both of these aides said.
Many in the White House try to avoid talking with the president about the
Mueller probe, for fear they will be subpoenaed. And both of the aides said
it was unclear why Trump was complaining more about the investigation
recently. During the midterm campaign, the president occasionally told
advisers that people had forgotten about the Mueller probe and remarked
positively that it was no longer dominating TV headlines.
Alice Crites contributed to this report. |
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